Our usual September regeneration of the site has added another 22,000 words of text, and hundreds of new images, links, entities and more. This rebuild takes the total number of words in Dictionary entries over the magic million mark, (although if you count captions, descriptions and other paratext, we’ve been over a million for quite some time). The entries are, as usual, a mixed bag.

We have a major long essay on the Archaeological evidence of Aboriginal life in Sydney, by Val Attenbrow of the Australian Museum, lavishly illustrated. It’s a fascinating account of what is known of the lives of people in the Sydney region before Europeans arrived. New people in the Dictionary range from the eminent to the forgotten: three of them are part of our joint project with the Sydney Mechanics’ School  of Arts.

• William Charles Windeyer – lawyer and public man, a stalwart of the Sydney Mechanics.
• Peter Nicol Russell – pioneering engineer and manufacturer who endowed the School of Engineering at the University of Sydney.
• George Kenyon Holden – lawyer and parliamentarian who reformed land title in NSW.

We also have entries profiling

• Walter Renny – oil and colour man, who was mayor of Sydney in 1869-70
• Elizabeth Kata – the writer of the book upon which the film 'A Patch of Blue' was based, whose family was divided by World War II and its aftermath
• John Lucas – son of convicts who became a parliamentarian and the protector of Jenolan Caves

Places and buildings are represented in this build by an entry on West Lindfield, and by pieces on Reynolds’ cottages in The Rocks, Glebe war memorial and the Glebe School of Arts. We also have some Event entries, which couldn’t be more different from each other

• Lenny Bruce’s visit to Sydney 1962
• International Eucharistic Congress 1928

As our final entry added this time, a piece of family history goes into the Dictionary in the form of Julie Watt’s article on the German vinedressers brought to Camden by Edward Macarthur in the 1830s. As always, you’ll see a lot of other things added too – new connections, more images and a whole lot of material newly indexed by Subject. It's always a pleasure announcing the new material on the website, because our authors have put so much work into it, and so have we. I hope you enjoy looking around and finding some new connections for yourself.

One of the ambitious things about the Dictionary is the way that it aims to become one of the sources about Sydney's history itself, not just publish about it. Of course, Sydney's history is still developing and happening, and the Dictionary took an early decision to begin to collect that information from the start. Did you know that the Dictionary has demographic information based on Census data for every suburb in the greater metropolitan area?

You can find it on suburb pages, right in the middle. All of them have a link to the demographics site, whether or not we have an article on the suburb. Here's Newtown -- still waiting for an article, but with plenty of other information, including a wealth of images. When you click on 'More', under the demographics heading, Newtown's demographics page opens in another tab.

These figures are adapted by our partners .id  from the Australian Census figures prepared by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They provide statistics on many aspects of Newtown's population over the last three censuses -- starting with 2006, and with the 2001 and 1996 profiles available on the tabs. It's fascinating to see the suburbs change, and compare their information with the Sydney-wide averages. You can look for birthplace, language, religion, employment, housing type, car ownership and much, much more. These figures will change as the population changes and if we have the resources, will be updated with the results of each census. Have a poke around in the demographics for your suburb and see what you can find!     Other posts in this series: Finding your way through the Dictionary part 1 -- Entities Finding your way through the Dictionary part 2 -- Images Finding your way through the Dictionary part 3 -- Maps Finding your way through the Dictionary part 4 -- Contributors Finding your way through the Dictionary part 5 -- Demographics Finding your way through the Dictionary part 6 -- Roles Finding your way through the Dictionary part 7 -- Subjects Finding your way through the Dictionary part 8 -- Bonus extras  

The people who have written the text, contributed the multimedia and supported the projects of the Dictionary are among our favourite people. You can find out more about them in the Contributors Browse, at the bottom of the right hand column on the front page.

Roll over the names to see a quick description of the contributor, or click through to see a full list of their contributions to the Dictionary. You'll begin to get an idea of the huge collaborative project that the Dictionary represents, bringing together all the expertise of all these hundreds of authors. Some have contributed only one article so far -- others have written upwards of a dozen. All our authors are volunteers, and have given their work to be published on the Dictionary. It's quite a contribution.  

Authors appear first in the list but they aren't the only kinds of contributors. Further down, you'll find the list of Institutions and Collections which have helped the Dictionary, and it's an impressive list.

Click through to see all the items contributed by any specific institution. This record, for the City of Sydney Council, shows the extensive range of images, oral history and film that they have contributed (but note that the City of Sydney Archives  have their own record!)

