1@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
1120 - 1200, Wednesday, 6th April 2016,
DIGIKULT, Gothenburg, Sweden.
http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Inspiration and Lessons from the British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey
2@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
https://youtu.be/ThC_4aWFx4c
From Gothenburg to Dalecarlia.
A Journey with Bergslagernas Railway.
With maps and illustations (1898)
Digitised by the British Library
http://goo.gl/hRpeyn
4@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
The British Library
Inside the British Library
Space for 1200 readers, around 400,000 visitors per year
Uses low oxygen and robots
Reading room and delivery to London
Document Supply and Storage at Boston Spa
Stockton-on-Tees
Author right to payment each time their books
are borrowed from public libraries.
St Pancras, London, UK
Many books are stored 4 stories below the building
Legal Deposit Library – Reference only
5@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Living Knowledge Vision (2015 – 2023)
Custodianship Research Business
Culture Learning International
To make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone,
for research, inspiration and enjoyment and be the most open, creative
and innovative institution of its kind by 2023.
Document:http://goo.gl/h41wW7 Speech:https://goo.gl/Py9uHK
Roly Keating (Chief Executive Officer of the British Library)
To make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone,
for research, inspiration and enjoyment and be the most open, creative
and innovative institution of its kind by 2023.
6@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
British Library Collections
> 180*million items
> 0.8* m serial titles
> 8* m stamps
> 14* m books
> 3* m sound recordings
> 4* m maps
> 1.6* m musical scores
> 0.3* m manuscripts
> 60* m patents
King’s Library *Estimates
7@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
8@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
10@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
digital
Data all around us!
/
Knowledge Quarter London
55 knowledge organisations within 1 mile radius of
Kings Cross, http://www.knowledgequarter.london
https://goo.gl/pGO7QY
digital
Data all around us!
11@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Finding Open Digital Collections
• Where is it, is it accessible?
• Copyright cleared?
Internal Access and Reuse and Licensing Group
(Risk assessment group – Strategic, Commercial,
Copyright, Curatorial, Technical)
• Curated?
Learn the story behind a collection!
Is there a human who knows the ‘story’ about the
collection, who wants it used, are there any surprises
lurking?
• Metadata available?
What state is it and does it need cleaning?
13@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship
http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections
Over 100 collections described
62 Open through Access and Reuse
Soon…http://data.bl.uk
Over 120 guides available to date
Finding Digital Collections
14@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Playbills, Books, Newspapers
(includes OCR)
Digital collections and Datasets
British National
Bibliography
http://bnb.data.bl.uk
http://sounds.bl.uk
http://dml.city.ac.uk/
Music (Recordings & Sheet) & Sounds
http://goo.gl/frSMJtBroadcast News (TV and Radio)
http://goo.gl/cwThHw
http://goo.gl/pBkisZhttp://goo.gl/E8aRyQ
Usage dataImages, Manuscripts & Maps
http://www.qdl.qa/
Qatar Digital Library
http://idp.bl.uk/
International
Dunhuang
Project
Maps
http://www.bl.uk/maps/
Hebrew Manuscripts
http://goo.gl/4sbCp9
Flickr &
Wikimedia Commons
https://goo.gl/LZRmaZ
15@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
The Digital Scholar
Digital
NetworkedOpen
From Digital Scholar : How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, page 4
Specialist who employs digital, networked and
open approaches to demonstrate their specialism.
17@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Digital research methods
Visualisations
Using Application Programming Interfaces
for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images Annotation
Location based searching & Geo-tagging Crowdsourcing
Human Computation
19@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Your Audience and You
Audience
research &
Digital
interests
Digital
collections
you have
This is where Labs works
It starts with a conversation!
Only a small amount of content is digitised!
Might not be the treasure expected at the end of a digital journey!
21@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Competition
Awards
Projects
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital
content
Show us what you have already done with our
digital content
Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
22@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
•Submit ideas by 11 April 2016.
•Two finalists announced late May 2016.
•Residency June – October 2016.
•Up to £3600 support, technical, curatorial etc.
•Showcase @ Symposium Monday 7Nov 16.
•Winner £3000 & Runner up £1000!
•Pitch an idea and win a goody bag!
Competition
23@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
•Projects already using BL digital content in
interesting and innovative ways.
