A free public talk by Arnold Rosen, with a film show and exhibition of letters about Gareth Jones. Introduced by Trevor Fishlock. Gareth Jones film, talk and exhibition.
Gareth Jones, journalist and foreign affairs advisor to Lloyd-George in 1930, exposed in his writings a famished Russia.
National Waterfront Museum, Saturday 18 October.
11.00am-12.30pm: film.
2.15pm-3.30pm: talk and discussion.
With Sir John Betjeman and Cecil Beaton among his fans – photographer Edwin Smith managed, in the 1950s and 60s, to capture subtle layers of light and texture in scenes of everyday life.
He died in 1971 at the age of 59.
Many of his atmospheric images are now on show at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, which hosts Edwin Smith’s archive of 60,000 negatives. Take a look at their ordinary beauty with co-curator Justine Sambrook.
Lecture and workshops at the Royal Commission, 14 October
On Tuesday, 14 October, 2014 the Royal Commission is inviting visitors to an afternoon of lectures, discussion and active engagement in evaluating Coflein, the Royal Commission’s online database.
Coflein provides online access to the National Monuments Record of Wales ─ the national historic environment database, catalogue and digital archive.
Beginning with a welcome and introduction to Coflein by David Thomas, Head of Data and Technology, the afternoon will progress with workshops where everyone will have the opportunity to discuss the Royal Commission’s database of sites and collections, raise queries, discuss problems they have encountered, and suggest future developments. If you are interested in archaeology and the historic environment, local history, aerial photography, the history of houses and religious buildings, maritime history and shipwrecks, there will be sources relevant for you on Coflein.
There will be two workshop sessions. The first will run from 2pm ─3.30pm and the second from 4pm─5.30pm. Light refreshments will be provided. For further information and booking, please contact Nicola Roberts: nicola.roberts@rcahmw.gov.uk Telephone: 01970 621248.
Everyone welcome, from novices to experts. Come along, discover more and gives us your views!
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College of Science, Swansea University
Distinguished Lectures in Computer Science
in the context of wider Government “Digital Transformation”
Chief Architect, Technology and Innovation, DVLA
Robert Recorde Room, Faraday Building (Level 2)
Organised in collaboration with Software Alliance Wales
The DVLA, based in Swansea, is regarded as a trusted organisation with a strong brand and levels of customer satisfaction are very high. It introduced electronic vehicle licensing and Driver Licensing Online 10 years ago. The EVL (Electronic Vehicle Licensing) service is held up as a model among government digital services for its simplicity.
Information Technology is absolutely critical to the day to day operation of the DVLA. The current ICT estate has grown organically over the last few decades and has become massively complex and is a blocker to innovation.
The expectation of the UK Government’s “Digital by default” agenda has lead to the DVLA taking a fundamentally different approach to the design of its ICT and the way in which it delivers its ICT services.
Central to this is the development of “Digital capability” within the DVLA and local supply base.
The talk will cover:
Mark Evans is the Chief Architect at the DVLA where has worked for the last few years on transforming the IT estate to meet the demands of the digital agenda.
Prior to this he has held a number of senior technology management roles across a number of different sectors and organisations.
This continues a series of Distinguished Lectures in Computer Science at Swansea University. The event is free and open to all (registration is not required). The lecture will be followed by a reception.
For further information, contact Professor Peter Mosses, coordinator of the Swansea University Distinguished Lectures in Computer Science (P.D.Mosses@swansea.ac.uk). Details of all the lectures in this series are available online at www.swansea.ac.uk/compsci/distinguishedlectures
Chris Wild – otherwise known as the Retronaut – has spent the past year mining the photographic collection of the Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives. This fascinating treasure trove – which will be exhibited from 27 September – is designed to change our perception of the past. Here Wild picks some of his favourites.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29246071
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.
Talks by leading experts, archival material, and the opportunity to discover more about the database of over 6000 chapels, and the exciting partnership project between the Royal Commission and Addoldai Cymru.
Hen Dŷ Cwrdd Unitarian Chapel, Trecynon, Aberdare, CF44 8NT.
6 September, 10am-12pm. Exhibition and talk by Stephen Hughes, “Chapels: The National Architecture of Wales”.
Yr Hen Gapel, Llwynrhydowen, Rhydowen, Llandysul, Ceredigion, SA44 4QB.
13 September, 3-6pm. Local choir and talk by Stephen Hughes, “Chapels: The National Architecture of Wales” Refreshments available from the Alltyrodyn Arms, Rhydowen.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Plascrug, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 1NJ.
20 September, talks 11am -1pm, tours 1.30pm and 2pm. The afternoon tours of Aberystwyth’s historic chapels are limited to 15 people per tour. For further information and booking, please contact nicola.roberts@rcahmw.gov.uk, tel: 01970 621200. Tours will start at 1.30pm and 2pm and will meet outside The English Baptist Chapel, Alfred Place, Aberystwyth.
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.”