Data rescue for World Digital Preservation Day 2025
Since earlier this year I’ve been helping to rescue scientific and cultural datasets, and WDPD2025 prompted me to remember to actually write about it. I think it’s pretty cool!
Trying to rediscover my voice
In which I reflect on creativity, trauma, confidence and finding myself strangely voiceless.
On fooling around with triples
In which I delve into the world of RDF to investigate what damage the current US administration is doing to the world of libraries.
On metrics and power structures
In which I consider the interplay between metrics and power structures.
On being told to do more with less
In which I question whether “efficiency” is all it’s cracked up to be.
On Donella Meadows and Systems Thinking
This weekend I started reading Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer and I cannot overstate how profoundly glad I am to have come across Systems Thinking as a whole field of study. It pulls together so many things that have interested me over the years, and makes sense of a whole load of things I’ve observed about the world around me.
On learning to code without mathematics
Why is it that so many beginner programming tutorials assume that the learner is both a) comfortable with maths; and b) motivated to learn by seeing simple arithmetic? Go look at your favourite tutorial (I’ll wait) and I’ll give you good odds it starts with some variation of “look, you can use this as a calculator!”
Best practice, or ignoring the care label
I was hanging the laundry the other day, and ended up thinking about reasons why you might ignore those coded instructions on the care label of your clothing. I came up with quite a few…
One of the reasons I’ve been blogging less lately is that the more I’ve progressed in my career the more aware I’ve been of representing my employer as well as myself and, let’s be honest, I have enough anxiety already without adding to it myself.
So I’ve finally had The Conversation about this with my line manager and agreed that I can write publicly about stuff that touches on my job role, as long as it’s clear that it’s my own opinion and not necessarily any statement of policy. It’s my hope that this will help with my thinking and creativity both in and out of work, as I’ll be able to get more of my opinions and ideas out there for feedback/criticism.
TL;DR Anything I publish on here is my own opinion and should not be taken as the official position of basically anyone at all, not least whoever my current employer at the time might be… 😅
Training my handwriting model: an update
My handwriting!
It’s only taken me two years, but I’ve finally got around to transcribing enough pages to have a first try at training a model on my own handwriting. My workflow has been (roughly) this:
- Write something out longhand with pen and paper
- Scan the pages and upload to Transkribus
- Run layout detection, tweak any arrors and transcribe the text on desktop (while listening to some music)