Slides for short talk given at History libraries & research open day, Senate House Library, 20 January 2015 http://historycollections.blogs.sas.ac.uk/

1. Digital Research at
the British Library
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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discipline
camp and
camps sentence
Ngram Viewer ©
Google

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“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf

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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative
Commons Licensed

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Tumblr
interface ©
Tumblr

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‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)

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Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.

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© UKWA/Conservative
Party

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Flickr interface © Flickr

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A Web of Rights, British Library, 19 February 2015 http://bldigicon7.eventbrite.co.uk/

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/