Wragge Labs

Hi, I’m a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Here you'll find contact details, biographical information, and a list of publications.

All the latest news from the GLAM Workbench and elsewhere in my current blog.

created: 2019

A large and growing 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

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

created: 2010

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

created: 2024

A personal site that turned into my first blog. Includes copies of many presentations and publications from 1985 to 2017.

created: 1997 archived

THATCamp Canberra was a user-generated ‘unconference’ on digital humanities. It ran in 2010, 2011, and 2014.

created: 2010 archived

A space for sharing experimental projects using the collections of the NMA.

created: 2011 dead

Developed in-house at the National Archives of Australia.

created: 2008 dead

This Cabinet holds many treasures. Two hundred years of Australian science are arrayed for exploration and reflection. The curiosities contained are those of Australia's men and women of science, and your own.

created: 1997 archived

The first WWW edition of the Australian Society of Archivists Directory of Archives in Australia, including links to websites and finding aids. Superceded by later efforts, with the current version published by the ASA.

created: 1996 archived

Superceded by the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation.

created: 1994 archived

Part of a global, co-operative effort to index the early web, this site attempted to keep track of information facilities in the field of the history of science, technology and medicine.

created: 1994 archived

The dashboard tells you how many records are currently available through the PROV API, and breaks down this count by entity, and category. It then works through the main entities – functions, agencies, series, items, and images – displaying a series of charts and tables that give you an idea what they’re actually made up of.

created: 2025 ok

This dashboard aggregates data from weekly harvests to display digitisation progress in the last week, the current year, and since harvests began in 2021.

created: 2025 broken

A Fediverse bot sharing images from the collection of the Public Record Office Victoria, powered by the PROV's public API.

created: 2025 ok

Trove contains thousands of digitised maps from the collections of the National Library of Australia, but they're not always easy to find because of the way they're arranged and described. This database provides an alternative way of exploring these maps.

created: 2024 ok

Locations have been extracted from coordinate strings in catalogue metadata, and may not be accurate. See the Trove maps section of the GLAM Workbench for more information.

created: 2023 ok

A demo built in a couple of weeks for the Library of Congress Data Jam. It explores a collection of 90,000 digitised books by finding and mapping places mentioned in the text.

created: 2022 ok

Searching for entries in the directories on Trove is difficult, because Trove's results are grouped by 'article', which is not very helpful for publications like these where information is organised by row. This interface searches for individual lines of text, rather than pages or articles. So it points you straight to entries of interest.

created: 2022 ok

Searching for entries in the directories on Trove is difficult, because Trove's results are grouped by 'article', which is not very helpful for publications like these where information is organised by row. This interface searches for individual lines of text, rather than pages or articles. So it points you straight to entries of interest.

created: 2022 ok

An experimental interface to Tasmanian Post Office Directories from 1890 to 1948 which have been digitised and made available as PDFs by Libraries Tasmania.

created: 2022 ok

This dashboard helps researchers understand the context of their queries by presenting a snapshot of Trove's digitised newspapers, based on weekly data harvests. It shows Trove's current make up from a number of angles, as well as highlighting recent changes.

created: 2022 broken

An free, aggregated search tool with access to more than 12 million records. Just enter a name to look for people in 293 indexes from 10 Australian GLAM organisations.

created: 2021 ok

A calendar style visualisation showing the number of issues per day in Trove's digitised newspapers.

created: 2021 ok

A subset of the digitised newspapers in Papers Past can be searched through DigitalNZ. Using data from the DigitalNZ API we can look at what's available.

created: 2021 ok

Move invisibly through the thronging masses, safely hidden by 100% recycled redactions from ASIO surveillance files held by the National Archives of Australia. (NAA: A6119)

created: 2021 ok

If you've ever tried to share a link to an item in the National Archives of Australia's online database RecordSearch, you've probably encountered the annoying 'Session time out' error. You need to be within an active session for the standard RecordSearch urls to work. But never fear, using this tool you can easily construct shareable links!

created: 2020 ok

There’s no reliable way of downloading an image of a Trove newspaper article from the web interface. The image download option produces an HTML page with embedded images, and the article is often sliced into pieces to fit the page. This app provides an easy-to-use workaround. Just enter an article url or identifier and you get back an image (or images if the article is split across multiple pages).

created: 2019 ok

This dataset includes a collection of 3,471 full-page editorial cartoons downloaded from issues of The Bulletin published between 1886 and 1952. The images can be downloaded as a single 62gb zip file, explored in an SQLite database using Datasette-Lite, or browsed in a series of PDFs (one per decade).

created: 2019 ok

The Trove web interface doesn’t provide a way of getting high-resolution page images from newspapers. This simple app lets you download page images as complete, high-resolution jpeg files.

created: 2018 ok

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

This collection of creatures was discovered amidst thousands of ASIO surveillance files held by the National Archives of Australia. They are reminders that the processes that limit our access to information are human in their operation and design. There is nothing magical about the ‘secrets’ preserved in government archives.

created: 2017 ok

There's lots of exciting new digitised content being added to Trove's journals zone, but it's not always easy to find and search. This page lists journals that have been digitised by the NLA and have searchable records for individual articles. This means you can search inside the journal, just like you do in the newspapers zone.

created: 2017 archived

An experiment in developing online historical narratives that embed rich structured data about people, places, events and resources.

created: 2017 ok

acts of erasure, censorship, and control extracted from ASIO files held by the National Archives of Australia; here voids become windows on the practice of state surveillance

created: 2016 ok

An prototype interface to the Documents on Australian Foreign Policy, developed for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Includes links to the National Archives of Australia.

created: 2016 ok

Explore files in the National Archives of Australia with the access status of 'closed'. Why can't we look at them? How old are they? What are we really being protected against?

created: 2016 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

The Vintage Face Depot services all your face replacement needs. Our special bot-powered fitting service automatically matches you with a face drawn from our large stock of vintage visages.

created: 2015 dead

In the war against terror, information is our most important asset. To play your part in this struggle for Australia’s very way of life, you need to learn to identify and protect information critical to our national security. This site will help train you for the challenges ahead.