•Submit projects (previous and new) by
5 September 2016.
•Artistic, Commercial, Research and Learning /
Teaching categories.
•Winners announced @Symposium 7 Nov 16.
•£500 Winner & £100 Runner Up.
Awards
24@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Projects
•Ideas change once you try to access, examine
and use the data!
•Talk to us about working on potential ideas /
projects.
27@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Finding things in messy data
Mrs Folly
• Clean up manually
• Get ground truth
• Write code to find things
reliably in it automatically
• Try code on messy content
• Tweak if necessary
29@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Chartists Un-Covered
History in London
The Red Lion Pub, Soho
Chartists Re-enactment
Chartist’s Meeting
Locations in London
Chartist’s Meetings
Heatmap in London
Chartist’s London
Walking Tour 21 Sep 15
32@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com
Public Engagement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes
Bob Nicholson interviewed on
BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme:
http://goo.gl/fmV9ep
And telling jokes to the public:
http://goo.gl/xIDRhz
33@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Rob Walker
Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
35@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Commercial (2015)
Etsy project by Dina Malkova
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DinaMalkova
https://goo.gl/OfJujM
Labs Symposium 2015
http://goo.gl/pbxZUv
36@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Commercial (2015) Runner Up
Sarah Wingate-Gray and Kate Lomax
http://goo.gl/s1dVSC
37@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/spatialhum.wordpress/
Labs Symposium 2015: https://goo.gl/ZCU56a
Research (2015)
Spatial Humanities: Lancaster University
Combining Text and
Geographic Information
http://goo.gl/yZ3xCJ
Investigating geographical
representation of disease in
digitised 19th
Century
newspapers
39@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Creative with Wildlife Sounds
http://goo.gl/s7siv0
Sound Edit Wildlife Films
Competition 2013
http://vimeo.com/60401313
'Dave's Wild Life' by
Samuel de Ceccatty, won first prize!
http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment
41@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Off the Map 2013 – 2015
Exhibition themed asset packs
Video: https://goo.gl/WGfJGo
2014
Gothic
Nix: University of South Wales,
Jackson Rolls-Gray, Sebastian Filby
and Faye Allen.
Blog: http://goo.gl/mZ2X3T
2015
Alice’s Adventures
Off Our Rockers: De Montfort University,
Dan Bullock, Freddy Canton, Luke Day, Denzil
Forde, Amber Jamieson and Braden May
Video: https://goo.gl/fPDZHE
Blog: http://goo.gl/MYih7C
Video: https://goo.gl/jNrpj5
2013
Pre Great Fire
of London
Pudding Lane Productions: De Montford
University, Ian Hargreaves, Joe Dempsey, Luc
Fontenoy, Dominic Bell, Daniel Peacock and
Chelsea Lindsay.
Blog: http://goo.gl/XPBmq1
Vote
1 2 3
43@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
What can 65,000
books tell us?
Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin
Just one digital collection
44@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Worked better for female faces
than men’s
Press
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com
Posts image every 30 minutes
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/
1,020,418 images
need tagging!
Creative uses of images
Face recognition
Mechanical Curator
http://goo.gl/qPPgxX
Flickr
Snipping out images
from 65,000 Digitised Books
>400,000,000 views
>500,000 tags
https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM
45@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Opportunities
– increasing traffic to Library services
You can purchase
a ‘High Res’ Copy
View in the
Library Item Viewer
Download .pdf
All illustrations
in book
Other illustrations in books
Published in same year
View the item in
the Library Catalogue Tags auto generated
User generated
Tag
Grouping for image
46@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Visibility - Technology Strategy Board
Competition Winner 2014
Understanding value / impact of making the BL’s
data open / in the public domain
Analytics dashboard for the Library showing what is
happening to our Flickr Images
Presentation:
https://goo.gl/phtgqv
Challenge details: http://goo.gl/Hb6l4A
47@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Tagging a million images
Iterative Crowdsourcing
http://goo.gl/j6fxac
Cardiff University’s
Lost Visions Project
http://www.metadatagames.org/
Metadata Games
James Heald
Mario Klingemann
Chico 45
Use computational methods
Human Tagger
Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers
http://goo.gl/8SkfM1
Machine Learning
Search Engine
& Google Image
search
48@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Curious Images Event 2014
https://goo.gl/ubL0AO
Labs Symposium 2015
https://goo.gl/gRZ5Ia
44 Men who Look 44
(Notice the direction faces)
Tragic Looking Women
Collage Art
Artistic (2015)
Mario Klingeman - Quasimondo
Blog post: http://goo.gl/dM8ieA
A Hat on the Ground
Spells trouble
49@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Special Jury’s Prize (2015)
James Heald – Wikimedia and Map work
https://goo.gl/WYZCB2
http://goo.gl/HNQq5e
https://goo.gl/VPgffL
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
https://goo.gl/djtm1b
Labs Symposium (2015)Geotagging maps
50@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Adam Crymble (2015)
Crowdsource Arcade
What if crowd sourcing
looked like this?
