The document discusses the evolving role of libraries in the context of digital humanities, emphasizing their shift from resource discovery to becoming hubs of innovation and research. It highlights the necessity of computational tools for literary scholars to analyze large data sets beyond traditional physical archives. Additionally, it introduces the concept of 'library-based skunkworks' as a response to the interplay between digital technologies and humanities research.

1. Future Libraries
…considering ‘publishing’
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. www.bl.uk 2
Some admin…
You are free to:
– Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix
– Photograph, film, or broadcast
– Blog, live-blog, or post video of;
this presentation provided that:
– You attribute the work to its author
and respect the rights and licences
associated with its components
– You distribute the resulting work only
under the same or similar license to
this one
Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
unless stated otherwise.

3. www.bl.uk 3
More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities isn’t an
isolated academic
phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary
changes are part of a larger
cultural shift, inside and
outside the academy, a
rapid cycle of emergence
and convergence in
technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of
the Digital Humanities (2013)

4. www.bl.uk 4

5. www.bl.uk 5
“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

6. www.bl.uk 6
discipline
camp and
camps sentence

7. www.bl.uk 7

8. www.bl.uk 8

9. www.bl.uk 9

10. www.bl.uk 10

11. www.bl.uk 11

12. www.bl.uk 12
“Library based skunkworks - or semi-
independent, research-oriented software
prototyping and makerspace labs—are
an uncommon, yet uncommonly potent,
response to opportunities that open up
when we pay increased organizational
attention to digital tools, methods, and
cultures across the humanities […]
We might therefore consider a digital
humanities skunkworks operation not
only as a site for research innovation,
but as an organizational experiment in
breaking away from shop-worn
service relationships.”
Bethany Nowviskie, ‘Skunks in the Library: A
Path to Production for Scholarly R&D’,
Journal of Library Administration 53:1
(2013), 53-59.

13. www.bl.uk 13

14. www.bl.uk 14

15. www.bl.uk 15

16. www.bl.uk 16

17. www.bl.uk 17

18. www.bl.uk 18

19. www.bl.uk 19
Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/