Pratt/KCL Summer School 2017
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The British Library's digital research team focuses on leveraging digital collections and data for humanities research through initiatives such as digitization, digital scholarship support, and collaborative projects. The team offers various resources and training to enhance the use of computational methods in research, addressing challenges like online discoverability and data visualization. This effort is part of a broader cultural shift towards digital humanities, promoting innovative research and analysis across vast data sets.
Pratt/KCL Summer School 2017
- 1. Digital Research Team: Exploring the Computational Turn in the Humanities Nora McGregor @ndalyrose @BL_DigiSchol
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 The British Library is the national library of the UK. By law we receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland which now includes the UK Web Domain!
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 Well over 150 Million physical items alone are stored in London and in Yorkshire….growing by roughly 3 million each year. If you saw 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection. Roughly 3% are digital/digitised but that’s growing with Non-Print Legal Deposit legislation the UK Web Archive and its 11 billion items/500 TB.
- 4. www.bl.uk 4 Meet the Digital Scholarship Department Founded in 2010, we support 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 Teams: • BL Labs • Digital Curators • Endangered Archives Programme
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 The Digital Curators Nora McGregor Asian & African Collections Stella Wisdom Contemporary British Aquiles Alencar-Brayner European & Americas Mia Ridge Western Heritage Rossitza Atanassova Digitisation
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 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 Digital Scholarship: Research at Scale Big Data and Old History https://youtu.be/tp4y-_VoXdA
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014) http://lisacharlotterost.github.io/2015/06/20/Searching-through-the-years/
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 Improving online discoverability • Transforming print catalogue records into digital (retroconversion) • c750,000 printed books held in Asian & African Collections are listed only in hard-copy catalogues. • Experimenting with crowdsourcing to tackle this! Have a go! http://www.libcrowds.com
- 10. www.bl.uk 10
- 11. www.bl.uk 11
- 12. www.bl.uk 12 Pilot will see over 4,000 items between 1713 to 1914, mostly Bengali to be digitised and catalogued http://www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print Dedicated Digital Curator supporting computationally driven research, such as text mining, with outputs, through creating and curating datasets for inclusion on data.bl.uk and providing digital skills training. Two Centuries of Indian Print Right: Pleasing tales designed to improve the understanding, and direct the conduct of young persons, 1825
- 13. www.bl.uk 13 A word on Optical Character Recognition • Benefit=enables search but also research at scale across many items • Example: Quarterly Lists-What can the history of book publishing reveal about a particular time period/place? • Big challenges! Tables, etc. Solutions tried yielded poor results! • Exploring possibilities with Google, Abby Corporate, Tesseract, Indian partners + research centres
- 14. www.bl.uk 14
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 ICDAR 2017 Transcription Competition
- 16. www.bl.uk 16 Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards
- 17. www.bl.uk 17 Digital skill building The Digital Scholarship Training Programme is an internal staff training initiative by the Digital Curator team that launched in November 2012. Helps us to situate our collections and expertise in the realm of digital research. Explore opportunities and challenges. Delivered over 100 courses to over 400 staff members so far! Looking now to go external with this in 2017/2018 https://www.bl.uk/projects/digital-scholarship- training-programme
- 18. www.bl.uk 18 Example Courses • 101 This is Digital Scholarship • 103 Digitisation at British Library • 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions • 107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research • 108 Geocoding Historical Information and Digital Mapping • 109 Data on the Web: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web • 118 Cleaning up Data Example Hack & Yacks • Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus • From Paper Maps to the Web: A DIY Digital Maps Primer • Literary & Historical Network Analysis using Gephi • Interactive writing platforms: Twine and Inklewriter Example Readings • Recovering Women’s History with Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Fabian News • Do Artifacts Have Politics? • Putting Big Data to Good Use: Historical Case Studies
- 19. www.bl.uk 19 Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards
- 20. www.bl.uk 20 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).
- 21. www.bl.uk 21 Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards
- 24. www.bl.uk 24 Get in touch! Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ @BL_DigiSchol
Editor's Notes
- #5: 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: 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
- #16: In collaboration with the PRIMA Research Lab at the University of Salford, we are running a competition to address our OCR challenge which forms part of a conference on document analysis and recognition taking place in Japan, November 2017. The competition is open to both commercial and non-commercial organisations and we’ve already had an array of entrants including technology companies such as Google and leading universities including Berkeley. If you know of anyone who would be interested in signing up, registration is open until 12 June through Primaresearch.org/REID2017. The conference organisers will be giving out a prize to the winner (prize TBC) (ICDAR = ‘International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition’)
- #21: 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
- #23: 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