Three decades of hacking and history – Tim Sherratt

From the dial‑up days of 1993 to today’s data‑rich cultural landscape, historian and technologist Tim Sherratt has been rewiring how we see public collections. In this SLV Lab Conversation with State Library Victoria's Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray, Tim retraces a 30-year career so far shaped by dashboards and digitisation, political interventions and playful data experiments – a body of generous, open practice that treats interfaces, notebooks and APIs as scholarship in their own right. Along the way, he champions sector collaboration and the courage to experiment, and sharing his code and thought process so others can build on them. About Tim Sherratt:Calling Tim Sherratt a historian undersells him slightly. Calling him a hacker does the same. Over the past thirty years, historian and hacker Tim Sherratt has moved between research, cultural institutions and code, building tools that sit in the space between official infrastructure and individual curiosity. In 1993, in the early days of the web, he worked on the Australian Science Archives Project based at the University of Melbourne, which led to the development of Australia’s first archives website. This sparked his interest in GLAM collections and how the affordances of the then fledgling web could allow people to access history and communicate about it in different ways. In 2007, while at the National Archives of Australia, Tim realised that applying computational methods to collections could open new avenues for analysis and exploration – an insight that became a major turning point in his career. Since then, his projects have ranged from dashboards (PROV Data, NAA Digitisation) and searchable digitised journals, to political interventions (The Real Face of White Australia, Historic Hansard) and playful data experiments (Operation Random Words, redacted). Most recently, he was Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra, and before that, Manager of National Library of Australia’s online research portal Trove. At the centre of Tim’s practice nowadays is the GLAM Workbench, a sprawling, carefully documented collection of scripts, notebooks and examples designed to help people work with data from galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Workbench reflects his philosophy: that institutions cannot do everything themselves, and that access depends on a commitment to openness.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.