DAY IN THE LIFE OF A TOWN OR CALL YOUR ANCESTOR
Our project focused on using a range of data to tell a story about a place at a particular time in history. We are using a range of records and analytic tools to create a more vivid portrait of the past.
We have created a proof of concept to be used by family researchers and historians to get a richer sense of the public sentiment at a place at a particular time, as well as providing an insight into what other factors, such as the weather, may have been at play. We used newspaper data from Trove, rainfall and temperature data from the Bureau of Meteorology, and data from the Commonwealth Hansard records to build a story about a place in time
Take Hobart in 1939 as the test case.
We drew on data from a Hobart newspaper in 1939 as our place and time period of interest. We also took specific data from the 3rd and 6th of September records from Hansard, the Bureau of Meteorology and Trove. Robert Menzies announced that Australia was at war with Germany on 3 September 1939. We wanted to see how people were feeling in Hobart at that time. We drew on a range of tools, languages and APIs to try to make this event more tangible. Java, HTML and the Trove API were used to extract newspaper data. Then analytic and visualisation tools were used (like Voyant, IBM Bluemix Watson Personality Analyzer and Tone Analyzer, Google Charts) to create new insights and 'portraits'. Our proof of concept is shown in the video and Git hub webpage mock up.
Two portrait possibilities
Once the visualisations have been produced they can be collected into a set of screens which show either a town portrait or further personalised into a 'call your ancestor conversation - the data call'. The video shows the personalised version (data call to John Doe ancestor). The mock up webpage shows the basic proof of concept focused on the town portrait.