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British Library Labs Presentation at the Accelerating Human Imagination Workshop
- 1. 1@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V British Library Labs Using the British Library’s Cultural Heritage Data Mahendra Mahey 1445 – 1500, 24-25 November 2016, Second Session Part II: Imagination and Speculative Cultures Accelerating Human Imagination, A workshop with the Arthur C Clark Center for Human Imagination, UC San Diego and the University of Liverpool in London, 33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG, UK. https://goo.gl/2qqj6V
- 2. 2@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Arthur C. Clarkes Mysterious World https://goo.gl/bAo3XR
- 3. 3@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Perspective on Accelerating Human Imagination • Getting Researchers, Artists, Entrepreneurs, Educators and General Public using the British Library’s Cultural Heritage Digital Collections and Data in creative, innovative and imaginative ways! • Why and how are we doing that? • What are the challenges and how we overcoming them? • What are people actually doing as a result?
- 4. 4@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- 5. 5@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V #bldigital 1-2 %* digitised * estimate Digitisation Partnerships Commercial & Other Organisations Amount increasing rapidly Bias in digitisation http://goo.gl/bR9UJL Sample Generator
- 6. 6@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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 in research, artistic, commercial and learning and teaching categories Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
- 7. 7@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Cultural Heritage Datasets Datasets about our collections Bibliographic datasets relating to our published and archival holdings Datasets for content mining Content suitable for use in text and data mining research Datasets for image analysis Image collections suitable for large-scale image- analysis-based research Datasets from UK Web Archive Data and API services available for accessing UK Web Archive Digital mapping Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital aerial photography and scanned historic map materials https://data.bl.uk Launched November 7, 2016 Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS
- 8. 8@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V The Magic of Openness! • By opening collections up we are creating the possibility to have them used in ways only restricted by human imagination. • Need to work hard to tell people about our Digital Collections and Data especially if not easy to find, creating serendipity and opportunities for use! • Give plenty of examples to inspire use! • Support and celebrate the use!
- 9. 9@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Labs Engagement 2016 • 18 institutions visited • 5000 miles travelled • 50 presentations & 25 workshops • 900 researchers / artists/ entrepreneurs / educators • 400 expressions of interest • 40 researchers, artists, entrepreneurs & educators supported • 60TB of data via post • 9TB of data via data.bl.uk (Nov 16) • Over half a billion views on BL Flickr Commons since launch in Dec 2013It’s hard work!
- 10. 10@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Wider…not just Researches Researchers https://goo.gl/WutNyi Artists http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 Librarians Curators https://goo.gl/9NWZUW Software Developers https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf Archivists https://goo.gl/x7b4tg Educators https://goo.gl/qh01Mi
- 11. 11@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Why and how are doing this? • Working closely with and listening to those who want use our digital collections and data for their work and helping to build services, tools and processes to support them • We can learn how we are and should be supporting them. – Is the access to digital collections we provide sufficient? – Do we have the right tools? – Do we provide the right support? – Where are the gaps between what they want and what we can give? – How do we build the bridges to overcome them? – Many more reasons…
- 12. 12@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Some Lessons Learned and Challenges so far… • Everything starts from a conversation (external and internal)! • Need to have several conversations with several stakeholders and tap into their tacit knowledge that isn’t always written down (esp internal). • It’s hard work at the beginning! • Expectations change when researchers actually see the data, systems and experience the ‘culture’ of the organisation. • We tend to work with researchers who can be ‘flexible’ with their research questions and are willing to embrace challenges. • Often misunderstandings because of jargon & different meaning of words. • Embrace dirty data, it may never be perfect!
- 13. 13@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Some Lessons Learned and Challenges so far…(2) • Many researchers have the domain knowledge but lack the technical skills to use Digital Research methods. Should they be teamed up with those that have problems that need solving (Computing) or get trained? • Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to use data, help them ‘navigate’ through the Library to get the data they want (sometimes). • Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats). • Start small and simple, but think big! • Create and embrace serendipity, stimulate the imagination, work fast, give it energy. • Learn the lessons, tell the positive stories and move on! • Fail faster (don’t be afraid), small experiments, reject perfectionism.
- 14. 14@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V What did people actually do?
- 15. 15@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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 Mrs Folly
- 16. 16@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com Victorian Meme Machine (2014) https://goo.gl/HMqDt3 Bob Nicholson http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/ Bob Nicholson interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme: http://goo.gl/fmV9ep And telling jokes to the public: http://goo.gl/xIDRhz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0 Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes Victorian Comedy Night, 7 Nov 2016
- 17. 17@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Katrina Navickas (2015) Political Meetings Mapper http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk https://goo.gl/Qq78Oa Labs Symposium 2015 https://goo.gl/BSA3be Interview 2015 The Chartist Newspaper http://goo.gl/vOLSnH Chartist Monster Meeting Chartists Re-enactment London
- 18. 18@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Black Abolitionist Performances & their Presence in Britain (2016) – Hannah-Rose Murray Frederick Douglass Ellen Craft Josiah Henson Ida B Wells A Performance by Joe Williams & Martelle Edinborough http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/
- 19. 19@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Data-mining verse in 18th Century newspapers BL Labs Project 16-17, Jennifer Batt https://goo.gl/5Akthd
- 20. 20@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V What can 65,000 books tell us? Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin Just one open digital collection
- 21. 21@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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* >600,000,000 views >15,500,000 tags https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs and Digital Research Team *Matt Prior - http://goo.gl/j29Tnx Since Dec 2013
- 22. 22@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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
- 23. 23@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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 54,000 Maps
- 24. 24@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V 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
- 25. 25@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V SherlockNet: Competition Winner 2016 Karen Wang, Luda Zhao and Brian Do Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Tag and Caption the British Library Flickr Commons 1 million Image Collection Classify into one of 12 categories >15 million tags added (total now 15.5 million overall) >100,000 experimental captions bit.ly/sherlocknet Pooled surrounding Optical Character Recognised text on page from similar images Used Microsoft COCO (photographs) & British Museum Prints and Drawings collections as training sets. Tags Captions
- 26. 26@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Artistic / Creative Works http://goo.gl/dM8ieA Mario Klingeman (2015) http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com David Normal 2014 and 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0 Rob Walker 2014 http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ Kris Hoffman (2016) https://goo.gl/QilqqT Jiayi Chong 2016 Ling Low 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0 https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/ Paul Rand Pierce 2016 A Hat on the Ground Spells trouble Tragic Looking Women 44 Men who Look 44 (Notice the direction faces)
- 27. 27@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Mario Klingemann 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnxnmqnR7Y Google Arts and Culture Lab – Experiments with Machine Learning https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/
- 28. 28@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V More BL Labs ideas for inspiration! http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs http://labs.bl.uk/Other+Uses+of+Collections
- 29. 29@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Contact us Mahendra Mahey Manager of BL Labs mahendra.mahey@bl.uk labs@bl.uk
- 30. 30@imagineUCSD @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol#bldigital https://goo.gl/2qqj6V Imaginary Cities – BL Labs Project 16- 17 Michael Takeo Magruder https://goo.gl/4ARwTy
Editor's Notes
- #2 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.
- #5 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>
- #6 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>
- #10 Sharing our data Coming up with ideas Listening and learning
- #11 https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
- #18 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.
- #21 75 seconds 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?
- #22 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.
- #24 18 Seconds (56 Words) 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>
- #25 27 Seconds (82 Words) 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>