 We now have Greg Roigston from the National Library, Digital Tinkera, and all-round technical dude who's going to talk to us about getting to know the Kumara Times. Howdy, everyone. So, for all the fancy ARVR people who were in the room before, this is some OG 100-year-old fancy technology shamanigans. This particular photo is one of those stereoscopic things that I've rocked backwards and forwards at about half a frame a second to make it look 3D, but they actually come in light little two things. So, when a year ago I wrote this talk, I knew I'd be following those guys and I'm just, you know, representing. Anyway, this little thing here is what I knew about about two years ago about the Kumara Times. It is not Kumara, and it's not a clock. It is the Kumara Times. It's a newspaper. So, I used to look after the collaborative newspaper programme for the papers past National Library business where groups of people would come up and say, hey, we really want to get our local newspaper title from 100 years ago. And between application cycles one year, the Sky Contact Mini said, hey, in like two years, it's going to be 150 years since this guy here said and came to Hoka Tika or West Coast, or I don't actually know what it was. I should know this. I don't. And this guy here is, I shouldn't have a favourite. I looked after the collaborative newspaper programme for about four years, three years. I actually can't remember. I shouldn't have a favourite collaborator, but it's this guy here. He actually does tours of Hoka Tika in this get up, which is him dressed like Sedan, doing readings from that book that was real famous from down at Luminez. Luminez, whatever it's, you know what I mean. But anyway, so he actually, he came up to me. Well, he came up to me. He sent me a letter on his own stationery, which is very unusual. I only get emails asking. He was like, hey, we want to do this thing when you get the Kumara Times onto papers past. And I was like, yep, sure. When do you need it done? I think he was going to say tomorrow, like everyone else. But he was like, no, I've got two years until it's 150 years since Sedan first came to Hoka Tika. So he went out and he made a pamphlet. He had an article in the local paper, which has a bank account number you can donate to, which is fast, which is blows the mind that people, you know, I've got friends online that won't take, put their bank accounts on Facebook. Because that's getting the sky put in the newspaper, which is awesome. So that's David Verrill there when he's not dressed as Sedan. This pamphlet here that I really badly photographed is from, it was actually an ad in the genealogy, New Zealand geology, genealogy, family history, magazine, anything. So they not only handed out pamphlets, they also did that. But anyway, he's a bit of a legend. Here's me photoshopping him in next to the statue because I was saying, hey, next time you make a statue of Sedan, maybe you should do it with David Verrill dressed as Sedan because that'd be that appeals to my sense of humour. And it'd be funny. And he's awesome. He's really awesome. Like I feel like I've just mocked him a little bit, but no, I should say that he was so awesome to work with. Normally, when people come to me, came to me, it was all part of their job. It's like, I've got this much to spend on digitisation. We want to do it on paper's past. But this guy was like, went out. I've always had this joke that I'm not going to be happy with a clabbers newspaper, and someone does a sausage sizzle outside Bunnings to get their money. And he didn't quite do that, but he might as well have. So I'm going to take that as a win. In the end, they only got half the money they needed. The New Zealand Society for Genealogists came up with the other half, but we got it up online well in advance. And you might be like, why have you told me this? That's why I wrote the story. Was that I then got invited down to Hoka Tika to do a talk at their celebrations for the 150th year of Sedan-ness. And I was like, holy crap. This is how I identify. I don't identify myself as like an old-timey guy. I know nothing about history. I might work for a library and look at here for the newspapers all day, but a lot of the time. But I'm more like this guy. If I saw this photo when I was a kid, I'd be like, this guy's the man. This is probably what... If I saw this when this came out in the 80s, I'm assuming it's the 80s based on all this stuff, I would have been like, this is how I think I should be right now. This should be me right now. But you know, I didn't. But anyway, I saw her as a funny photo in the SNF. I thought, hey, that's cool. So I had no idea what I was doing with this talk. So I knew I was going to be talking to people who didn't really get into technology like I did. They weren't like me. They were probably going to be way older than me as most fans of papers past are. And so I had no idea. So I started... I was like, this is what I know about the Kumara Times. It was on the right fonts. Imagine this stuff looks prettier. That's how much we digitise of the Kumara Times. It was like 8... I'm not sure we're going to list down as well. It was like 18-something to 18-80-something. And then there was a gap and then it's a meeting of 96. It wasn't a massive chunk of stuff. That's why I should bring my notes. I left my notes on. Anyway, so what I normally do when I'm investigating things is I do stuff like open up our fantastic website at netlib.govt. Something. Anyway. I should drop you anyway. So this is Kumara. This is what it was back in town. It was a huge boom town in