Wragge Labs

I’m a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections.

A collection of tools, tutorials, examples, and hacks to help you work with data from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

created: 2017

This Guide explores the different types of data available from Trove – what it is, how you can access it, and what you can do with it. It aims to give researchers a critical understanding of Trove data, both its limits and its possibilities.

created: 2024

Commonwealth of Australia parliamentary debates presented in an easy-to-read format for historians and other lovers of political speech.

created: 2016

Here you'll find information and resources to help you use the collections of Australian GLAM organisations (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums).

created: 2024

This project aims to make people more aware of government records documenting the history of the White Australia Policy.

created: 2010

How has social media changed political discourse? Let’s flip the question around and look at past political discussions as if they were being shared through Twitter. What changes?

created: 2017 ok

In need of a snappy name for your next secret military operation? This app can help!

created: 2015 ok

A simple API to a collection of faces extracted from Trove's digitised newspapers.

created: 2015 ok

What can you read in a single word? Drawing on details of ABC Radio current affairs programs stored in Trove, this page presents a word a month from AM, The World Today, and PM.

created: 2014 ok

An early experiment in providing some sort of place-based interface to Trove newspapers. Either search for a place name or select a place on the map to find nearby newspaper titles.

created: 2014 ok

Faces offer an instant connection to history, reminding us that the past is full of people. People like us, but different. People with their own lives and stories. People we might only know through a picture, a few documentary fragments, or a newspaper article.

created: 2014 ok

Trove Traces presents a sample of the thousands of webpages that include links to articles in Trove’s newspapers zone. How is Trove used? In what contexts do links appear? This is an attempt to explore some of the stories behind the stats.

created: 2014 archived

View and modify example queries to learn how the Trove API works and understand the data it delivers.

created: 2013 broken

An attempt at an aggregated search interface to find records about Australian First World War service personnel across multiple collections.

created: 2013 dead

Explore the world of 1913 through newspaper illustrations from Trove. Created for the National Museum of Australia's 'Glorious Days' exhibition.

created: 2013 archived

A playful way of exploring collections from Digital NZ. Developed in collaboration with Sydney Shep.

created: 2012 ok

The White Australia Policy was about people – people whose lives were monitored and restricted because of the colour of their skin. This experimental browser enables you to explore the records of the White Australia Policy through the faces of those people.

created: 2011 ok

This site has one, modest aim: to build a corner of the semantic web by mobilising an army of determined machine taggers. The first objective in this campaign is to see how many photos in Flickr we can tag with party identifiers from the National Library of Australia.

created: 2010 dead

Exploring word frequencies across 10,000 biographies from the ADB.

created: 2009 archived