Digital Research Support at British Library
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Presentation for the British Library Doctoral Open Day for 20th & 21st Century Collections on 25 February 2019
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Digital Research Support at British Library
- 1. Digital Research Support @ British Library Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator 20th & 21st Century Collections Doctoral Open Day 2019
- 2. www.bl.uk What is Digital Scholarship? 2 "Allows research areas to be investigated in new ways, using new tools, leading to new discoveries and analysis to generate new understanding." Dr Adam Farquhar Head of Digital Scholarship British Library • There’s been a technological and computational shift in scholarship • Digital tools have transformed the research process, specifically two fundamental aspects of research: search and analysis • Digital tools help overcome the traditionally most difficult aspects of being a researcher: finding information, and interpreting it
- 3. www.bl.uk Opportunities for researchers You can: • Explore a bigger body of material computationally - 'reading' thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of volumes of text, images or media files • See trends, patterns and relationships not apparent from close reading individual items, or gain a broad overview of a topic • Test an idea or hypothesis on a large dataset; generate classification data about people, places, concepts 3 Adapted from Mia Ridge’s blog post, Some challenges and opportunities for digital scholarship in 2018 (25 April 2018) Scale Perspective Speed
- 4. www.bl.uk Some digital tools and methods 4 OCR/HTR Data Visualisation Text and Data Mining Digital Mapping Crowdsourcing Emerging formats
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 Meet the Digital Research Team The Digital Research Team is a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections. Neil Fitzgerald Head of Digital Research Stella Wisdom Contemporary British Nora McGregor Europe & Americas Dr Mia Ridge Western Heritage Dr Adi Keinan- Schoonbaert Asia & Africa Dr Rossitza Atanassova Digitisation Tom Derrick 2 Centuries of Indian Print
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 How we can help you We support new ways of exploring and accessing our collections through: • Working behind the scenes to support and improve processes for getting content in digital form and online • Enhancing digital skills for BL staff • Collaborative projects • Offer digital research support and guidance • Events, competitions, and awards (BL Labs) • Outreach through our blogs and social media https://twitter.com/AshaMarie18/status/1061925248940101632
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 Big Data + Old History https://youtu.be/tp4y-_VoXdA
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Political Meetings Mapper “I was able to do in minutes with a python code what I’d spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!” Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 2015 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 Political Meetings Mapper https://youtu.be/0lx0CL_dsQs
- 10. www.bl.uk 10 State of Dementia Research in the UK Research Question: The Alzheimer’s Society appointed RAND Europe to produce a report on the state of dementia research in the UK. RAND wished to investigate the dementia workforce pipeline - how many researchers are working on dementia and how this is changing over time. http://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/mapping-uk-dementia-research-landscape.html Source Collection: British Library’s electronic thesis service EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk Digital/Computational Techniques: EThOS Metadata Manager and RAND analysed a list of theses awarded from 1970 onwards. Outcome: Discovered dementia-related PhD research has been steadily increasing over the last 30 years in the UK, however, cancer-related PhDs have skyrocketed over the same time frame. Now five times more PhD researchers choose to work on cancer than dementia: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/science/2015/09/a-novel-use-of-phd-data.html A Review of the Dementia Research Landscape and Workforce Capacity in the United Kingdom, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1186.html As an extensive source of information on PhDs undertaken in the UK, EThOS data can also be used to look at trends in PhD research over time.