ages ago with the gold rush and all that good stuff. The town itself is just this tiny little bit over here and all this madness over here is all gold mines and good stuff. So I knew they had a map. I knew they had a sick waterslide. As you can see down here, this is the Kumara waterslide. I think there's again something to do with gold mining as well. I told John, awesome with history. I know that that's one time they had some fancy people come. So they put palm trees and this was on Reddit that it blowed their minds. There's a camera looking at a camera. Wow. I'm ashamed they didn't have the internet back then. But then I found this and this was kind of what I was looking for when I was looking through all these photos. I was trying to get a sense of the thing but I wanted a juicy story that I could blow these people as history seminars mind and I was going to somehow link in technology because that would be awesome. So what I found was this Lewis Slowish guy and I still haven't worked out his name a year later. These are his two kids. He had quite a few kids. He blew off his arm and one of his eyes or both his eyes or something in a dynamite explosion in Kumara or stuff. There was one and a half to two miles at 10 o'clock in the morning and he did some mischief to himself. So this was the cool thing. So here what I had is I had my original newspaper which was the Kumara Times. Now I had a store, a sweet photo that tugs up the heartstrings and now I have found him on papers past getting injured. Then I found the other guy and it's a good thing his name wasn't John Smith because that would have been in trouble but he's got a fairly unique name so I found to see all these little things down here. These are all these articles on papers past that I found about him. So I found about him as injury which is when him and his buddy blew himself up then I found this cool thing here which was they had a couple of concerts for his benefit to get him some medical business, take him over to Melbourne to do cool medical things in Melbourne. You can see they did a couple of those there. So the other thing that I've just totally skipped over is this weird timeline thing that I've put together. So this is timeline.js which I'll cover more in the details but I was thinking this was a perfect thing to show these oldies how they could display stuff in an awesome way that would not just be sending links to their friends and family. Anyway, so here we go. Melbourne people, doctors can't do it, I'm going to skip through this quickly because it's an interesting story but it's not the main thing dragging in a little bit. Anyway, so through all this so from 1896-ish to here there was all about, you can see how many articles I found about this fella through here and then we get to here and we see these deserving case which will have his name that I found and these are the same texts, posted in newspapers all around the country saying, hey, there's this one armed, blind organ grinder, give him some money, he's a legit dode and so it was like he travelled the country getting this thing printed in all the papers so this one here is in Dunedin, here's one in Waikato, there's ones like other places that I haven't written down and I've forgotten in the year since I wrote this and then this is the end of the story. The last time I found, unfortunately, a nasty woman robbed him in Auckland and that's a really shitty end to that story sorry, but that's the end of the story and it's a good thing that I didn't make my whole talk about this because when I got down to Kumara that's me, just in case you didn't know, standing next to the photo and the whole story on a billboard so, yeah, if you're interested that's actually how that thing that you just saw was built you've got a spreadsheet that you just dump the stuff in then you follow these simple instructions and it looks like that and it's all interactive and stuff and it's real cool and I have it online that you can see the link at the end if you want to do it if you're interested in tinkering with technology stuff but don't know code or anything this is a perfect way to kind of get your feet wet in this kind of making stuff with technology space then it's so right back to the drawing board being all smoky and cartoony and going computer head thing again I decided, alright, no we need to do more technology here we need to go back to my roots become cool 80s dude with all my technology and do something cool because stories, half-assed stories told by me I'm not going to cover when I'm representing at this live heritage seminar so what I did was I took every single or page of the kumara times and I made my own interface because why not I figured how am I going to understand this stuff if I can't play around with it because normally when I've done things like this before I've always written crazy scripts and made cool graphs and all that sweet and stuff but I was trying to be let's just look at the pages for once I spend all this time looking at them but how do I really look at them so I made this sick little interface where's my dot, can you see my dot where's my dot, let's try it at the top there we go, okay so at the top of these cool xbox colours, those are intentional because I've actually got the order wrong so that I wouldn't get sued by Microsoft accidentally but basically what this is is it's mapped to my keyboard so the whole idea was this I was doing a lot of this work outside of work time some of it was in work time but this was like I need to explore this while I'm watching TV line on the couch, putting in as little