 Kia ora, welcome back and bonjour. A few thanks indeed to the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, to Victoria University of Wellington, where we all hang out, to undertake a project with an extended research fan out of which we're sharing with you a part of the project and part of the team. Finally, the family of Robert Cooplan Harding, who's without their blessing, we would not be here. On Tuesday, 17th of March, 1868, the youthful Robert Cooplan Harding set out from his father's printing establishment on Hastings Street, Napier, to walk overland to his uncle John's farm in Waipukurao, some 80 miles away. Apart from visiting relatives, the primary reason was to hand deliver the weekly country edition of the daily newspaper, The Hawks Bay Times, which had been overlooked in the scramble to bundle up the papers for the Cobb and Co. coach earlier that morning. As Harding's diary records, the rhythms of walking provide a singular opportunity for observing in vivid and minute detail the world around him, from various signposts in the landscape, both familiar and foreign, to chance meetings with acquaintances, from getting lost and forwarding streams in the Big Bush, to meeting a Maori woman who gives him a watermelon, from encountering three tramps, sleeping rough who share a cup of strong coffee through bushwhacking through scotch thistles. His trottings also include this wonderfully evocative description. It continues, before I passed the houses, however, I found that it proceeded from the vibrations of the telegraphic wires, causing the posts to give forth a musical sound and the ground to quake around them, quite in the style of the Aeolian harp. Where the wires were at all loose, there was an awful rattle. It struck me as being astonishing how tight the wires were drawn between the posts, being almost horizontal. I took notes of the milestones and the time I reached them. Harding's encounter with the telegraph, an early recorded experience of this new technology, immediately results in a desire to mimic the stenography of sound, suspending the narrative by marking of time and place that overwrites and encodes the landscape in numerical sequences. Later that evening, when he tosses and turns in bed at the halfway house of his friends, the fosters he writes, quote, I still seem to be taking quick and regular strides and the music of the telegraph wires rose and fell on my ears, just as it is done for the first 14 miles of my journey. The conjunctions and disjunctions of this moment are several, walking to hand deliver a hand type set, hand printed newspaper, in a landscape already infiltrated by that exemplar of progress and speed, the telegraph, listening to the hum of the wires that deliver in the end not sound, but writing, and writing that in turn, through the print medium, recrosses delivery lines that depend variously on coach roads, railways, steamships, electrical impulses, and the rhythms of walking. This technological moment also exemplifies how the newspaper and periodical press in the long 19th century functioned as part of a global communication network. Molded by the interrelationships of hand and machine, walking and telegraphic transmission, slow reading, and the illusion of instantaneity, this fluid and flexible web of empire was reliant upon the cut and paste economy of trade exchanges, repurposing snippets of information for domestic consumption and sending the results out once more into the great sea of textual circulations. Today, we're going to share with you one facet of our Mariston project. Using the example of our lively printer, Robert Cooplan Harding, and his landmark typographic journal, typo, we'll discuss how new geotemporal visualization tools help illuminate the individual and network biographies and bibliographies of 19th century printers by plotting Harding's extensive local and international connections, tracing the dissemination of his design principles around New Zealand and charting his downward spiral from relative prosperity in Napier to bankruptcy in Wellington, we'll also engage with Tim Hitchcock's recent call to interrogate, quote, how the evolution of the forms of delivery and analysis of text inherent in the creation of the online problematizes and historicizes the notion of the book as an object and as a technology. And in the process, problematizes the discipline of history itself as we practice it in the digital present, unquote. Recently, a so-called spatial turn in history has led to new conceptualizations of space, place, locus, and sight. If, as Doreen Massey states, places are constructed at a particular constellation of social relations meeting and varying at the particular locus, then a spatial analysis of the book trade allows us to explore the complex intercrossings between the production, circulation, and reception of the printed word. