While looking up my alma mater today, I discovered that Vivienne Gray, Professor of Classics during my time there, died one year ago today. She was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after I started my degree; I can only remember seeing her twice in my four years in the department.

I've just discovered that a couple of Australian universities offer a BLitt or BPhil, and that AUT and Waikato offer an MPhil by research (unlike Auckland where it's for if you won't achieve a doctorate), so now there are a couple of other ways I could theoretically complete my academic bingo card!

Nice intersection with the 19th century College of Arms, and some antiquarians I have encountered. Nicholas Harris Nicolas wrote histories of various orders of knighthood, and Philip Bliss (mentioned in the full entry) edited the third edition of Wood's 'Athenae Oxonienses'.

Most transport maps show where infrastructure is. I wanted to show what that infrastructure actually lets people reach. I’ve been building the Auckland Transport Access Atlas: an interactive map of car dependency, accessibility, equity, and planner priorities across Auckland. ataa.tfwelch.com

Interesting entry in the recently updated catalogue for the Court of Requests series at TNA: a wager between a gentleman and a publican about whose family and arms were older, as adjudged by Clarenceux and the heralds in 1637 (REQ 2/296/61). discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2...

#DHMakes: Prof Kate Nartker recreates textiles from weave drafts in an 18th century commonplace book (Folger MS V.a.540) www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

New (to me) research library unlocked! Tangential to the documents I was looking at, I came across the proposal from the 1960s to build an artificial ski slope on Mt Wellington/Maungarei! This appears to be unknown to the internet, except for an newly digitised article on Papers Past.

The other day I came across this visualisation of the percentage of female/male speech in Shakespeare that I made back in 2019 from @heatherfro.bsky.social's data and thought it was worth reupping. At the time there was a similar graphic for female/male speech in Oscar-winning films doing the rounds

There are lots of things to admire in this image of a pedigree shared by in this recent post by @shamrockroots.com I particularly like the illustrations of people at the top of their lines of descent, and the diapering on the middle two flags (Original pedigree is held by PRONI, reference D1702/7/5)

Heraldry! This is a huge family tree for William Cole, who established the Plantation town of Enniskillen. It asserts that he is related to many English nobility families, with wonderful illustrations of their coats of arms. #GenHour #Genealogy #IrishGenealogy

#DHMakes friends: my son has started a new school, and got into their Maker class. This means his normal education takes place in (and using the resources of) a makerspace! (3d printers, sewing machines, etc) He is absolutely loving it.

Spotted over breakfast: a pūkeko in a (not a ponga) tree

I think we need a mega thread of everyone's craziest archive stories.

Congratulations Meghan!

The brain is a wonderful thing! Yesterday I had occasion to look up a photo of the old Epsom library, where I worked during high school and the start of university. Almost three decades later I can still remember the shelving layout, and what books went where, almost down to the letter!

Very proud to share that one of my articles celebrating the 100th anniversary of the PhD in Aotearoa has now been published! This article explores how PhD dress in Aotearoa has changed in the century since the then University of New Zealand introduced the degree. newprairiepress.org/burgonsociet...

I made some macarons for a shared lunch today, and I'm very pleased with how they turned out! #DHBakes

In honour of the release of "The life of a showgirl" I've finally gotten around to adding "Unicode burlesque" to my website of DH songs – "What is #DigitalHumanities? The Album" – after only two years! Thanks again to @quinnanya.me for the inspiration what-is-dh-the-album.netlify.app/singles/unic...

@thegozfather.bsky.social REQ 2 question: I transcribed REQ 2/136/33 for my research a couple of years ago. Are you interested in the dates of the 3 or 4 documents contained therein, to make the catalogue entry more precise than [reign of Eliz 1]?

Thrilled to have been able to identify today a copy of a 15th century papal bull used as binding waste, and thereby establish a terminus post quem for an Old West Frisian text on the verso! #Paleography #BookHistory

Yesterday I was more than pleasantly surprised to discover that Renata Defelice has published a review of my side project "What is #DigitalHumanities? The Album" including translating one of my songs into Spanish! revistas.unlp.edu.ar/publicaahd/a... (If anyone knows the reviewer, please tag them!)

