ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog - Page 7 of 9 - Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer

The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…

Following the previous posts, bringing this all together meant three different applications.

paintergoblin.py – creates the images, can be run standalone
wikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL services
twittergoblin.py – tweets for us! Either a random Wikidata image or from am existing Wikidata link

We create Tweetable information using the wikigoblin. We perform the Tweet using twittergoblin. In between the paintergoblin has to create his art!

We’ve seen examples of the images from the original zine.

How do we turn this concept into something real, and automated?

The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources

One thing that held the Painter Goblin project back was finding a data source to get images from.

There are potentially hundreds of sources out there, but! The path of least resistance means that:

Any source needs either hackable URIs** (uniform resource identifier) or a randomizing function.
Ideally, a data source doesn’t link to yet-another-page, e.g. portal like websites to other’s collections.
Ideally the data source links directly to an image to download.
Data can be easily selected by category, e.g. just paintings, or posters, not just ‘art’.

** A hackable URI is a URI pattern that can be cycled through using computational techniques, even if the underlying data isn’t entirely well-known. E,g, http://example.com/image/0001, http://example.com/image/0002, for subsequent pages, for lack of a more concrete example.

I wanted to explore heritage sources such as Europeana, TROVE, DPLA. I struggled to search these effectively though, and struggled to see how I might automate using them. I recognise they have APIs. I’ll revisit them in the future as I look to expand the Painter Goblin’s corpus.

Enter Wikidata.

The Painter Goblin: Part 2, Twitter Pieces

Continuing the story of the Painter Goblin and following part one, the idea of a Twitter bot started to form earlier this year.

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

In part 2 I take a very brief look at what is needed to write a bot and get it publishing.

Learn more below.

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

I wrote a new Twitter bot two weekends back: The Painter Goblin.

The Painter Goblin was inspired by a Zine I wrote in a different time, in 2015 for the Christchurch Zine festival, New Zealand.

The Zine itself was inspired by a story I had heard a few weeks earlier from someone who had seen this story on Reddit:

Every time I play the Sims, I start my family with a ‘painting goblin’.

I make him/her morbidly obese with green skin. I make sure to give him the following traits:

Likes to be alone

Lives art

Hates the outdoors

The first thing I do once I have enough money, is build a small room in the basement, send him down there, and then remove the stairs. I set him up in a tiny little area with only an easel, a toilet, a refrigerator, a bed, a shower, and a trash bin.

All he does all day is paint. That’s it. He paints and paints and paints.

Eventually his paintings become very good and worth a lot of money. Every few minutes I go downstairs and sell whatever painting he has finished and then I return to playing the game.

My family always ends up feeling blessed because of their fortune, and they never find out about the horrible secret living beneath their home.

Lets take a look in more detail below.

Brainscape Flashcards: For Digital Preservation

Digital preservation is massively multi-disciplinary and it can take time to be able to grasp the skills and concepts cross-discipline, wherever you began your own training.

How do we develop the skills of new folk entering the field today?

How do we re-skill those who have worked in GLAM a long time in disciplines other than digital preservation?

These are questions I think about a lot. I dig into some of those thoughts below and take a look at one approach I worked on for students and very early-career professionals with flashcards using Brainscape.

Ménage-à-préservation: The tensions of Digital Preservation as-a-Service…

Digital preservation as-a-service (DPaaS) is a concept that could potentially allow many more users to satisfy the need to maintain ‘records’. Be those records in government, in another so-called GLAM institution, or one’s own personal memories and artefacts.

DPaaS makes sense on a number of levels as it enables the sharing of some very expensive infrastructure and individuals (storage, backup, delivery servers, software maintenance, engineers).

Those savings could be significant but I’m not aware of any single exemplar of the complete DPaaS infrastructure operating out there right now.

My instinct is that this is because one does not simply do digital preservation.

But that’s an overly dramatic simplification. I wrote up some rough notes off the back of a conversation. I take a look at these below.

Formatted 2025 for SEO and ActivityPub optimization. Original post: 28 April, 2017

Digital Preservation: The Job Application

I recently, applied for a pretty cool role in digital archiving and digital preservation. Applying for the role and considering…

Context Switching: Do you really need to be an archivist programmer? One perspective…

The first in what I hope will be, a series of blogs. This blog has been torn from an introduction…

Skyline from a train station in Sydney, Australia

Binary Trees? Automatically Identifying the Links Between Born-digital Records

I recently presented a summary of a paper I am trying to see published in the Australian Society of Archivists…

Abstract representation of a Key Value store

Key :: Value Access Language (KVAL) for BoltDB and Golang

With some forced downtime as the effects of the Kaikōura earthquake are felt here on the North Island, with the shutdown of Archives New Zealand, what better way to spend it than creating a new grammar and parser for key-value databases? I have spent the last few weeks developing a specification for a Key-Value Access Language (KVAL) and implementing a binding for it for Golang’s BoltDB. I hope it will be of interest to folks, but let’s take a look at it in more detail below.

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