The Time Team programme about Swansea and copper is to be repeated on Friday 7 November, 3.35pm on More4.
There is also a Time Team episode about the lost remains of Kenfig on Tuesday 4 November, same time and place.
John Ashley is giving a White Rock talk to St Thomas Eastside Historical Society on 30th September, 10.00. Supporters welcome.
‘We are situated in St Thomas Primary School, off Grenfell Park Rd, follow the road around to the car park, we are in the ground floor room in front of you. We start at 10 am till 12 noon.’
I have a feeling this will be an interesting event, with WR learning at least as much as the Society!
It is time for another Friends of the Hafod-Morfa Copperworks Meeting! Please join us at 18.00 on Thursday 25 September at Landore Social Club http://www.landoresocial.co.uk/contact.html to hear about recent developments, plans for the future, and ways in which you might be able to contribute to the future development of the site. You can also take the opportunity to view the recently completed work on site. All welcome!
The site will be open as part of the wide range of Open House activities this weekend Saturday-Sunday 13-14 September, programme of Open House/Open Doors events. You can turn up and enjoy the new trails and features at any time, although project staff will be on site to discuss work in progress on Sunday 14 September between 11.00 and 13.00.
BBC News, 29 August 2014.
Internet Archive Book Images library
The project has resulted in even more pictures of cats being put on to the internetAn American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.
The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library books scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.
The images have been difficult to access until now.
Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.
“For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works,” he told the BBC.
“They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.
“Stretching half a millennia, it’s amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time.
Visitors to the site are free to copy and make use of the pictures without charge“Most of the images that are in the books are not in any of the art galleries of the world – the original copies have long ago been lost.”
The pictures range from 1500 to 1922, when copyright restrictions kick in.
Mr Leetaru began work on the project while researching communications technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC as part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of photo-sharing service Flickr.
To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.
The Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to convert the image of each word into searchable text.
This drawing, dating back to 1502, is one of the oldest in the collectionAs part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.
Mr Leetaru’s code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.
The software also copied the caption for each image and the text from the paragraphs immediately preceding and following it in the book.
Each Jpeg and its associated text was then posted to a new Flickr page, allowing the public to hunt through the vast catalogue using the site’s search tool.
“I think one of the greatest things people will do is time travel through the images,” Mr Leetaru said.
“Type in the telephone, for example, and you can see that all the initial pictures are of businesspeople, and mostly men.
The library of pictures allows users to explore how technologies developed over the years“Then you see it morph into more of a tool to connect families.
“You see another progression with the railroad where in the first images it was all about innovation and progress that was going to change the world, then you see its evolution as it becomes part of everyday life.”
Archivists said they were impressed with the project.
“Finding images within texts and tagging large collections of images are notoriously difficult,” said Dr Alison Pearn, a senior archivist from the University of Cambridge and associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.
“This is a clever way of providing both quantity and searchability, and it’s great that it is freely available for anyone to use.
“The image identification has picked up things like library stamps and scribbles in the margins, and the tagging is a bit hit and miss, but research has always been at least in part about serendipity, and who knows what people will find to do with them.”
The images should prove useful to amateur and professional historiansMr Leetaru’s own ambition is a tie-up with the internet’s most famous encyclopaedia once his project is completed next year.
“What I want to see is… Wikipedia have a national day of going through this to illustrate Wikipedia articles,” he said.
“Take a random page about a historical event and there’s probably a good chance that you’re going to find an image in here that bears in some way on that event or location.
“Being able to basically enrich [them] would be huge.”
The many illustrations available include this sketch of Edinburgh shops published in 1846He added that he also planned to offer his code to others.
“Any library could repeat this process,” he explained.
“That’s actually my hope, that libraries around the world run this same process of their digitised books to constantly expand this universe of images.”
This video celebrates the June 2014 Living History Festival at Hafod-Morfa. It was filmed by Swansea University students for the completion of phase one of the regeneration of Morfa Copperworks at Hafod Swansea.
The day included a visit by the minister for natural resources, culture and sport, John Griffiths AM.
Welsh Wildlife are looking volunteers to walk and monitor the Tawe from the M4 to the Marina. Se the River Rangers flier for details.
Organised by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Digital Past is an annual conference which showcases innovative technologies for the data capture, interpretation and dissemination of heritage sites. Open to anyone working in, or studying, the archaeological, heritage, education or museum sectors, the conference is aimed at allowing informal networking and exchange of ideas within a friendly and diverse audience made up of participants from commercial, public and third sector organisations.
On Saturday 21 June, at 11.00 in the National Waterfront Museum, John Ashley will give an illustrated talk on the visit of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to Swansea in 1903. The Wild West was a spectacle and a logistical marvel, hardly rivalled even today. Learn about the show, the personalities – and how to shift a 20,000 seat stadium, 800 men and women, and 600 horses overnight to give two shows a day, every day, in different towns!
The talk is sponsored by the Swansea Branch of the Historical Association. Admission is free, all are welcome. Please check firearms at the door.
The White Rock project is holding a mini-conference on Wednesday 11 June at Swansea University. Team members including our invaluable students will present the results of their research and activities, and we will finish by laying plans for the next stages of the project. The programme is below. Lunch will be provided.
| Wednesday June 11 2014, Glyndwr A 0930 – 1600 | ||
| 11.00 | Introduction | John Ashley |
| 11.10 | Digital Trails | MEng teams |
| 11.30 | White Rock site history | Rob Hulme |
| 11.55 | White Rock lease | Dominic Williams |
| 12.10 | Schools Pack | Rosemary Crahart |
| 12.40 | Anthropology and industrial heritage | Sarah Rojon |
| 13.00 | ||
| 13.40 | White Rock Ferry an oral histories | Tudor and Janet Price |
| 14.00 | Oral histories | Rachael Lovering and Sarah Daly |
| 14.20 | Our Heritage funds | John Ashley and Kate Spiller |
| 14.30 | Discussion – next steps | All |
| 15.00 | Finish | |