A Tiro's Blog

Spring 2026 Link Cleaning

Richard Palmer — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:53:30 GMT

Time to close a few hundred browsers tabs in-between eating (not quite hundreds) of mini-eggs (nutrition for the body and the mind). Some of them from the DH Awards 2025 voting page - http://dhawards.org/dhawards2025/voting/ (voting closes 17th April 2026!)

Future Direction for Object Pages

Richard Palmer — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:09:20 GMT

There are some interesting points (library/archive focused but mostly generalisable cross the cultural sector) in Roger C. Schonfeld's post on the JSTOR blog - The purpose of stewarding distinctive collections: discovery and impact and especially for the future of collections sites this paragraph is relevant:

Discovery deepens when secondary literature and primary sources are integrated. In the scientific and quantitative fields, there are growing efforts to link datasets with journal articles. For the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS), the parallel opportunity is bi-directional linking of archival and special collections materials with critical context and analysis in scholarly monographs and journal articles. This is more than “linking” in a simple sense: it enables context-driven discovery that supports deeper exploration and interpretation, rather than more atomized access to discrete items.

For museum object pages the idea they can become the hub for links to on-going work/literature in the wider world and across institutions seems a big step forward from the 90s object page paradigm we are still mostly stuck in. But it does require researchers and those in the cultural sector to align on goals and implementation (i.e. how to automatically find references to an object discussed in a journal article), which is often where GLAM/Academic collaboration plans fall apart.

Keeping Dependabot Happy

Richard Palmer — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:39:20 GMT

I found this post from Filippo Valsorda interesting as it's increasingly seemed like what was originally something useful (finding out about security alerts for dependencies) has become a beast that must be fed everyday. The satisfaction of closing a few Dependabot PRs is swiftly followed by deflation as 2-3x that many new PRs are created the next day. One thing that would make it much more useful (and I'm baffled as to why it's not done by GitHub) is to have a clearer UI that splits out PRs into those from developers, security PRs (important!) and then the endless dependency update ones that can be considered as and when. Instead if you don't keep merging them, you end up with a open PR count in the hundreds and a feeling that you are not maintaining things.

Pain Au Chocolat Review: Heidi, Richmond

Richard Palmer — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:52:51 GMT

Cost: £4.10 (!)

Chocolate Insets: 2

Chocolate Quality: Good

Chocolate Quantity: Good

Chocolate Distribution: Good

Lamination: Good

Shape: Good

Look: Good

Taste: Good

A decent pain au chocolat from Heidi in Richmond Station, but the price is hard to get over. It was just less than some of the other baked items which looked to have more expensive fillings, so either the chocolate in this is very expensive or the markup is large.

What we can know by Ian McEwan

Richard Palmer — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:07:43 GMT

It's like A.S. Byatt's Possession crossed with Waterworld. But not in a great way, nothing ever seemed to really get going. The references to (real) people around now was also a bit jarring. Interesting on what gets preserved or not in some semi-apocalyptic future though.

Best Monoprix Stores in Paris

Richard Palmer — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:19:17 GMT

Sure, Paris has museums, art, monuments, historic buildings, but in between visting all of those, where do you hang out ? At a Monoprix dept stores of course (to be clear - not at a Monop' express store, although those are fine for a quick purchase in-between all the touristing). Any time you visit one of Monoprix's stores there will be some newly designed homewares, clothes, stationary, gifts and as well as a huge supermarket. It's M&S, but French. It's Tiger, but French. It's Paperchase (sadly departed), but French. You get the idea.

Digital Cultural Heritage Link Roundup Autumn 2025

Richard Palmer — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 14:04:13 GMT

Another collection of links on digital cultural heritage topics from the last few months, mainly for my own benefit but possibly of interest to others as well.

(I started on this in the Spring but never finished writing it. Posting now so I can move onto a links catchup post for Spring 2026 now and maybe actually post it on time...)

Rich Interlinked Text Specification (proposal)

Richard Palmer — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:54:55 GMT

I think this is an issue unresolved in all cultural heritage collection websites (but please let me know if otherwise) and yet it's such a small basic web feature - the ability to link to other object pages in a collection from the text within an object page. For example in the V&A collection a record's description might say:

Mistral AI Illustrations Detection Tests

Richard Palmer — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 21:05:07 GMT

Mistral OCR test on National Art Library collections from C11-20th

Following on from the announcement about Mistral's OCR model, I thought I would (unfairly!) test it against some examples of manuscripts and books from each century from the 11th to the 20th; to see how well it can recognise illustrations amongst text (or vice-versa). All examples taken from the National Art Library at the V&A.

Conversational Search for Cultural Heritage part 2

Richard Palmer — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:57:23 GMT

I'd called the previous blog post 'Conversational Search for Cultural Heritage' but the implementation in it was not really much of a conversation, as I was just sending individual queries/prompts one at a time to the LLM with RAG, with no real history between the queries. So I wanted to make good on my claim for "conversational search" by developing this more.