Former Windsor Herald, William Hunt, receives an honorary doctorate. #heraldry

Reupping the advice to always talk to the staff when you go to an archive. Shout out to James at Auckland Council Archives today, who directed me to a record series I didn't know about which had valuable information about one of my local history projects!

It is such a rush to correctly deduce the location of a fully functioning *unadvertised* API when you need to get structured metadata out of a GLAM institution's catalogue! #DigitalHumanities

Putting my paleography and local history degree to good use in correcting a listing at the local auction house :)

Dorothy Amherst #HerBook

Deep dive by @spil030.bsky.social into the history of the PhD in NZ on its 100th anniversary. Fun fact: the first Oxford DPhil was awarded to a New Zealander* * Dr James Brontë Gatenby was one of the first two DPhils, awarded in 1920. I don't know whether the other guy graduated before or after him

ESTC is back!

I am delighted to announce that my data paper "Locations of Markets in English Market Towns, 1813: Constructing a dataset" has just been published in ZfdG This is a deep dive into the process & decisions that went into creating a dataset of market locations from a C19th text doi.org/10.17175/202...

4am start this morning but all four of us made it to the ANZAC day dawn service at Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tāmaki Paenga Hira. Lest we forget.

Yesterday I made a major breakthrough in my local history side project! I found a photo of the house I have been looking for for the past year!! (Thread)

A Wellingto library is trialling a new cataloguing system based on te ao Māori wellington.govt.nz/news-and-eve...

More #DHMakes digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thr...

Pre-1956 arms of New Zealand on the left.

Paging #DHMakes: www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/03/heat...

OTD 120 years ago, a cheque was drawn on Maungatautari Peeke, a Māori-operated bank, one of only three such cheques known to survive. This bank was one of two established by the Kīngitanga; the other was Te Peeke o Aotearoa, which used the same cheque design. www.kotuia.org.nz/kete-sets/cu...

Tonight's lunar eclipse/blood moon, photographed on a phone through a telescope.

Top-quality NZ academic-dress- history research thread from @spil030.bsky.social

"TL;DR — Network visualization is often done in the wrong way: first a network layout is produced using a heuristic, and then follow-up analyses are performed and evaluated according to the layout...." Also introduced me to the very useful term "ridiculogram."

13JAN25 #TrinidadandTobago passed bill to replace Columbus' ships on national #coatofarms with a steelpan, citing removal of colonial symbols and their replacement with a symbol of cultural value to the nation. #heraldry Source: www.facebook.com/ttg...

On the off chance, does anyone have access to this 1982 article on the Cursitors Office, and would also be willing to send me a PDF copy? doi.org/10.1080/0037... #LegalHistory

Submission made on the Treaty Principles Bill, just before the deadline, after much reloading of the web page!

Disappointing news :(

For #DayOfDH2024 I am writing up a data paper for a recently completed dataset, reconciling lists of markets from two different sources, and finding that last year David Lawrenson finished a monumental PhD studying markets using 50 variables over 1000 years! doi.org/10.17613/em7...

A petition on change.org for the inclusion of the Māori Tino Rangatiratanga flag as an emoji, started by a teenager, has gained over 4,000 signatures #Vexillology flagchronicle.com/2024/11/30/p...

Pentametron was one of the great web art projects, retweeting couplets of accidentally iambic tweets. Thanks to Bluesky's open feed, I have resurrected the concept.. Behold @iambic.bot!

A vexillological curiosity at yesterday's Santa Parade in Auckland - a quadruple size flag featuring New Zealand quartered with Japan.

"In benediction falls the night Priest of the kindly quiet hours" A.E. Mulgan I came across this unexpected poetry the other day on the back of a photo of Auckland being auctioned by the Fairfax Archives. bid.thefairfaxarchives.co.nz/lots/view/5-...

Some observations on the decennial occasion of renewing my New Zealand passport 1) Now they've dealt with the recent backlog, the Department of Internal Affairs is impressively fast. Submitted my application online at 8:30pm Tuesday, and had passport delivered lunchtime Thursday.

This weekend's #DHBakes effort: a white chocolate berry cheesecake. I make this so infrequently that I forgot till after I put it in the oven that I normally only use the first half of this recipe and the second half of another. But only the first was saved in my phone! Photos are before after & BTS