Grimoire for the Digital Humanities:
The Forbidden Atlas

7. Under the Evil APEye of Trove

Authors: Dr Mitchell Harrop, Kim Doyle, Dr Emily Fitzgerald, Karen Thompson, Dr Aleks Michalewicz

This chapter is a gentle introduction to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), showing how an online collection of photographs can be found through the Australian National Library’s Trove portal and downloaded using code and/or a spreadsheet for offline analysis, mapping and improvement. In this way the chapter takes the Programming out of Application Programming Interfaces and then puts it back in again. The chapter then uses online databases of Australian place names to improve the location data in the Luly photograph collection.

The Luly Collection consists of 325 colour transparencies taken by Evan Luly in Melbourne, Australia, from the 1950s until the 1970s. Luly was born in Preston in 1895 and lived there until his death in 1985. During his professional career he worked for the Victorian Lands Department, and was an avid traveller and photographer. His daughter Lexie Luly (b. 1924), a teacher at Presbyterian Ladies College and friend of fellow-teacher Sibely May (1924-1994), donated the collection to Sibely’s son, Professor Andrew May, in the 1980s. Much of this collection consists of photos of houses in suburban Melbourne, photos of modern suburban churches and an eclectic range of other buildings and places (factories, parks, freeways, airports, public buildings). It also includes higher profile Melbourne landmarks such as the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, the West Gate Bridge, the Princess Theatre, Victoria Market and the Royal Botanic Gardens. The Luly Collection captures a very specific moment in the evolution of Melbourne, and the development of an urban cityscape during the mid 20th century.

Melbourne History Workshop (MelbourneHistoryWorkshop.com) has put the Luly Collection up online, though the collection hasn’t had much in terms of metadata explicitly stated. For example, the picture “Flinders Street Clocks” (figure 7.0.1 below) has long had the description “Flinders St Clocks - 1964 - 126”. As humans, we could easily add some metadata to this picture. The date the picture was taken is clearly 1964, both from the presence of this number in the title, but also an intuitive feel for the picture quality, the types of cars and the 1960s fashions on display. We could explicitly fill in a date for the photograph to help online search results but also to map the locations over time. The location metadata of the photograph is clearly the iconic Flinders Street train station.

Flinders Street Station
Figure 7.0.1: “Flinders St Clocks,” Melbourne History Resources (2019b)

7.1 The Trove API

We’re going to use the Australian National Library’s Trove website (trove.nla.gov.au) to download the Luly collection so that we can then work on the collection, row by row to improve the dataset. The Luly Collection appears in Trove searches because it's hosted on an Omeka website (Omeka.org). Most Omeka websites can be indexed or harvested by Trove if you ask the Trove people nicely. Everyone loves Trove. It’s essential infrastructure for historical research. We can use Trove's API to get the data we need or most any data from the National Library really. ... PREVIEW ONLY ...

Next: 8. Encyclopedia of Melbourne Locator Spell