http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W
http://goo.gl/OH9pOZ
https://goo.gl/7z0j8p
30 mins talk
Labs Symposium (2015)
https://goo.gl/SSRsdd
5 min interview (2015)
http://goo.gl/0APpE8
Game Jam
51@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Art Treachery and Tag Attack
You choose!
https://goo.gl/vVMPuL
Art Treachery
Januz Druz
Tag Attack
Antonio Padial
https://goo.gl/engC6A
1 2
52@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
David Normal
https://youtu.be/Q3SBxO34Zlc
‘It was beyond my wildest dreams’
53@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Finding one image
on Flickr
Finding many more!Make collages
Make 4 paintings
Exhibit light boxes at
Burning Man 2014
In Nevada USA
Work with Labs &
British Library to install
Light boxes in London
In 2015
Where did we put it?
54@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Let’s have a party!
Exhibited from
June to Nov 2015
20th
June 2015
Music mix by DJ Yoda using British Library Sounds: https://goo.gl/z3k4JT
David Normal’s art work: http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com and http://www.davidnormal.com
Images from Burning Man and Flickr
brought into the Poet’s Circle
Physical
DigitalDigital
Physical
57@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Starting a Conversation
Language Problems
•Finding the intersection…
•Misunderstood words
–Access
–Collections
–Content
–Crowdsourcing
58@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Data Problems
[stuff goes in here]
•Metadata isn’t as clean as many
•Square brackets to indicate inferred
information
•Code to plot when a record had square
brackets by Ben O’Steen
61@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Simple Data structures (if only)
•Everything has a URL
•URL links to page which tells you about the
thing
•Link to other things
•URL readable by machine not just a human
•Not there yet!
62@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Get the data to them however
•Internet / APIs
•Post hard drives
•Don’t worry about cleaning it up
63@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Training /
Teaming up with Expert?
•Many researchers have the domain knowledge but
lack the technical skills to use Digital Research
methods
•Should our support be more focused on training?
•There are plenty of computational experts looking
for problems to solve
•Should they be teamed up with those that have
problems that need solving
67@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Lessons…
•Huge appetite to use digital content & data
(e.g. Flickr Commons stats)
•Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to
use data.
•Can help researchers navigate through the
Library to get the data they want.
68@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Open your doors!
•Let researchers in to use your digital collections.
•Start those conversations, start small and simple,
but think big!
•Embrace serendipity, work fast, give it energy.
•Learn the lessons, tell the positive stories and
move on!
•Don’t be afraid to experiment and fail!
69@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Perfection vs Imperfection
•If we focus too much on perfection,
we will never get anything done!
•Fear of failure seen as a negative
thing.
70@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Fail faster
Small experiments!
https://goo.gl/Vlv3Yu
Let yourself reboot!
71@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
1120 - 1200, Wednesday, 6th April 2016,
DIGIKULT, Gothenburg, Sweden.
http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Thanks to Maria Press for inviting me
Inspiration and Lessons from the British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey
72@BL_Labs #bldigital #digikult http://goo.gl/Fp9SQW
Questions?
Prompt Question
I didn’t understand…. Can you tell me more about…
Why did you… I am not sure about…
What if… Why didn’t you…
What’s the best thing about… What was the worst thing…
If you could have your time again,
…
How did you…
I am not sure I agree about… What was the biggest challenge…
What was the most successful
thing about…
Who did…
Editor's Notes
25 Seconds (68 Words)
My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
140 seconds
The British Library is the national library of the UK and one of the largest research libraries in the world . The Library moved to a new purpose built building in 1997 <click> the largest of it’s kind that was built in the UK in the 20th century. Many frequently used items are stored 5 stories below the main building at St Pancras in London and many might not know that part of the building is meant to look like a ship on a journey to discovery!<click>. <click to switch off>
The building can sit 1,200 researchers at any one time across 5 reading rooms.
