Episode 5 - Bonita Mersiades and Fairplay Publishing; how to use Trove

Aussie soccer administrator and now media mogul Bonita Mersiades had a
 chat with us about her Australian soccer publishing effort Fairplay Publishing.

Download and listen to episode 5 here.

We begin with our weekly clean up, where Paul corrects a heinous error he made the previous week.

We also pay tribute to the Queensland historians who are doing some good work, including some work on Goodna and Woogaroo, and the hunt for various Fletchers.

Paul promises to try and get a website up in the new year.

The 100 Years Ago Today, where there's not much going on in the off-season, but we start with Newcastle with a post-season affair, which was a sombre affair in the wake of another war death, though the war is nominally over. We look at the language of the relevant article, its ordinariness, and the role of women at the time.

Then we cast aspersions on our audience, based upon their states.

After the break, we chat with Bonita Mersiades, the founder of Fairplay Publishing, an Australian publishing company specialising in soccer stories. We talk about

• the impetus for Bonita to found the company.
• the difficulties in being an independent publisher in Australia.
• some of the books that Fairplay is looking to publish.
• learning curves, and the collapse of Australia's main independent book distributor.
• why won't mainstream publishers put out more Australian soccer stories?

In the final segment, we take a look at Trove, the National Library of Australia's online archive. We look at:

• what Trove covers in terms of regions, content, and eras
• Trove's limitations
• what to look out for when doing online research on a service like Trove - for example, awareness of the political and editorial lines within newspapers
• the perils of 'digital narrowness', and being of the social context your research is located in
• how to tag articles
• poor scanning of the text - and the ways you can work around this obstacle
• for soccer, the game having different names across different eras
• the importance of learning search techniques
• the problem of discerning who these writers are
• the benefits of registering an account on Trove