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 EThOS & Multimedia PhD Theses Coral Manton worked on a British Library research placement investigating multimedia and non-text PhD research outputs and how EThOS might develop to meet the challenge of evolving digital theses. She interviewed doctoral students from various disciplines as case studies http://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2016/09/multimedia-phd-research-and-non-text-theses.html https://www.bl.uk/case-studies/sam-martin https://www.bl.uk/case-studies/rob-sherman
- 12. www.bl.uk 12 Emerging Formats Project This project builds our ability to collect publications designed for mobile devices that respond to reader interaction or are structured as databases. Focus on three format types: eBook mobile apps, web-based interactive narratives and structured data. https://www.bl.uk/projects/emerging-formats
- 14. www.bl.uk 14 The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee https://ambientlit.com/cartographersconfession
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 Breathe by Kate Pullinger https://ambientlit.com/breathe
- 16. www.bl.uk 16 It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman https://ambientlit.com/index.php/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then/
- 17. www.bl.uk 17 For 2018 International Games Week the British Library hosted The Narrative Games Convention: AdventureX 10-11 November 2018 http://adventurexpo.org/ https://youtu.be/PyJl5stFteI
- 19. www.bl.uk 19 Creating a Chronotopic Ground for the Mapping of Literary Texts: Innovative Data Visualisation and Spatial Interpretation in the Digital Medium http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH%2FP00895X%2F1 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2017/mapping-project-will-open-up-new- routes-to-uncharted-territory/ http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/professor-sally-bushell/literary-mapping-in- digit_b_17319788.html
- 20. www.bl.uk 20 The Litcraft component of the project is a semi-standalone series of developments aimed at encouraging elements of literary environmental criticism for younger audiences. Primary and secondary English lessons do not typically focus on the descriptions of textual setting; one of our aims is to introduce this analytic field, through designing a series of standalone gaming-based resources that engage with landscape and world design. https://chronotopiccartography.wordpress.com/litcraft/
- 21. www.bl.uk 21
- 22. www.bl.uk 22 Datasets data.bl.uk As part of its work to open its data to wider use, the British Library is making copies of some of its datasets available for research and creative purposes. We aim to describe collections in terms of their data format (images, full text, metadata, etc.), licences, temporal and geographic scope, originating purpose (e.g. specific digitisation projects or exhibitions) and collection, and related subjects or themes. This site is a 'beta', and is in development. If you have questions or feedback about this site or our open data work, please email digitalresearch@bl.uk. We'd also love to hear what you've done or made with the data.
- 23. Mechanical Curator What can68,000 books tell us? Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin
- 24. www.bl.uk Many creative projects have used Public Domain images from the Microsoft Partnership Digitisation Project 2006-8 •68,000 volumes (47,000+ titles) published in the 19th century mostly in English •Excluded authors active 1850-1901 and who died after 1936 •Output: 25 million pages
- 25. www.bl.uk 25 The illustrations were extracted algorithmically from the digitised books: 25 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> - <mets:mets xmlns:xsi="http://ww w.w3.org/2001/XML Schema-instance" xmlns:mets="http://w ww.loc.gov/METS/" xsi:schemaLocation= "http://www.loc.gov/ METS/ http://www.loc.gov/ standards/mets/ver sion18/mets.xsd info:lc/xmlns/premi s-v2 Image snipped out Algorithmically From ALTO XML Image taken from page 207 of 'London and its Environs. A picturesque survey of the metropolis and the suburbs ... Translated by Henry Frith. With ... illustrations' ALTO XML
- 27. www.bl.uk 27 The illustrations were uploaded to Flickr and albums were created through crowd-sourced tagging
- 29. www.bl.uk 29
- 30. www.bl.uk 30
- 31. www.bl.uk David Normal created light boxes around the Burning man, using the British Library’s Flickr Images The Crossroads of Curiosity Installation at Burning Man Festival
- 32. The Crossroads of Curiosity Installation at the British Library June to November 2015 The installation featured an “augmented reality” self-guided tour enabling viewers to explore the meaning and origins of the painting’s symbols using Blippar. https://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.org/
- 33. Odyssey Jam 2017 https://itch.io/jam/odysseyjam Writing challenge tied in with Read Watch Play, a partnership of libraries worldwide encouraging themed discussions of books, films, music and games, each month they have a theme and for March 2017 it was #waterread.
- 34. Odyssey Jam 2017 entries https://itch.io/jam/odysseyjam/entries We encouraged entrants to make use of the digitised images on Flickr that The British Library had released under a creative commons license. Some games used these images, e.g. No One and 108 suitors.
- 35. 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. A perfect opportunity to run a gothic novel themed challenge. Gothic Novel Jam with Read Watch Play; participants to make something creative inspired by the gothic novel genre and share it on the itch.io Gothic Novel Jam site. Entries invited to include stories, poetry, art, games, music, films, pictures, soundscapes, or any other type of digital media response. We wanted participants to use images from the British Library Flickr account as inspiration
- 36. Gothic Novel Jam 2018 We received 46 entries submitted by people from all around the world including UK, Australia, America and France. https://itch.io/jam/gothic-novel-jam/entries
- 37. We encouraged entrants to use the digitised images on Flickr that The British Library had released as Public Domain. As a glow brings out a haze by Eldridge Misnomer is a lovely example of how these illustrations are used as a key part of the storytelling.