<click>Medium and long term requested items are held at Boston Spa in Yorkshire in a low oxygen warehouse, using robot to retrieve items. In total, the library has 625 km of shelving, growing by 12 km every year.
Whilst we acquire items through purchase or gifts, much of the collection has been built up through legal deposit. That is, by law, a copy of every UK and Ireland print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers. Around 3 million items are added per year. In 2013, legal deposit was extended to cover non-print material which means by law we take in digitally published items as well, which means regular mass crawls of the entire UK web domain as well as ebooks, ejournals etc.
85 seconds
The picture you can see is inside the main building in London, it’s the King’s Library – King George the Third’s personal library! Sometimes known as the ‘stack’, I walk past this everyday and I sometimes forget that the collections the British Library have are truly staggering! We currently estimate them to exceed <click>150 million items, representing every age of written civilisation and every known language. Our archives now contain the earliest surviving printed book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, written in Chinese and dating from 868 AD….
So some big numbers…
Over …<click>14 million books
<click>60 million patents
<click>8 million stamps
<click>4 million maps
<click>3 million sound recordings
<click>1.6 million music scores
<click>over .3 million manuscripts
<click>0.8 million serials titles (which are of course made up of many many volumes/editions), this is where a lot of our content is, just in case you thought the numbers didn’t add up!
33 Seconds (100 Words)
In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else,
<Click>
to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example.
<Click>
33 Seconds (100 Words)
In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else,
<Click>
to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example.
<Click>
17 Seconds (53 Words)
<Click>The British Library is one of the largest Library’s in the world <Click> with an estimated 180 million physical items, with only a small proportion being digitised. <Click>We estimate this is around 1-2%, but no one really knows exactly how much. However, increasingly more items are being stored as ‘born’ digital, such as the UK Web Archive<Click>
6 Seconds (20 Words)
So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc
Finding openly licensed collections is sometimes like detective work and from lessons learned Labs, uses the following 4 methods for filtering digital content:
<click>Is the Copyright cleared for research and non commercial use?
<click>Is it Curated (Is there someone who knows the ‘story’ about the collection?)
<click>Is there Collection / Item Level Metadata available? And importantly what state is it in, does it need cleansing?
<click>Finally, where is it?
<click>These have been effective filters in doing the work of Labs in an agile way.
<click>Labs has therefore identified several collections at the website above, some are shown in the slide:
<click>Due to our licensing conditions, we are in the process of text mining the abstracts for a large number of journal titles in electronic form. The visualisation indicates the subject spread of our collections.
<click>We have been harvesting the UK Web since 1993 and this is available as a resource under specific conditions for research.
<click>We are also investigating the use of our item request data (around 17 million records) and anonymised reader data, data protection allowing.
<click>The British National Bibliography has over 3 million catalogue records available as linked open data, licensed under CCO from the British and Irish National Library catalogues.
More information is available on the Labs website, and we hope to one day develop data.bl.uk a place where all our open content and data lives with a unique identifier for each data set.
<click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections!
<click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions,
<click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online
<click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media.
<click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally,
<click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available.
The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers.
The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
35 Seconds overall
We have created collection guides detailing some of these digital collections <Click>on our Digital Scholarship site.
<Click>and some on the Labs site.
<Click> Soon data.bl.uk will be the place where people can directly access some of the digital collections we have available.
<Click> Today we have brought data with us, see the guide on how to access it and print outs on the tables.
A pause for thought and reflection however, digital is just a current technology to deliver information. Perhaps in Years to come <Click>we won’t be using the word ‘Digital’ <Click>in front of the word ‘Scholarship’. It will just be ‘Scholarship’, digital tecnology will be part of the EVERYDAY process of research. Any way back to the present.