Finally at the bottom of the Browse Contributors page, you'll find the Supporters. At present, it's a small section, but we hope it will get larger as joint projects fill out the Dictionary. One of our successful joint projects has been the Writer-in-residence project we conducted with the support of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts between 2009 and 2012. Click on their Supporters link, and you'll get a listing of all the articles generated by that project, with links.  We are currently working on a joint project with the Irish Consulate-General, which will generate a similar list of  supported articles on Sydney's Irish history. If you'd like to contribute to or support the Dictionary, please get in touch. Other posts in this series: Finding your way through the Dictionary part 1 -- Entities Finding your way through the Dictionary part 2 -- Images Finding your way through the Dictionary part 3 -- Maps Finding your way through the Dictionary part 4 -- Contributors Finding your way through the Dictionary part 5 -- Demographics Finding your way through the Dictionary part 6 -- Roles Finding your way through the Dictionary part 7 -- Subjects Finding your way through the Dictionary part 8 -- Bonus extras

Let's talk about maps. The Dictionary has many kinds. You will have noticed the maps that appear on entity pages that have geographic information.

Have you ever wondered about the landscape, cities and places you fly over as you travel by air around Australia and the world? Wouldn't it be great to be able to see images and read about the places far below you as you go? Hidden Journeys, a wonderful new website from the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in London,  aims to 'explore the world from the air', with interactive flight path guides to a growing number of major routes around the world. Naturally, some of these arrive in Sydney, and we hope soon they will link readers to the Dictionary of Sydney to find out more about Sydney's history.

The Sydney section has a wealth of images of Sydney from the air, and you can explore at 13,000 metres, 5,000 metres and at street level. Looking further afield, you can explore the places underlying the routes from Sydney to Singapore, and Sydney to Hawaii, and see really wonderful pictures of the landscapes that lie below. The Society is currently investigating how best to develop the project further for the enjoyment of air travellers across the world, including looking at how they could apply this geo-entertainment content to an in-flight entertainment system. It seems like a brilliant idea.

Readers of the Dictionary will be aware that we also have a wealth of aerial imagery,  much of it very kindly provided by the people at Airview Online who were among the first content partners of the Dictionary of Sydney.

So you've read entries, and you've followed some links between entities. What else does the Dictionary have to offer? How about images?

Images are connected into entries where they illustrate the stories our authors tell about Sydney's history. In situ, they appear to the left of the text at thumbnail size, and larger when you roll over them.

Sydney's historians had an excellent couple of days last week, revelling in the riches of the past at the State Library. The conference, titled From the Ground Up, which has been advertised on our front page for quite a few weeks, was a big success, showcasing some of the new work being done on Sydney's history, and including some self-examination too, as the Sydney History Group revisited their formation, research and publications from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. A Festschrift session honouring the work of Dr Shirley Fitzgerald was both inspiring and heartwarming, and made many of us realise how important it is to acknowledge the contributions made by senior colleagues to the field.

There was considerable interest in a revival of some kind of organised Sydney history group, and in a repeat of the conference, maybe in 2013, maybe 2014. The Sydney Journal will be publishing papers from the conference as soon as practically possible, to spread the scholarship more widely, and we are very hopeful that versions of much of the research on show will eventually end up in the Dictionary. Papers ranged across Sydney's space and time, including economic history, geography, cultural history and even artworks based on Sydney's past. Oral history, documentary history and material cultures were all examined. Much chatting was done over the State Library's excellent catering, and some of the tourists who take endless photographs of the front steps of the State Library's Mitchell wing were unaware they were also photographing some of Sydney's most eminent historians, standing in the sunshine. Our warmest thanks go to Dr Matt Bailey of Macquarie University, who did most of the hard organising (and will be guest editing the Sydney Journal special issue with Paul Ashton and Emma Grahame), and to everyone else who helped make the conference a success. Next year in Parramatta? We shall have to see.

Lighthouses are being celebrated around the world this weekend during International Lighthouse Weekend, a great excuse to check out some of the Dictionary's articles, images and entries on the history of the lighthouses of Sydney here . After that, head over to the Australian National Maritime Museum's blog to read about some heroic lighthouse keepers and find out about their Lighthouse Larks Family Fun Day on Saturday. There will also be events at Barrenjoey Lighthouse over the weekend.

 

Local historians are endlessly inventive, and the folks working on the history of Homebush have devised a sort of open-mike history-slam, which is an idea sure to take off.

On Saturday 18 August, from 12 noon, at Five Dock Library, local knowledge and deep research will be on show as a range of local historians give short talks based on their work on the Homebush area. There's time for discussion too, and there will no doubt be lots of tips on sources, archives and other secret historians' business. It's free, and there's no need to book -- just turn up and be impressed with the depth and variety of Sydney's local knowledge. Some of it may well be appearing on the Dictionary before too long! Five Dock Library is at Great North Road and Garfield Street, Five Dock, above the Supabarn store. Another such event is planned, focussing on Homebush Bay, later in the year.

This Saturday, 11 August 2012, is National Bookshop Day, and we're all being encouraged to visit our favourite bookshops and celebrate their role in the community. The Dictionary of Sydney team are a book-loving bunch - yes, even digital afficionados like us still adore print - and we'll be out there shopping up a storm. By the 1860s, there were 30 bookshops in Sydney, and their growing presence was important to the development of Sydney's culture and history. You'll often find a Sydney bookseller's label on the items of our great institutions.

If you, or somebody you know, is writing a history of Sydney's booksellers, please get in touch, we'd love to know more. Happy shopping!