effort as possible keys to go through newspapers so left arrow would take me back an issue right arrow forward an issue up and down would go up and down through the issue through the pages, yeah that's the so I was living the high life for a while just cruising through this newspaper thinking I was pretty flash and then I noticed that they were all the same like all the pages are the same so I made this which is when you scroll back and what it would do is I'm doing this, I shouldn't have said I'm doing this I should have pretended this as if I'm actually looking at it but this was what it would do it would animate backwards and forwards and then I would say true or false that these pages look almost identical the same and you can see the dates there are changing so it is actually a different page and I did about 160 of these marking matched finding I didn't actually count how many didn't match because I wasn't thinking it far enough ahead I think I was a little bit too relaxed but it got real boring real fast and I did it for a couple of nights and the data was useless I was going to make a sit graph but it would have been real real sad so this is what I came up with so this is using my graphic design slash animation skills from my uni days I was like well animation is 24 frames a second why don't we just chuck the newspaper into Premiere or After Effects so I animated the pages at 24 frames a second so for every second that you see there that's 24 issues of the newspaper so you might be able to tell that it's not changing much and when it is it looks all liquidy and blurry and stuff so this was every single page that was in a run but I have them online later you can check out that thing the YouTube channel so the first time I presented this I did two pages at the time it was the front and the back pages but I felt that made me sick it actually made you a little bit because you can see how this one here dances up and down it freaks you out a little bit but anyway the thing I love this this is my favourite thing ever never changed half the back change never changed changed a little bit there most of the ads are boring as hell they're all ads so these are like super important things because I look at these things all the time I do the image QA for every single not every single thing I see a lot of newspapers and I never picked up just how many damn ads there were this was fascinating and I'm just going to stop there because that's getting kind of boring but if you do for whatever reason need to go to sleep tonight it's on the internet I can send you a link in fact I'll tweet it afterwards because that's what the cool kids do but I did discover this ad just going to pause here because how cool is this ad like 1. Bacon trade more pork ow, eyes are open 40 years before hamburgers were invented people there was a guy that had a bacon thing called H burger slew that sink in they told me they were going to track him down and find out more about H burger because I bought this up in a good ticket no one has gone back to me disappointed so the rest of the time I'm going to talk a little bit about the ads because I don't know I find them real interesting or whatever but this is one that I saw all the time and this might have actually been a placeholder thing like they were like ah we don't have enough ads Jimmy is not up to his bacon ad this month or this week or whatever so they had this in here and now this is funny basically saying these are the official places you can read our newspaper which is a weird thing to me but then when you think about it's not that dissimilar from this it's that the official hydration partner of your blacks which is my favourite one and I guess it's a stretch but I've always thought of these things like official hydration partner I'm pretty sure 10 years ago they would have said drink partner but whatever I've always thought of these as new things but it's clear people have been doing sleazy advertising business for years I mean sure it doesn't say official they don't have it pinked on their uniform but it's that same thing and then I found this guy here who I think is probably mostly to blame for all this bad advertising business so does anyone know Professor Holloway no does anyone know this ad here you would have seen it all along the right side of the newspaper if you've ever used papers past you would have seen these ads they everywhere this guy Mr Holloway had a goal to be advertising on every single newspaper in the world and he spent 50% of everything he earned on advertising this is a really weird article in that it's an article not an ad but it's talking about how awesome this guy was and the guy lived in London actually I don't know where he's from but he had this thing where he had always had the same ads always in the same side of the newspaper and it's for like snake oil pills they're like I don't even know what they do maybe they're slow around and they're gonna sue me but he has also had this other interesting thing which is my other shady advertising a little thinga mi jigamie which is letters that aren't letters so this kinda looks like a letter isn't a letter and you see a lot of these in the newspapers and no one from Bermuda is gonna write to Freakin Hoka Ticket Akumara sorry they probably don't even exist anyway there's lots of really bad stuff and I mean fake news I've heard that term up a few days a few times today and I would like to propose that this guy here with his shady this miracle kyo shave me it was the original stuff like this so on the left here you have well at first glance an article