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

For my American friends today, I offer you this recording of "Go the Distance" from "Hercules" (1997), particularly the second chorus: "And I won't look back, I can go the distance And I'll stay on track, no, I won't accept defeat It's an uphill slope, but I won't lose hope" youtu.be/5xhDdTiHKoE?...

An epic and momentous victory for the plaintiff, Rore Stafford, and Wakatū iwi. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

A great lunchtime (for me, 1am for her!) talk by Erin featuring aggressive dolphins, non-computationally tractable date metadata, the linear algebra x manuscripts crossover you never knew you needed, digital nihilism, and a guest appearance from the hardcopy STC. And of course updates on STEMMA :)

I've been getting a bit* behind in my one-thing-a-day #DHMakes #dataviz, but fortunately there's a domain-specific hack that can help me move from spreadsheet to paper more quickly. In #heraldry "tricking" is labelling a sketch of a coat of arms with abbreviations for the colours. *four months

📢THE WILLS PROJECT IS NOW LIVE ON ZOONIVERSE 📢 And now we need your help! www.zooniverse.org/projects/hjs... Using cutting edge technology we've generated transcriptions of 25,000 wills, now we need participants to check & correct them 🧵1/ 🗃️ #skystorians #EarlyModern #CitizenScience

I discovered the NZ Air Force Museum's digitised photo collection today, and found an interesting detail from 1943: a sign pointing to the "Albert Park Tunnel Shelters Victoria St Entrance". I've not seen these signs mentioned in accounts of the tunnels. fotoweb.airforcemuseum.co.nz/fotoweb/arch...

At the weekend we took the kids to Ambury regional park, and unwittingly came across the "Woolworths for bees" popup supermarket, designed to raise awareness about declining bee populations. The branding was very well done, but the pièce de résistance was the local notice board!

@quinnanya.me here's a Slavic/Star Trek crossover for you: a newly digitised manuscript in Glagolitic script with the shelfmark Borg.ill.4 digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Bor...

As we come to the end of this year's Te Wiki o te Reo Māori/Māori language week I want to share some new-to-me examples of the fusion of Māori and Pakeha culture in the 19th century from various GLAM institutions which point to an alternative way NZ society could have evolved...

#DH installation success! I've been trying to get a new-to-me piece of software working for a side project. The documentation had installation instructions for multiple operating systems, so I thought it would be straightforward. Almost two dozen undocumented steps later I've finally got working!!

As thoughts turn to the 2028 Olympics, may I present this piece of ephemera from the 1988 Olympics from my collection. My younger siblings were unaware of my collection development policy and attempted to deaccession it. Currently awaiting the attentions of the conservator :)