One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot. […]
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the
With Twitter’s future looking increasingly nasty, brutish and/or short, I’ve made alternative arrangements for my array of Airminded social media accounts at Mastodon. My main account is: This instance, hcommons.social, is run by Humanities Commons, an open-access scholarship repository (where I already have a presence).
It’s time for a new bot! Unlike my Trove bots, this one isn’t useful or even historical; it’s just for fun. @TTAships tweets out an image of a spaceship (mostly), once(ish) a day.
I have a short, non-peer-reviewed article about Trove bots coming out in History Australia as part of a special issue on Trove; the advanced access version has just been published. Here’s the abstract: Like many other historians I use Trove for both targeted searches and exploratory ones, which in itself has revolutionised my historical research
In the previous post I looked at the possible origins of the phrase ‘big bang’ — as in ‘Big Bang’ — in Operation Big Bang, the partial destruction in 1947 of Heligoland, a German island in the North Sea. I also suggested that there was longer history to the phrase ‘big bang’, which I’ll also
There have been many big bangs. One particularly important one is the ‘Big Bang’ in which the Universe began, according to current cosmological understanding, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. This was not a bang at all, in the sense of an explosion, because there was nothing to explode into — rather it was space itself
Recently I’ve been playing around with AI-generated images. This is far less impressive than it may sound: there’s a small community on Twitter and elsewhere doing this stuff already, many using scripts and tutorials which mean you don’t need any more skill than the ability to log in to Google Colab, type in some keywords
In my previous post I looked at the first appearances of the phrase ‘air raid’ and related words in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Of course, just because these phrases had been coined by somebody, or even used in a newspaper, it doesn’t mean they were widely understood — they might have taken a long
I recently came across a few more examples from 1920s and 1930s newspapers of the ‘Red Baron’ being used in reference to Manfred von Richthofen, which I suggested undermined my argument that, in essence, we call him that because of Snoopy. But instead of shrugging my shoulders I decided to get my data on and
