Digital scholarship at the British Library by stella wisdom for Researching Born Digital Archives event
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The document summarizes digital research resources and projects available through the British Library. It describes how the Digital Research Team supports innovative uses of digital collections through activities like getting content online, offering guidance, and running events. Examples are given of projects that use digital methods like text mining, data visualization, and geocoding to study topics such as political meetings and the history of music. The document also promotes digital scholarship competitions and apps like Poetic Places that combine literature and maps.
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Digital scholarship at the British Library by stella wisdom for Researching Born Digital Archives event
- 1. Digital Scholarship @ British Library Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator Researching born-digital archives event 16th March 2017
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 Meet the Digital Research Team We support researchers in the innovative use of British Library's digital collections and data through: • Working behind the scenes to get content in digital form and online • Offering digital research support and guidance • Supporting collaborative projects • Running events, competitions, and awards
- 3. www.bl.uk 3
- 4. www.bl.uk 4 Defining Digital Research Using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms…. Geocoding Data Visualisation Data Mining Georeferencing Crowdsourcing Text mining Collaboration
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 Big Data + Old History https://youtu.be/tp4y-_VoXdA
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 Example: Political Meetings Mapper “I was able to do in minutes with a python code what I’d spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!” Dr. Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Winner 2015 https://youtu.be/0lx0CL_dsQs 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps/ , https://youtu.be/0lx0CL_dsQs
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 Political Meetings Mapper Video: https://youtu.be/XabsuyNkD5s
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Big Data History of Music How can vast amounts of bibliographic data held by research libraries be unlocked for music researchers to analyse? Can this data be interrogated in ways that challenge the traditional narratives of music history? Analyses and visualisations exposed previously uncharted patterns in the history of music, for instance the rise and fall of music printing in 16th- and 17th- century Europe (huge dips in output in Venice were down to plague and war).
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 Handwritten text recognition http://transcriptorium.eu/
- 10. www.bl.uk 10 Datasets data.bl.uk As part of its work to open its data to wider use, the British Library is making copies of some of its datasets available for research and creative purposes. This site is a 'beta', and is in the early stages of development. If you have questions or feedback about this site or our open data work, please email digitalresearch@bl.uk. We'd also love to hear what you've done or made with the data.
- 11. www.bl.uk 11
- 12. www.bl.uk 12
- 13. www.bl.uk 13 The Off the Map Competition • A new type of collaboration • Explores how British Library digital collections can be used in creative ways • Engagement with new audiences • Opportunity for students in the UK to showcase their talents to industry
- 14. www.bl.uk 14 #Shakespeare400 2016 commemorations of 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare
- 15. www.bl.uk 15
- 16. www.bl.uk 16 The Tempest Shakespeare was inspired to write The Tempest when he read of the fate of the Sea- Adventure, a ship taking English colonists to North America which was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda in 1609. The Bermudas were then the most feared place on earth for sea travellers, who had heard stories about the islands being inhabited by devils. Map of Bermuda as published in Gerhard Mercator and Jodocus Hondius' world atlas of 1633. Maps K.Top 123
- 17. www.bl.uk 17 Off the Map 2016 1st Place: “The Tempest” by Team Quattro, De Montfort University, Leicester YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/0lzpEFgpk3Y
- 18. www.bl.uk 18 A Midsummer Night’s Dream From Boydell's Collection of Prints illustrating Shakespeare's works http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/boydells-collection-of-prints-illustrating-shakespeares-works
- 19. www.bl.uk 19 Off the Map 2016 2nd Place: ‘Midsummer’ by Tom Battey, London College of Communication YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/sz-IKvp62NI
- 20. www.bl.uk 20 Sarah Cole, Poetic Places Creative-Entrepreneur-In-Residence http://www.poeticplaces.uk/
- 21. www.bl.uk 21 What is Poetic Places? • A free, native app for Android and iOS devices. • Bring poetic depictions of places into the physical world, helping people to encounter literature and heritage in relevant locations, accompanied by materials drawn from cultural heritage collections. • Brings literature and heritage into everyday life in unexpected moments. Serendipitous discovery; not tours. • Browse the poems and places without being in situ.
- 22. www.bl.uk 22
- 24. www.bl.uk 24 Get in touch! Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ Email: digitalresearch@bl.uk Twitter: : @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital
Editor's Notes
- Set up in 2010 the team was formed as a way of dedicating focus on the changing research landscape in the digital realm. Now embedded in collection areas, and as you’ll see later, joining the library explicitly as part of major digitisation projects. Main activities: Getting content in digital form and online Collaborations, Competitions & Awards Digital research support and guidance
- One way is through the British Library Labs project and the Digital Curator team which make up the Digital Research Team. The aim of the lab is to encourage scholars to experiment at scale with our digital collections and data. The team holds competitions, events, and creates the space in which to engage with scholars working in this realm. Through the labs we’re learning how to better support scholars and build new services.
- Research Question: Chartism was the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th Century British history. They campaigned for the vote for all men. The Chartists advertised their meeting in the Northern Star newspaper from 1838 to 1850. The question is, how many of the meetings took place and where? We started with 1841-1845. Source Collections: 19th Century Digitised Newspapers, specifically Northern Star newspaper Digitised and Georeferenced Map of Oxford Street Digital/Computational Techniques: The images of the relevant pages of the Northern Star were run through an Optical Character Recognition program (Abbyy Finereader 12) and the resulting text was checked manually. We developed a set of Python codes to extract and geo-code the place of meeting, using a gazetteer of places, and parse the date of the meeting. Outcome: 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK! http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps/
- The images of the relevant pages of the Northern Star were run through an Optical Character Recognition program (Abbyy Finereader 12) and the resulting text was checked manually. We developed a set of Python codes to extract and geo-code the place of meeting, using a gazetteer of places, and parse the date of the meeting.
- Research Question: Brought together for the first time the world's biggest datasets about published sheet music, music manuscripts and classical concerts (in excess of 5 million records) for statistical analysis, manipulation and visualisation. Aim was to unlock musical-bibliographical data held by libraries in order to create new research opportunities. The project cleaned and enhanced aspects of the British Library catalogues of printed and manuscript music, which are now available as open data from www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html and piloted big data research techniques on these and five other datasets. Source Collections: Data from seven existing databases and catalogues were used as the basis of this project: the British Library's catalogues of printed and manuscript music; the bibliographies created by Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) that list European music printed 1500-1800 and music manuscripts in European libraries; and the RISM UK Music Manuscripts Database and the Concert Programmes Project database. Digital/Computational Techniques: Data wrangling using Open Refine and MARCedit. Data visualisation using: Google Fusion Tables and Palladio Project slides: http://www.slideshare.net/historyspot/ihr-big-data-history-of-music-9-june15 Outcome: Analyses and visualisations of these datasets exposed previously uncharted patterns in the history of music, for instance involving the rise and fall of music printing in 16th- and 17th-century Europe (huge dips in output in Venice were down to plague and war!), or the rise of nationalist colourings in music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The detection of these long-term trends permits new ways of linking music history to wider histories of culture, economics, society and politics
- Aims developed quickly at project start Refined over project, flexible mindset Last point: to achieve this chose (needed) to use DIY app platform…