about beautiful handcrafted jewellery actually a promoted offer and on the right you have a thing from my facebook sorry the stuff app on my phone this is the facebook app on my phone and for some reason it thought that I would really like to start shopping in wish and that I would like whatever the hell that is and to me these are the same as those letters right like these are content that is designed to look like regular content but isn't that actually it isn't actually content like I've never heard of wish before none of my friends have and that looks like something that I would find on my desk that's a mistake from soldering a blob of solder to the end of a wire that is some terrible jewellery sorry people much like this and so this is not selling things well I guess that's selling things but these are content and I guess those letters and again this is something that I've always and I guess this is probably me just being young and naive or whatever that thinking that all these sort of shady things have happened in social media and on the internet dodgy ads designed to look like articles okay I'm supposed to be politically neutral here but I would and I will say that I'm not knocking national here I'm knocking whoever thought writing word with whatever content ever it's not 1998 it's a bad call I hope that person got fired anyway that's my rant on that so like all with internet things you can fix I use ad block pretty much exclusively on all my computers I'm probably shameful probably not the cool thing to say anymore I don't know because you go to those websites and they tell you you're killing our site by using it make better content anyway so I wrote ad blocker for just to prove a point and this is the first and the second page of the Kumara Times as you can see the front page is completely blank apart from the metadata at the top there the I'm pretty sure that's actually an ad that didn't get tagged right because generally when they start the article you have the little mini-master there so page 3 and 4 not much better I actually think that's also an ad that hasn't been tagged correctly that's the little thing of the insane this was printed by Jimmy Smith or whatever can't read it probably doesn't say that not much content on the Kumara Times this isn't that dissimilar from any other newspaper of this time so to prove that I'm going to go through my favourite the evening post which I delivered when I was young front page just death and birth notices second page nothing third page we've got some content and that means I'm going to go through all of them look almost had a whole page of content but no there was an ad there same thing here actually that one is a whole page I thought there wasn't any anyway we're going to skip through because this is going to be boring that actually is an ad even National Library is not perfect and it's tag-in of metadata but anyway so you can check this out if you want to look at any of your favourite papers past newspaper title I have a version of hacked papers past that you can not hack creatively engineered to display this these are actually screen grabs from that version so I'll give you that link right now that's the URL there I'll actually tweet it so there's no fake news coming out that is my handle that will be coming from and that is the URL that's my talk stories I feel like I fired through that real quick thanks Greg for that hilarious and well deconstructed meta-talk can you create an overview like data about the historical variation of advertising to sort of see if there are geographic patterns or patterns of time and this kind of thing is that something you're interested in doing? I mean I could don't have time to do that or it's not part of my job but I could potentially if you were talking about from the paper source so we mark up in our Met's Auto illustrations different ads and articles so you could potentially do that and what you were more interested in like where does this ad appear around the country or like how often it was there or who who has the most ads how does it vary over time from what my experience I mean you're welcome to use my hacked papers pass and have a look for yourself but yeah it seemed pretty consistent to be honest like I think you know I'll flick back through it real quick to here so the front page and the back page of the newspaper are like on the same sheet so this is basically a fold of things you can almost imagine that they did the front or the front and the back page at the start at the start of the month they got his intern or whatever to just print out all these things so I feel like a lot of that stuff was maybe like convenient what I'm trying to get at is like you know I feel like a lot of this stuff was just we need to fill up the space and there was sometimes now where you'd see there wasn't an ad there and I feel that's like a guidance payers bill and he's like oh I'll get you old Steve pay your bill but yeah as to we also chunk up ads really weird on papers pass so if I can just find a fairly long example so like this would be listed as one whole big ad then say this is one two four ads you know we don't actually chunk them up that well because I guess when we were writing the original well I wasn't writing it Hover to the original specs for papers pass was like well no one cares about individual ads we just care about the articles and they're probably right except for poetos like me they have a thing for cool owls ah such a good picture it's actually one of the best wood block things I've seen on papers pass I love this thing so much anyway thanks