Have balance of Multimedia
Broadcast news and radio, sounds asave our sounds
Books and newspapers
Images
BNB
Qatar Digital library
Hebrew manuscripts
50 seconds
In his book, The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller suggests that a short hand term should be used to loosely define a Digital Scholar. First of all,
<click>the person does not necessarily need to be a recognised academic or someone who posts online<click>. It is someone who employs
<click>digital,
<click> networked and open<click> approaches to demonstrate their specialisms. Offering digital content on large scale means scholars can ask questions they had not dreamed of doing before.
Adam Crymble was doing his PhD research on Distant Reading at King’s College. He won a competition to explain his thesis in 2 minutes in the PhD Comics competition.
Examples like this will hopefully INSPIRE YOU to use the British Library’s digital content in some way in your work by showing some of what others have done.
Get clearer annotation image and transcription (perhaps TILT)
6 Seconds (20 Words)
So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
41 Seconds (123 Words)
One way is by running an annual competition which is open to the world! All you have to do is
<Click>submit and idea by 11 April 2016.
<Click>The two finalists will be announced in late May <Click>and they work with in residence between June and October,
<Click>where they will get up to £3600 financial support, together with technical, curatorial and other types of support.
<Click>The winners will showcase their work and receive their prizes at our symposium on Monday 7th of November.
<Click>£3000 will be awarded to the winner and £1000 for the runner up.
15 Seconds (45 Words)
The next way we try to engage those interested in using our digital content is through our Awards,
<Click>these recognise work already carried out using our digital content.<Click>The deadline for this year is the 5 September. You can submit previous and new projects<Click>in one of four categories: Artistic, Commercial, Research and Teaching & Learning <Click> Winners will be announced on Monday 7th of November
<Click> where each category winner, winning £500 with £100 for the runners up.
8 Seconds (24 Words)
The final way to engage with our digital collections and data is to simply examine and use our data. We have learnt ideas usually change when we have done this. Talk to us about projects or ideas you would like to work on whether it’s for the competition, awards or something else.<Click>
6 Seconds (20 Words)
So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
7 Seconds (21 Words)
So focusing back on the competition, let’s look at a few examples.
21 Seconds (65 Words)
Katrina Navickas was particularly interested in the <Click>Chartist Movement who were a group who were campaigning for the vote for working people. <Click>They were the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th century British history, just as this is early picture shows a huge monster meeting at Kennington Common<Click>She wanted to use a combination of manual and computational methods to explore our Digitised Newspapers to find out when and where they met and plot them on map. <Click>and hopefully unearthing new history.
33 Seconds (101 Words)
Katrina’s previous research has primarily focussed on the North of England.<Click>She was surprised to learn that many Chartists’ meetings were held in London. See the map of Chartists’ meetings in London and heat map where they met most. <Click>The map at the bottom left shows the route of a walking tour she organised in London visiting sites where the Chartists met.<Click> The photo at the bottom right is a Historical re-enactment of a Chartist meeting that took place in the Red Lion pub. Let’s take a peek at have happened …
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Video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lx0CL_dsQs
2.39 – 3.07
From 2.13 – 3.07 – 54 seconds
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From 1.18 – 3.09 – Longer clip – 1 minute 51 seconds
Play from 1:06
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Now on to our Awards, these recognise work *already* carried out using our digital content. Last year’s categories were Artistic, Entrepreneurial and Research. <Click>
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Dina Malkova was the winner of Commercial category. <Click>Inspired by a small digitised fragment of an <Click>illustration of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground original handwritten manuscript<Click>Dina made handmade and bespoke bow ties and cufflinks. <Click>You can still buy these items in the Alice pop up shop in London and of course online on Etsy.
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<Click>The research winner were a Spatial Humanities group of researchers from Lancaster University <Click>who focussed on analysing digitised newspapers to establish when and where diseases were mentioned in the Victorian Era and <Click>plotting them on a map to look for patterns.<Click><Click>
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So focusing back on the competition, let’s look at a few examples.
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Curator Cheryl Tipp Curator of Environment and Nature Sounds <click>in Digital Scholarship worked with the creative industries department at the British Library and a company called Ideas Tap to launch the <click>‘Sound Edit Wildlife Films Competition’ which challenged animators, filmmakers and photographers to create a short film inspired by the Library's collection of 10 wildlife sound recordings.
<click>The winning entry was 'Dave's Wild Life' from Samuel de Ceccatty, a fantastic short which follows Dave, an amateur naturalist whose sole aim is to have his own TV show. The clip I will show uses the ‘Haddock drumming calls’ to give a voice to the cranes or, as Dave liked to call them, the Diplodocus longus cranum.