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

A visualisation I created so that there was somewhere to point people who asked 'What is Trove?'.

created: 2014 dead

A sunburst visualisation to explore the contents of Trove zones. Click on segments to zoom and load examples of each format.

created: 2014 dead

An online version of an English-language index of two Chinese-language newspapers, including links to digitised copies in Trove where possible.

created: 2014 ok

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 demonstration project created for Culture Victoria that explores the practical applications of linked open data as a means of sharing cultural heritage material.

created: 2013 archived

Random newspaper illustrations carefully curated by @TroveNewsBot and shared through Tumblr.

created: 2013 archived

TroveNewsBot shares random-ish digitised newspaper articles from Trove, but that's not all! TroveNewsBot can help you explore the riches of Trove without leaving Mastodon. Just try tooting a few keywords at TroveNewsBot and see what happens!

created: 2013 broken

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

created: 2012 ok

Use TF-IDF values to explore 10,000 newspaper articles from Trove that include the phrase 'the future' and create your own fridge magnet poetry!

created: 2012 ok

Use word frequency clouds to explore the future of the past dataset.

created: 2012 ok

A userscript that inserts portrait photos into records from the National Archives of Australia's online database relating to the administration of the White Australia Policy.

created: 2012 ok

An experimental viewer for digitised files in the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database. It added a number of features that weren't available in RecordSearch itself at the time.

created: 2012 dead

Visualise searches in the digitised newspapers of Papers Past using the DigitalNZ API. There have been many versions of QueryPic NZ of the years, the latest is part of the GLAM Workbench.

created: 2012 ok

An attempt to identify editorials within Trove's digitised newspapers.

created: 2012 archived

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

An experimental interface that brought together historical data from a range of sources and displayed it chronologically as an endless scrolling wall. The selections were randomised, so two views of the wall were ever the same.

created: 2011 dead

Visualise searches in Trove's digitised newspapers. There have been many versions of QueryPic of the years, the latest is part of the GLAM Workbench.

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

Find and use identity data from Trove's People Australia service.

created: 2010 dead

A game using data from the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

created: 2010 dead

A simple game in which you're presented with the headline of a randomly selected newspaper article from Trove. Can you work out the year in which it was published? Be careful, you only have 10 guesses!

created: 2010 broken

A userscript that harvests metadata from images shared by GLAM organisations through Flickr, and embeds it back into the organisations' own online databases.

created: 2010 dead

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

created: 2009 archived

The Trove Newspaper (& Gazette) Harvester makes it easy to download large quantities of digitised articles from Trove’s newspapers and gazettes. Just give it a search from the Trove web interface, and the harvester will save the metadata of all the articles in a CSV (spreadsheet) file for further analysis.

created: 2011 ok

Convert a query from the Trove web interface into a set of parameters that can be used with the Trove API.

created: 2021 ok

This package includes tools to download newspaper articles as complete JPEG images. If an article is printed across multiple newspaper pages, multiple images will be downloaded – one for each page. It’s intended for integration into other tools and processing workflows, or for people who like working on the command line.

created: 2021 ok

The NAA’s online database, RecordSearch, contains lots of rich, historical data. Unfortunately there’s no API, so we have to resort to screen scrapers to get it out in reusable form. This is a library of scrapers to extract data about the main entities in RecordSearch – Items, Series, and Agencies – from both individual records, and search results.

created: 2011 broken

The Omeka S API is powerful, but the documentation is patchy, and doing basic things like uploading images can seem quite confusing. This package is an attempt to simplify common tasks, like creating new items.

created: 2021 ok

This is a GitHub repository template that you can use to get your own Mirador version 3 installation running in minutes. You can also configure it to display local or remote IIIF manifests.

created: 2024 ok

This page generates a url that will publish a CSV file as a fully-searchable, online database using Datasette-Lite. All you need is the url of a CSV file saved in a public GitHub repository.

created: 2024 ok

This is a userscript that changes the way the National Archives of Australia's online database RecordSearch works. In particular, it retrieves the number of pages in a digitised file and displays it in search results. This means you know without clicking through whether the file contains 1 or 300 pages.

created: 2009 ok

This is a very simple userscript that does something very useful. It allows you to use the arrows on your keyboard to move between pages in Trove's digitised newspapers.

created: 2021 ok

I've created Zotero translators to save metadata and images from Libraries Tasmania, National Archives of Australia, Trove, PROV, and Queensland State Archives.

created: 2008 ok

Create your own online exhibition with nothing but a Trove list and a GitHub account.

created: 2016 broken

If you're an organisation that contributes collection records to Trove you can use this code to build your own Twitter bot that responds to user queries and tweets random collection items.

created: 2013 broken

A basic proxy service to simplify integration of Trove data into other services. In particular, it can provide links to download PDFs of newspaper articles, and randomly-selected newspaper articles.

created: 2016 ok

This is an unnofficial, experimental and probably temporary API to the wonderful Trove Australian Newspapers database. Behind the scenes a Python script retrieves and scrapes the Trove pages to extract the newspaper data.

created: 2011 dead