Talk about Playing and Making with Library Collections for the British Library Labs roadshow event at University of Leeds on 5th June 2018

1. Places of inspiration:
Playing and Making
in the Library
Talk for BL Labs Roadshow, Leeds
5 June 2018
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

2. www.bl.uk 2
Founded in 2010, the Digital
Scholarship Department at British
Library supports researchers and
staff to make innovative use of our
digital collections and data.
We are a group of cross disciplinary
experts in the areas of digitisation,
librarianship, digital history &
humanities, computer and data
science, looking at how technology is
transforming research, and in turn,
our services.
@BL_DigiSchol

3. Meet the Digital Scholarship Team
Main Activities:
• Staff training
• Promoting Digital Scholarship
within BL
• Curating digital research data
• Project management
• Engagement with users
• Creating and sharing online
content with other libraries and
research centres
• Communication: events, blogging,
social media

4. • Poetic Places
• Badgical Kingdom
• Read Watch Play Online Jams
– Odyssey Jam 2017
– Gothic Novel Jam 2018
• Playing Beowulf
• Lakescraft and Litcraft
• Off the Map Competition
• Rob Sherman’s transmedia residency
• Interactive Fiction Summer School
• International Games Week
– AdventureX
• Games & GLAMs
What I’ll talk about today:

5. www.bl.uk 5
Many of the creative projects I’m about to discuss use Public
Domain images from the Microsoft Partnership Digitisation
Project 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

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The illustrations were extracted algorithmically from the
digitised books:
6
<?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

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http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/ https://twitter.com/MechCuratorBot

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The illustrations were uploaded to Flickr and albums were
created through crowd-sourced tagging

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Sarah Cole, Poetic Places
Creative-Entrepreneur-In-Residence
http://www.poeticplaces.uk/

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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.

13. https://www.badgicalkingdom.co.uk/

14. Odyssey Jam 2017
https://itch.io/jam/odysseyjam
Writing challenge tied in with Read Watch Play, a partnership of libraries
worldwide encouraging themed discussions of books, films, music and games,
each month they have a theme and for March 2017 it was #waterread.

15. Odyssey Jam 2017 entries
https://itch.io/jam/odysseyjam/entries
We encouraged entrants to make use of the digitised images on Flickr that The
British Library had released under a creative commons license.
Some games used these images, e.g. No One and 108 suitors.

16. It is the 200th anniversary of the
publication of Frankenstein. The a
perfect opportunity to run a gothic
novel themed challenge.
Gothic Novel Jam with Read Watch
Play; participants to make
something creative inspired by the
gothic novel genre. By the 31st July
upload or share it on the itch.io
Gothic Novel Jam site.
Entries can include stories, poetry,
art, games, music, films, pictures,
soundscapes, or any other type of
digital media response.
As part of the jam we want
participants to use images from
the British Library Flickr account as
inspiration for submissions.

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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

20. www.bl.uk 20
C.J. Visscher, London , 1616 (detail) Maps C.5.a.6

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John Leake, An exact surveigh of the streets lanes and churches contained within the
ruines of the City of London, 1667. Maps Crace port 2.58

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2013 winning team:
Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort University, Leicester
Created an interpretation of 17th Century London
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)

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Image from Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey, John Rutter, 1823

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Image from Delineations of
Fonthill and its Abbey,
John Rutter, 1823

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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

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The original handwritten manuscript of the
story, ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’,
which was first told to Alice Liddell by Lewis
Carroll in 1862.

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2015 Winning Game:
“The Wondering Lands of Alice”
Team Off our Rockers, De Montfort University in Leicester
YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/7bwx4uUnbV4

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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

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Off the Map 2016 1st Place:
“The Tempest” by Team Quattro, De Montfort University, Leicester
YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/0lzpEFgpk3Y

31. www.bl.uk 31
Off the Map 2016 2nd Place:
‘Midsummer’ by Tom Battey, London College of Communication
Blog: http://tombattey.com/design/developing-interactive-dialogue-in-
midsummer/
YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/sz-IKvp62NI
Download the game:
http://tombattey.com/portfolio-items/midsummer/

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Playing Beowulf
Project with University College London Institute of Education, funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council in the UK. Developed a game-authoring tool
based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, for use by schools, universities,
curators and library visitors.
http://darecollaborative.net/2015/03/11/playing-beowulf-gaming-the-library/

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Lakescraft is an AHRC funded project that uses the Minecraft platform to engage
schoolchildren with the literary and cultural landscape of the Lake District.
Using data from the Corpus of Lake District writing at Lancaster University, to
create an interdisciplinary educational resource that enables pupils to undertake
activities in an accurately modelled digital 3D environment.
https://thelakescraftproject.wordpress.com/

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The Lakescraft project has turned into
Litcraft; using the Minecraft platform to
explore and better understand literary
landscapes.
Each map is recreated from the maps
published with each text, hand-crafted
and scaled to provide a fun world, that
permits both exploration and building
tasks.
https://chronotopiccartography.wordpress.com/litcraft/

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Interactive Writer-in-Residence 2014/15

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Lines in the Ice - Seeking the Northwest Passage
British Library Free Exhibition
November 2014 to April 2015

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Sir John Franklin Lady Franklin

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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

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Isaak Scinbank, the ‘Arctic Angler’ of Milldale
http://onmywifesback.tumblr.com/post/100107314408/scinbank

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/collectioncare/2014/11/the-salmon-
book-conservation-in-reverse-.html

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
The Digital Cairn

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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Events & Music
https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/songs-from-on-my-wifes-back

44. The Infinite Library
InteractiveFictionSummer School
17– 21July2017
www.bl.uk/courses
http://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2017/07/first-steps-into-interactive-fiction-.html

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Infinite Journeys
Interactive Fiction Summer School
23 – 27 July 2018
https://www.bl.uk/events/infinite-journeys-interactive-fiction-summer-school

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4-10 November 2018
http://games.ala.org/international-games-week
http://games.ala.org/gaming-at-the-british-library

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For 2018 International Games Week the British Library is hosting
The Narrative Games Convention: AdventureX
10-11 November 2018
http://adventurexpo.org/

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A forum for those who are interested in games, cultural heritage
and GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums)
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!forum/games-and-glams
https://twitter.com/games_glams

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Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship
Blog:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Email: stella.wisdom@bl.uk
Twitter: @miss_wisdom #bldigital