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about mapping the world of print in 19th century Wellington. Our guy, Robert Kirkland Harding, formerly entered Wellington's lively print scene in February, 1892. A letter addressed to the town clerk declares that Harding Wright and Eyre have commenced business as general printers and typographers. Furthermore, they were prepared to complete any share of the municipal printing in a satisfactory manner at reasonable rates. Their office on the corner of Balanson McGinnity Streets was in full view of the docks and near the general post office, a large cluster of booksellers, stationers, the government printing office, and the famous steam press and lithographic printers Lion and Blair were a short walk away. By October, 1892, Harding had severed ties with Wright and Eyre, but continued alone at the same fantastic premises. By 1896, though, his business had moved from the bustling intersection at the north end of town to Farrish Street, a tiado through fair dominated by the presence and smell of a biscuit factory. Here, he took on some uncharacteristic print jobs and in 1897 published the last issue of typo and closed his business. Between 1890 and 1900, he had shifted his family from the central city in Bullcott Street to Mount Cook, to Newtown, and finally to the outer suburbs of Hataitai. For the part of our project with that narrative at its center, we had dual aims. We had research questions surrounding the relationship between the local print trade, Coopland Harding and Wellington City. Where did particular trades cluster? How does this relate to Wellington's social, economic, or political environment? How do Harding's movements relate to all of this and what do they say about his success as a printer? We also started with the Print History Project, a suite, well it's a digital collection, a suite of 80 TEI documents that we wanted to repurpose and reformat in aid of unpacking Harding's Wellington story. This collection, created in 2000, paints a broad profile of colonial print production in Wellington. It contains photos of workshops, letters from tradesmen seeking work, and examples of that work. William Rose Box illuminated manuscripts, Lion and Blaise chromolithographic maps. After 12 years, this rich collection had significantly dated both technically and regarding interface design and usability. So it used TEI P4, had a static tree structure for navigation, and most significantly wasn't supported by its existing platform on the NZ ETC site. We approached these two aims within a quote methodological context of prototyping. Our process focused on existing tools, which would A, capture the spatial dimension of our research, and B, provide that new platform and interface for the old content. We assessed Hypersities, Historypin, and the Netline Plugin for a Mecca, and you'll be unsurprised to find out that the major challenges we faced were technical. Place names hadn't been effectively marked up in the existing TEI, so we couldn't automatically geocode. Many tools didn't support TEI at all, and crosswalking metadata had to be done manually. Our solution, by the way, for transforming the P4 TEI into the P5 was to build a one-time processing pipeline that generated an XSLT transformation, and then we just crawled the returned TEI documents. So there's a lot of quite intense technical stuff going on behind there. We also assessed how each platform supported different kinds of stories. Hypersities, for example, affords browsing and non-linear engagement with content, whereas Netline encourages structured linear narratives. In Netline, we could make an argument, for example, that Harding leveraged his social connections to seek work, or that his business suffered when he alienated political allies. We could do this by linking content to a narrative very clearly articulated and argued on a timeline. We could, to quote Bill Furster, build a curated path that leads the viewer through the primary source material towards insight that benefit from our expertise. The question is, though, what do you lose by narrowing the broad picture that the print history project painted so well? A browsable visualization, like this one, re-broadens that picture. In this case, we used various mapping, temporal, and storytelling tools, alongside general web tools like Twitter Bootstrap and GitHub Pages. We combined Harding's story with the old print history project material, content from Te Ara, Papers Past, National Library, and even added a manually collated data set outlining the location of every local print business in the 1890s. This prototype provided a virtual sandbox where information is made available for search and discovery by the user, with very little guidance towards conclusions. Unlike a curated path, users construct their own understanding directly as demonstrated bottom left. You select a map point for access to a huge array of information. This approach exasperates some scholars, though, who suggest that leaving the final synthesis to our users is just careless. They argue, quote, highly exploratory visualizations often lack the context for users to properly understand the issues, end quote. It was a constant tension then and still is, suggesting an argument about Harding while also encouraging users to find relationships in the data and across content that we hadn't anticipated. Even before we could interrogate this line between curation and exploration, we found that digital mapping has a significant impact on historical interpretation, which isn't surprising. For example, we had anticipated that contextualizing Harding story geographically would generate thoughtful perspectives and a meaningful way to engage with content, but it wasn't quite that clear cut. We could see where every printer worked, what