These bots are getting nicher and nicher!
@TroveWW1AirRaidBot is a Bluesky and Mastodon bot. Just like @TroveAirRaidBot, it posts Trove newspaper articles containing the phrase “air raid” – with the difference that it only posts those published between 1914 and 1918.
The reason for this is because I’ve noticed that @TroveAirRaidBot now posts much more Second World War (and much more Australian) content than it used to. As I’ve written previously, I had been using @TroveAirRaidBot as a 24/7/365 research assistant, but given that my book is on the First World War, it’s got the sack and I’ve given the job to @TroveWW1AirRaidBot instead. Also, with Bluesky’s new post notification feature, I no longer miss what it’s trying to tell me.
Technically, this only took a little vibe-coded tweaking to the increasingly inaccurately named troveairbot2-mastodon, primarily based on the new environment parameters START_YEAR and END_YEAR. I’m not sure what changed to make it necessary; it may have been a change in the Trove API between v1 and v2 which made random selection harder; Tim Sherratt, who wrote the ancestor of my bot, had to figure out a clever workaround. Indeed, I’ve noticed that my Trove bots recycle a lot of articles, meaning that they are not actually sampling a large part of Trove space. Since troveairbot2-mastodon now searches a single year each time, at least when START_YEAR and END_YEAR are set, that may help a little with that problem.
By the way, Tim is no longer working on Trove, thanks to an inexplicable act of sabotage on the part of the NLA, which are tied to changes in the Trove API’s use policy and relations with the Trove community. He suspects the API might be on the way out. So the future (as always) is uncertain – but for now there’s a new Trove bot to carry on the noble tradition started by Tim.
Image source: The World’s News (Sydney), 3 June 1916, 8.
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