Presentation given at meeting with Fujitsu 8 December 2015

1. British Library Labs
Tuesday 8th
of December
Presentation to Fujitsu
British Library, St Pancras

2. http://labs.bl.uk 2
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
180 Million Items?
1-2% Digitised?

3. http://labs.bl.uk 3
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
UK Web Archive

4. http://labs.bl.uk 4
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk4
Alan Turing Institute for Data
Science and Knowledge Quarter
•Partners: Universities of
Cambridge, Edinburgh,
Oxford, University College
London, Warwick
•Funded at £42m over 5 years
•Headquartered @ British
Library
•Part of Knowledge Quarter

5. http://labs.bl.uk 5
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk

6. http://labs.bl.uk 6
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Competition
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital
content
Awards
Show us what you have done with our digital
content
Projects
Talk to us about working on collaborative projects

7. http://labs.bl.uk 7
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Example Digital research methods
http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event (has some examples from researchers)
Corpus analysis tools
Text Mining
Visualisations
Location based searching
Geotagging
Annotation
Crowdsourcing /
Human Computation
Natural Language
Processing
Using Application Programming Interfaces for
datasets e.g. Metadata, Images
Transcribing

8. http://labs.bl.uk 8
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Dan Norton (2013): Mixing the Library:
The Disc Jockey & the Digital Collection
http://www.tompro.co.uk
http://www.ablab.org/shetland
http://www.ablab.org/pd/di/
Prototype design
Annotation
Preview ‘item’
Selected ‘right’
channel ‘item’
Selected ‘left’
channel ‘item’
Collection ‘stalks’ made of ‘items’. Each ‘item’ is a URL.
The order of the ‘items’ can be ‘shuffled’ and sent to the ‘left’ or ‘right’ channels
‘Play back’ of ‘items’ (Blue)
and annotations (Yellow)
Living Lab: Library of the Future, see: http://alturl.com/284zw

9. http://labs.bl.uk 9
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Pieter Francois (2013):
Sample Generator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK80Jy0ijkA
Focus on European travel in 19th Century
Tool produced statistically represent
samples of texts based on search criteria
http://goo.gl/YFnZmu

10. http://labs.bl.uk 10
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Anna Gerber and Desmond Schmidt:
(2014) Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4bjZSJ4cY&feature=youtu.be
Desmond Schmidt Anna Gerber

11. http://labs.bl.uk 11
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Victorian Meme Machine
BL Labs 2014 Competition Winner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK95lzaPNp0Bob Nicholson
http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/

12. http://labs.bl.uk 12
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Katrina Navickas (2015)
Political Meetings Mapper
Katrina Navickas

13. http://labs.bl.uk 13
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Adam Crymble (2015)
Mechanical Curator Arcade
What if crowd sourcing
looked like this?
http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W
Drawing on downtime
Drawing on scarcity of access
Drawing on energy reserved
for ‘play’
http://itch.io/jam/britishlibrary

14. http://labs.bl.uk 14
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Snipping out images
from 65,000 Digitised Books
Face recognition
Mechanical Curator
Flickr
Worked better for female faces
than men’s
Press
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com
> 300,000,000 views
> 380,000 tags
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/
1,020,418 images
need tagging!
Creative uses of images
http://goo.gl/qPPgxX

15. http://labs.bl.uk 15
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Tagging a million images
Harnessing Crowdsourcing
http://www.metadatagames.org/
http://goo.gl/j6fxac
Cardiff University’s
Lost Visions Project
James Heald
Mario Klingemann
Chico 45
Use computational methods
Human Tagger
Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

16. http://labs.bl.uk 16
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Crowdsourcing Flickr and Other
Digitised Maps
http://www.bl.uk/maps/

17. http://labs.bl.uk 17
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Crossroads of Curiosity at the
British Library