Cue up video and play from 47 s- 1.58
http://vimeo.com/60401313
Cue up video and play from 45 s- 1.58
Off The Map challenges budding game makers to use collections from The British Library as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media.
It’s associated with the British Library’s upcoming Shakespeare exhibition (15 April 2016 to 6 September 2016).
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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.
The Library digitised 65,000 17th to 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. We also captured 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.
So the question became then, what next? What can 65,000 books tell us?
Posts small illustrations taken almost at random from the digitised book corpus to a Tumblr blog.
This experiment with undirected engagement was a by-product of work to uncover the hidden wealth of illustrations within the digitised pages.
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Here is the anatomy of a Flickr record, importantly we have created links to many of the Library’s services <click>some of this lovely traffic is going back to the Library and hopefully generating more interest in our services, from downloading a pdf of the book to purchasing a high res scan of the image.
<click>Tags are added from the original book record, including the approximate page number the image came from<click>users of Flickr can add their own tags, and I have mentioned they have already started doing it.
Change link to presentation!
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The artistic winner was Mario Klingemann otherwise known as ‘Quasimondo’ . He tries to use computers to generate art or do clever and interesting things such as find images. He worked a lot a collection of un-described images largely from the 19th Century. <Click> Here you can see a picture of a 44 men he found algorithmically who looked around 44<Click>notice how the eyes of the faces change from left to right. <Click>Bottom Left is an attempt to use code to find images of <Click> ‘Tragic looking women’ and <Click>Top Right above is an attempt to create computer art by snipping bits of images together computationally.
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Indexing BL the 1 million & Mapping the Maps – was led by James Heald and collaboration with others <Click>They produced an index of 1 million 'Mechanical Curator collection' images on <Click>Wikimedia Commons from a collection of largely un-described images. <Click>This gave rise to finding 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon <Click>These are now being geo-referenced. <Click>
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Adam Crymble <Click>wanted to harness the power of playing fun games on arcade machines to help with crowdsourcing the tagging of un-described images. He particularly wanted to engage a younger audience into crowdsourcing .<Click>On the right you can see a replica 1980’s arcade machine we built and <Click>and on the bottom left some tagging games that were developed through a ‘Games Jam’ for the machine. <Click>. Let’s take a closer look at two of the games…<Click>
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We are close to installing the machine at the National Video Arcade in Nottingham to see how successful the games will be. If you’re interested in having the machine in your institution, please contact us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCgHo2rwN4 (Switch on Subtitles)
1.47 – 3.06 1 min 19 seconds
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From 1.47 to 2.28 – Art Treachery – 41 seconds
From 2.28 to 3.06 – Art Attack – 38 seconds
Total for both clips – 1 min 19 seconds
Play from 4m 50 seconds to 5m 19 seconds
1m 18seconds
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Let’s look at the finished work!
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https://goo.gl/QilqqT
1.27- 1.43 – 16 seconds
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<Click> Why is the Library doing this? Well there are many reasons, but essentially it is about…
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<Click>Labs is learning important lessons on how we are supporting researchers who want to experiment with our digital content using digital methods. <Click>We are learning what we are doing right.<Click>Understanding what researchers want, <Click>learning if we provide the appropriate services, tools and resources to support them. Trying to understand where the gaps are <Click>and what we should be doing in the future. <Click>
<click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections!
<click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions,
<click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online
<click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media.
<click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally,
<click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available.
The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers.
The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
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We have learned many lessons. I will touch on a few briefly here. <Click>There is a tremendous appetite from researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and others who want to use our digital content/data (see our Flickr Commons Image statistics later). <Click> We are identifying and bridging gaps for researchers to access BL data.<Click> and helping researchers navigate through the Library’s systems and processes to get to it. <Click>At our first roadshow, student Alison Pope suggested that BL Labs acts like a human API (or access point) connecting people to the BL’s digital data.
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The Labs is a place where we do many small experiments quickly. Most importantly it’s where it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them. Fail faster and fail better! Perhaps Jimmy Wales’ advice (founder of Wikipedia) can sum what we have learned time and time again.<Click>
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Video Clip
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34808495
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My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.