Digital Scholarship at the British Library: Collecting, Collaboration and Research by Stella Wisdom
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Talk for Bath Spa University Digital Writing Research Group on 20th March 2017
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Digital Scholarship at the British Library: Collecting, Collaboration and Research by Stella Wisdom
- 1. Digital Scholarship at the British Library: Collecting, Collaboration and Research Talk for Bath Spa University Digital Writing Research Group 20th March 2017 Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator @miss_wisdom Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 The British Library is the national library of the UK We receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland From 6 April 2013, legal deposit covers e-books, e-journals and other types of electronic publication Plus other material that is made available to the public in the UK on handheld media such as CD- ROMs and microfilm, on the web (including websites) and by download from a website. http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 Over 150 Million items are stored in London and in Yorkshire If you saw 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection Digitisation is crucial for opening up access to this content and collections http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/facts/
- 4. www.bl.uk 4 The UK Web Archive http://www.webarchive.org.uk • Three collections: – Open Archive (since 2004) – Legal Deposit Archive (since 2013) – JISC Historical Archive (1996-2013) • Statistics: – Over eight billion resources – Over 160TB compressed data • Goals: – Preserve UK web history – Support access – Enable research
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 The Conservative Party deleted speeches and press releases published on its website between 2000 and the 2010 general election. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24924185 http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 Born-Digital Manuscripts Personal Digital Archives
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 The Wendy Cope Archive http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/british-library-digital-archives
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Digital Scholarship is using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms…. Geotagging Data Visualisation Data Mining Georeferencing Digital Mapping Crowdsourcing Text mining Collaboration
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 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
- 10. www.bl.uk 10
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 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.
- 12. www.bl.uk 12 Story of one digital collection… What can68,000 books tell us? Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin
- 13. www.bl.uk 13 Microsoft Partnership Digitisation 2006-8 • 68,000 volumes (47,000+ titles) published in the 19th century mostly in English • Excluded authors active 1850-1901 and who died after 1936 • Output: 25 million pages • Digitised content is public domain
- 14. www.bl.uk 14 Extracting Images from OCR 14 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> - <mets:mets xmlns:xsi="http://ww w.w3.org/2001/XML Schema-instance" xmlns:mets="http://w ww.loc.gov/METS/" xsi:schemaLocation= "http://www.loc.gov/ METS/ http://www.loc.gov/ standards/mets/ver sion18/mets.xsd info:lc/xmlns/premi s-v2 Image snipped out Algorithmically From ALTO XML Image taken from page 207 of 'London and its Environs. A picturesque survey of the metropolis and the suburbs ... Translated by Henry Frith. With ... illustrations' ALTO XML
- 16. www.bl.uk 16 Flickr albums created through crowd-sourced tagging
- 18. www.bl.uk 18
- 19. www.bl.uk 19
- 20. www.bl.uk 20 David Normal created light boxes around the Burning man, using the British Library’s Flickr Images The Crossroads of Curiosity Installation at Burning Man Festival
- 21. www.bl.uk 21 The Crossroads of Curiosity Installation at the British Library June to November 2015 The installation featured an “augmented reality” self-guided tour enabling viewers to explore the meaning and origins of the painting’s symbols using Blippar. www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com http://www.bl.uk/events/the-crossroads-of-curiosity-installation
- 22. www.bl.uk 22 Hey There, Young Sailor written and directed by Ling Low with visual art by Lyn Ong. Inspired by the works of early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, the video draws on 19th century images from the British Library's Flickr collection. The video was commissioned by Malaysian indie folk band The Impatient Sisters https://youtu.be/bcOP1E5bRE0
- 23. www.bl.uk 23 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back http://onmywifesback.tumblr.com/
- 24. www.bl.uk 24 Lines in the Ice - Seeking the Northwest Passage British Library Free Exhibition November 2014 to April 2015
- 25. www.bl.uk 25 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back Sir John Franklin Lady Franklin
- 26. www.bl.uk 26 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were lost on the ill-fated Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in 1845
- 27. www.bl.uk 27 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back Isaak Scinbank, the ‘Arctic Angler’ of Milldale http://onmywifesback.tumblr.com/post/100107314408/scinbank
- 28. www.bl.uk 28 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/collectioncare/2014/11/the-salmon- book-conservation-in-reverse-.html
- 29. www.bl.uk 29 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back The Digital Cairn
- 30. www.bl.uk 30 Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back Events & Music https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/songs-from-on-my-wifes-back
- 31. www.bl.uk 31 Sarah Cole, Poetic Places Creative-Entrepreneur-In-Residence http://www.poeticplaces.uk/
- 32. www.bl.uk 32 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.