they printed, where any item was produced, but we couldn't see why or gain a nuanced sense of the circumstances so often hinted at by primary content. Essentially, we found that plotting coordinates relative to each other can produce a pale shadow of the lively print culture scene in 19th century Wellington. Our challenge to overcome then is that the map technology is fundamentally interested in Euclidean space, whereas historical interpretation is interested in Doreen Massey's place. Space is area defined by mathematics and is how physics understands the world. Place is area imbued with human experience, social bonds, and emotion. It is how people and of course the humanities understands the world. So as the printer's web moves forward, we explore strategies for generating a sense of place. Platforms that support storytelling are powerful because demonstrating change over time appeals to a human textual understanding. Even quite basic web 2.0 features like user generated content portals can encourage subjectivity. But of course, we're still some distance from understanding all of this. So in the meantime, I will hand over to Sydney again. Thanks Flora. Harding's professional and personal movements around Wellington constitute part of a larger narrative of mobility that is neither unusual in the long 19th century nor restricted to the printing fraternity. True once printers had completed their seven or eight year apprenticeship and qualified as journeymen, they hit the road. In Britain at least, they used well-worn tramping routes policed by the typographical unions. Some, however, were imperial careerists, colony hopping through the pointless settler's dominions as warranted by economic circumstances or encouraged by an adventuresome spirit. And although he moved from Wellington to Wonganui to Mohaka to Ahuriri to Napier and then back to Wellington, Harding never left New Zealand. Instead, he traveled the world through the empire of print. After taking over and then selling his father's newspaper, he cut his displayed teeth on jobbing printing and in 1887 produced the first issue of the internationally-claimed typo, a monthly newspaper and literary review. Typo joined a legion of journals dedicated to black arts that thrived on the Victorian journalistic penchant for cut and paste, scissoring and scrapbooking. Predating news syndication and affordable cable feeds, infectious texts could go viral through the simple expedient of writing with scissors. As an early mix and mash artist, Harding participated fully in this world of open access text. Until we discovered a largely unknown Apache archive in 2011 and 12, his life was only glimpsed through fragments of print, a few letters, some memorial reconstructions. His business archives followed the way of most records, tossed out, pulped and destroyed. But this is no different from the bulk of historical evidence of the 19th century printing and allied book trades, hence the intrinsic importance of these journals. Over to Sarah. One of the most exciting finds in the family stash, apart from the diary with which Sydney opened our talk, was a small scrapbook of press notices, clipped or transcribed from various named or unattributed New Zealand newspapers. This archive went beyond the international praise that Harding would sometimes reprint in typo in giving us rich documentary evidence of the impact of our printer's work. It was rich in the best way, just as one review assures readers. The receipt of typo every month is as cheering as the advent of Christmas, the difference being that we have 12 treats, journalistic treats, yearly instead of one. Typo is a literary Christmas pudding served up once a month, but there is no dyspepsia or other discomfort afterwards. On the contrary, it is calculated to dispel such unpleasant and uncomfortable effects. Every printer in the colony should be a subscriber to typo. Especially young printers and apprentices. There were approximately 130 items either snipped or written out in this whole journey, journal. They both marked Robert Coopland Harding's influence on his contemporaries and compatriots and were marked by him through his act of collecting and saving them as significant. In the first volume of typo, Harding sets forth a manifesto. It is our design to issue a journal representative of the printing, publishing, bookselling, stationary and kindred interests, and to provide a recognized channel of communication between those engaged in these industries. We will endeavour to make our paper as practically useful as possible and trust the cooperation of all our friends north and south to make it a thoroughly successful and representative trade journal. Many of the excerpts saved in the press notices explicitly judged typo according to its aims. Some of the snippets had a date attached to them. Many of the snippets had a source scribbled next to them, even in such cryptic notes as FG Star or BPJ. Of those that did not, many contained a reference or a clue that could be turned into metadata. For example, by identifying a reference to a specific typo comment, I could give a clipping an approximate date. The National Library's Papers Pass collection helped me to identify some of these fragments by text match alone. I also turned up 85 fragments in that collection that were similar in tone to the ones