Slides from a lecture given at Information Management and Policy module for the MSc programme in Library and Information Science at City University, 31 October 2014 Notes at http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/101409618042/a-million-first-steps-information-management-in

1. A million first steps:
Information management in practice
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
#citylis, 31 October 2014

2. 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 (2014)
www.bl.uk 2

3. Pieter Francois: Winner of British Library Labs 2013 Bob Nicholson: Winner of British Library Labs 2014
www.bl.uk 3

4. www.bl.uk 4

5. www.bl.uk 5

6. www.bl.uk 6

7. www.bl.uk 7

8. www.bl.uk 8

9. “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
www.bl.uk 9

10. discipline
camp and
camps sentence
www.bl.uk 10

11. ‘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)
www.bl.uk 11

12. www.bl.uk 12

13. www.bl.uk 13

14. www.bl.uk 14

15. 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.
www.bl.uk 15

16. www.bl.uk 16

17. www.bl.uk 17

18. www.bl.uk 18

19. Michael Hancher: blog, exercise
www.bl.uk 19

20. © Nicola
Demonte
www.bl.uk 20

21. www.bl.uk 21

22. © David
Normal
www.bl.uk 22

23. www.bl.uk 23

24. www.bl.uk 24

25. www.bl.uk 25

26. www.bl.uk 26

27. www.bl.uk 27

28. www.bl.uk 28

29. www.bl.uk 29

30. www.bl.uk 30

31. www.bl.uk 31

32. www.bl.uk 32

33. blpublicdomain.azurewebsites.net
www.bl.uk 33

34. www.bl.uk 34

35. Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: slideshare.net/drjwbaker
www.bl.uk 35