- 33. www.bl.uk 33
- 35. www.bl.uk 35
- 36. www.bl.uk 36
- 37. www.bl.uk 37 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
- 38. www.bl.uk 38 Image from Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey, John Rutter, 1823
- 39. www.bl.uk 39 Image from Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey, John Rutter, 1823
- 40. www.bl.uk 40 2014 winning team: Gothulus Rift, University of South Wales Created a Fonthill Abbey inspired game called Nix using Oculus Rift YouTube flythrough: http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw
- 41. www.bl.uk 41 The original handwritten manuscript of the story, ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’, which was first told to Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll in 1862.
- 42. www.bl.uk 42 2015 Winning Game: “The Wondering Lands of Alice” Team Off our Rockers, De Montfort University in Leicester YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/7bwx4uUnbV4
- 43. www.bl.uk 43 #Shakespeare400 2016 commemorations of 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare
- 44. www.bl.uk 44
- 45. www.bl.uk 45 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
- 46. www.bl.uk 46 Off the Map 2016 1st Place: “The Tempest” by Team Quattro, De Montfort University, Leicester YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/0lzpEFgpk3Y
- 47. www.bl.uk 47 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
- 48. www.bl.uk 48 Off the Map 2016 2nd Place: ‘Midsummer’ by Tom Battey, London College of Communication YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/sz-IKvp62NI
- 49. www.bl.uk 49 For 2017: There Will Be Fun Off The Map
- 50. www.bl.uk 50
- 51. www.bl.uk 51 Three themes: 1. Illusions, magic and impersonators 2. Outdoor places of entertainment – Fairground, travelling shows 3. Indoor places of entertainment – Music Hall and Pantomime
- 52. www.bl.uk 52 Maskelyne & Cooke's entertainment at the Egyptian Hall, 1873 http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/evanion/Recor d.aspx?EvanID=024-000004866 'Will, the Witch, and the Watch' or 'The Mystic Freaks of Gyges', was written in 1872 and performed at the Egyptian Hall in 1873.
- 53. www.bl.uk 53 http://handeyesociety.com/event/wordplay-london-photo-video-recap/ WordPlay 2016 was held on the 19th of November at the British Library in London as part of International Games Day @ your Library.
- 55. www.bl.uk 55 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
- Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches…. activities might include incorporation into the traditional arts and humanities disciplines use of text-analytic techniques; GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; and interactive games and multimedia.
- 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
- 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.
- 60 seconds The Library digitised 68,000 predominantly 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. There are 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. with no restrictions on use by Microsoft So the question became then, what next? What can 68,000 books tell us?
- 60 seconds As the books were scanned for text, this had a fortunate ‘side effect’ the software not only tries to detect the text on the page but also where the images might be. There had already been some interest in the images from the community of researchers. It seemed easy to extract them. s part of the Labs competition, Matt Prior attended one of our hack events and when examining our book data and was very interested in the images from the books. Meanwhile the algorithm that Ben had written to snip the images from the OCR scans was still churning away, how many were there going to be? The Mechanical Curator could publish them every hour, but was there somewhere we could put them all for people to browse when they wanted. Importantly if we did put them somewhere, could we get people to help us add descriptions to the individual images making them infinitely more discoverable.]
- With an algorithm by Ben O’Steen we snipped out images from digitised books and put them on to Flickr on December 13 2013, there were over a million, but the problem we had was that we knew which books they came from (author/dates), but we didn’t’ have any information about the images. By releasing them onto flickr, we have got people to start tagging them and using them in very creative ways. Hosting them internally was not an option and there was not sufficient metadata to put them on Wikipedia. Flickr seemed the obvious option as it is a platform that can support high usage, did not require metadata, allowed tagging and it is free for public domain images.
- He speaks about his project, how he came across the images and what he did with them. How he learnt about the image = it was pure serendipity Taking images out of the context of books creates potential to reinvent them in a new context. http://youtu.be/3AOa98RsA2Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3AOa98RsA2Q#t=48 Make sure subtitles are on.
- This is a surprising use of the images we put onto Flickr. Once a year in the summer, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever. [This year it took place between August 25 to September 1, Nevada, USA, the show ends by burning an effigy of wooden man! <click>] American Artist David Normal used images from your Flickr Commons collection and worked on a set of collages called "Crossroads of Curiosity". The finished paintings based on these collages were presented in full colour as ' lightboxes at this year's Burning Man Festival, the theme for which was "Caravansary“. They were presented around the base of the effigy of the Burning Man in the heart of the festival.
- Aims developed quickly at project start Refined over project, flexible mindset Last point: to achieve this chose (needed) to use DIY app platform…