Harding had saved. That provided a new dimension of context. The two groups of reviews provided valuable opportunities to contrast and reflect. They were a reminder that the press notices reviews are a subset of a larger whole that Harding may never have seen and just so are the papers past collections by necessity a subset of a larger whole that we may never see. As you can see, the fragments that Harding collected represented a wide variety of publications. We can hope, for his sake, that they represented a high proportion of the papers to which he actually sent typo. The additional press reviews, in contrast, represent a greater variety across time with more instances of repeat reviews from a single contemporary. The reviews Harding collected end in 1892, although publication of typo continues sporadically into 1897. Interestingly, the additional reviews I found in digitized collections follow the same pattern, with very few appearing, if a typo's later years, implying that Harding stopped collecting them, not arbitrarily, but perhaps because the responses were drying up. Because I had dates and locations for many of the press notices snippets, I wanted to see what I could learn through a map of these fragments, both by literally mapping data across the mainly New Zealand landscape and by mapping these fragments in time, parallel to Robert Kublin Harding's career. I started with dates and locations that were very rough, rarely better than January 1888 or Woodville, and so I used a mapping tool, Batch Geo, on the point and click end of the spectrum that runs from accuracy to ease of use. Batch Geo runs off Google Maps and is quite simple. It can cope with a location as broad as New Zealand, which was all I had for 50 of my 130 reviews. This is a free version. Paid users can work with more data and more finesse. It isn't a big data tool, but 130 items isn't big data. Here, precision is overkill. Every visualization tool is its own research question. It challenges you to fill out the metadata in certain ways, which is tempting out to asking questions for the data. Then it challenges you to ask more questions that make best use of its function. For example, I'd started out the project with the goal of pinpointing each source far more accurately, finding out, say, the exact coordinates of the printing office of every newspaper that prints a review, but using a mapping tool that didn't require that encouraged me to ask questions in other directions. And when it came to questions of influence, precise coordinate locations were not as relevant as geographical associations with particular population centers. The research became almost immediately a bit recursive. One of the research questions I'd started with was, how long did it generally take between the date on which Harding published a typo issue and the date on which a contemporary newspaper printed an acknowledgement? However, because of the gaps in the data, I was instead using an estimate of that answer. Three to six weeks was common and links to specific content and typo articles in order to help me guess the dates of possible reviews. Another research question that shifted as I went, what was the geographical pattern of typo responses when Harding was in Napier compared to that pattern when Harding shifted to Wellington? As far as I could tell, the record preserved here, both in Harding's personal collection and other archives, fell sharply off after or even as a result of that move, as Harding's fortunes did not improve. Because of that, this turns out to be a map of places that typo reached either directly from Napier or perhaps from Wellington via Napier in the sense that they grew from connections Harding created in his earlier base of operations. Similarly, Harding continued to bear the label of a Napier printer after his change of address. Use for mapping tool has allowed me to answer several questions about my data briefly and roughly to see how widely typo was recommended, to see some places and times in which correspondence seemed to cluster and to speculate on further patterns linked to the passage of time. More interesting though, those answers to me are the questions they pose. By prioritising distance, a map directs me to consider space that is shortened, lengthened and generally constructed by technology, that is by telegraph lines and postal routes by land, sea and rail. It encourages a viewer to construct an idea of network and influence with the tyranny of distance always at the forefront. However, even within a framework that explicitly privileges space, I'm left with a picture that suggests conclusions about place, about the relation of other new centres to Napier, even after Harding had left Napier. Harding's location is a logical centre of the narrative I've told so far about the press notices. But developing from that, about the time and location of each point in correspondence, an obvious next area of inquiry is people. These were editors and printers, not newspapers, with whom Harding conducted an exchange. And many of Harding's correspondence during this period were just as mobile as he was. The next step in visualisation may be a tool that will allow me to represent the movement of all key figures throughout the period of their connections so that their changing spheres of influence can be shown as