- 38. www.bl.uk 38 Have a digital research enquiry? Get in touch! Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ Email: digitalresearch@bl.uk Twitter: : @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital
Editor's Notes
- Some of these processes help get data ready for analysis (e.g. turning images of items into transcribed and annotated texts), while others support the analysis of large collections at scale, improve discoverability or enable public engagement. OCR/HTR: creating machine-readable text for search/analysis Data viz: for analysis or publication Text and data mining: applying classifications to or analysing texts, images or media. Digital mapping: displaying/analysing spatial data Crowdsourcing: public participation and learning Engaging with emerging formats: 3D, VR, AR
- Set up in 2010, the DS team was formed as a way of dedicating focus on the changing research landscape. Now embedded in collection areas, or joining the library as part of major digitisation projects.
- The Universal Viewer: an interface for viewing images from the Library's digitised collections. It enables easier access and download of digitised collection items. Projects: collaborative PhDs, placements Labs: roadshows, symposium
- Research Question: Chartism was the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th Century British history. They campaigned for the vote for all men. The Chartists advertised their meeting in the Northern Star newspaper from 1838 to 1850. The question is, how many of the meetings took place and where? We started with 1841-1845. Source Collections: 19th Century Digitised Newspapers, specifically Northern Star newspaper Digitised and Georeferenced Map of Oxford Street Digital/Computational Techniques: The images of the relevant pages of the Northern Star were run through an Optical Character Recognition program (Abbyy Finereader 12) and the resulting text was checked manually. We developed a set of Python codes to extract and geo-code the place of meeting, using a gazetteer of places, and parse the date of the meeting. Outcome: 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK! http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps/
- Research Question: Chartism was the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th Century British history. They campaigned for the vote for all men. The Chartists advertised their meeting in the Northern Star newspaper from 1838 to 1850. The question is, how many of the meetings took place and where? We started with 1841-1845. Source Collections: 19th Century Digitised Newspapers, specifically Northern Star newspaper Digitised and Georeferenced Map of Oxford Street Digital/Computational Techniques: The images of the relevant pages of the Northern Star were run through an Optical Character Recognition program (Abbyy Finereader 12) and the resulting text was checked manually. We developed a set of Python codes to extract and geo-code the place of meeting, using a gazetteer of places, and parse the date of the meeting. Outcome: 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK! http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps/
- The work of Labs is really about a number of stories, stories about digital collections and about researchers wanting to ask fascinating research questions about them. Let’s now tell you a story about one collection and the intended and unintended consequences of working with it.
- 60 seconds The Library digitised 68,000 predominantly 19th century books from our collections a few years ago (around 2.7 % of the physical total in that period). You can view them from our catalogue or read them on your <click>IPad via the Historical Books app developed by BiblioLabs. There are 22 million individual page images, along with full text scans of these images, all of which contain untold quantity of useful data such as names of people, places, historical events, dates. with no restrictions on use by Microsoft So the question became then, what next? What can 68,000 books tell us?
- 60 seconds As the books were scanned for text, this had a fortunate ‘side effect’ the software not only tries to detect the text on the page but also where the images might be. There had already been some interest in the images from the community of researchers. It seemed easy to extract them. s part of the Labs competition, Matt Prior attended one of our hack events and when examining our book data and was very interested in the images from the books. Meanwhile the algorithm that Ben had written to snip the images from the OCR scans was still churning away, how many were there going to be? The Mechanical Curator could publish them every hour, but was there somewhere we could put them all for people to browse when they wanted. Importantly if we did put them somewhere, could we get people to help us add descriptions to the individual images making them infinitely more discoverable.]
- With an algorithm by Ben O’Steen we snipped out images from digitised books and put them on to Flickr on December 13 2013, there were over a million, but the problem we had was that we knew which books they came from (author/dates), but we didn’t’ have any information about the images. By releasing them onto flickr, we have got people to start tagging them and using them in very creative ways. Hosting them internally was not an option and there was not sufficient metadata to put them on Wikipedia. Flickr seemed the obvious option as it is a platform that can support high usage, did not require metadata, allowed tagging and it is free for public domain images.
- He speaks about his project, how he came across the images and what he did with them. How he learnt about the image = it was pure serendipity Taking images out of the context of books creates potential to reinvent them in a new context. http://youtu.be/3AOa98RsA2Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3AOa98RsA2Q#t=48 Make sure subtitles are on.
- This is a surprising use of the images we put onto Flickr. Once a year in the summer, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever. [This year it took place between August 25 to September 1, Nevada, USA, the show ends by burning an effigy of wooden man! <click>] American Artist David Normal used images from your Flickr Commons collection and worked on a set of collages called "Crossroads of Curiosity". The finished paintings based on these collages were presented in full colour as ' lightboxes at this year's Burning Man Festival, the theme for which was "Caravansary“. They were presented around the base of the effigy of the Burning Man in the heart of the festival.