well, rather than that mode, which only allows me to imply that of Harding. As we reflect on the experience of mapping printers' lives and letters, a few points come to mind. Knowledge structured through digital tools that produce databases, visualisations or maps, rather than conventional narratives, require different modes of reading and in turn create different understandings. In discussing the cognitive power of visualisation in the context of the London Charter, Eudonar draws attention to the societal implications of computer visualisations. The potency of these cognitive effects raises important questions about the digital representation of knowledge and points to the need to reveal the processes of understanding and interpretation which lie behind all knowledge representation. In short, that is the paradata. Thus, many of the questions our team is exploring are also meta-questions about the nature of open-linked data projects, the role of prototyping in digital research, and the nature of digital humanities if not digital culture in general. As such, the printer's web project joins Luke Tridentich in posing the ultimate question about the making of history and the remediating of historicised experience, quote, what does the past look like through the lens of digital culture? We may not have all the answers, but in posing this question in the context of geotemporal visualisations, we have started to understand both the affordances and the challenges of the digital tools upon which we rely to accomplish our interpretive work. Thank you. We've got time for a couple of quick questions. Oliver's got a microphone here. Is anyone out there who wants a quick burning question? Just like from my... There's one over there, Oliver, please. Just a burning question or thought from me is wonderful to see these clippings-type collections come back into frame with papers passed. And what a powerful tool they are when you put them both together. Papers passed is wonderful, not entirely perfect. Clippings registers a lovely thematic and subject base. So nice to draw the elements of both. Stephanie. Thank you. I really enjoyed that talk. And I was really interested in the question you raised about who should shape the joining of the dots? How do you scaffold people's connection without constraining their exploration? And you talked about how different sorts of platforms encourage different sorts of exploration. And so I wondered, from what you envisaged you wanted to do with this material, what would your dream platform be for organising the material? Would you like a particular platform recommendation or just what capabilities? Well, if there is one that fits in your dream of what you could do with this material, how would you organise it if anything was possible? If there's a platform that fits that great, but what would you like to exist that would allow you to organise things in the way you imagine the best possible? I think, I don't know if people are familiar with the concept of quantum, but I think the tool that would best suit our purposes and one that we're trying to couple together at the moment is one which allows for a kind of dynamic drawing of content. So you've got a database behind an interface and which can actually respond to... Well, can generate a story as it were. So you start at the beginning and you say, do you want a story and then you can have a story. It can also generate exploration in a sandbox environment and also you can just query the raw data as it is for doing your own exploration purposes. So we're actually working on the model at the moment of something which has a like a tripartite structure which, and we're using a framework called Kiln right now which comes actually out of Kings College and it has a, in our mind, there's a digitised corpora which people can engage with just as like a digital collection and then you can query that and then we have a sandbox environment which has some tools for people to play with overlaid on that content and there's also kind of more of a structured interpretive area where we provide a curated path as it were on top of that. So it's not, so those are kind of the three options and it's not all together in one place but it's three places in one website sort of thing and that's what we're going with at the moment if that sort of explains it. But in the meantime, Neatline was wonderful. I thought Neatline actually did a lot of the things that we were looking for. Yeah, and it was kind of technical resourcing which actually stopped us moving a bit further forward with that. Yeah. I think if I could just supplement Flora's answer. It's a question too of the assumption that there's an ideal user, that there is a single pathway, that there is a single strategy for engaging with resources and so what we're endeavouring to do is try to find multiple avenues into the corpora and multiple ways of playing within it and multiple outputs. So I think the posing the question of an ideal vision of what you would want is actually not the question that we would want to either pose or answer because it assumes a linear and a flat model of digital storytelling and we're trying to explore all the multiplicities that are possible with the kind of data that we have recognising that we don't have all the answers. Thanks very much, Sarah, Flora and Sydney.