Cpd25_Aquiles Alencar Brayner
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The British Library Digital Research Team supports the creation and use of the library's digital collections through various initiatives: 1) It works to digitize the library's vast print collections and make digital content available online through projects involving mass digitization, fundraising, and crowdsourcing transcription. 2) The team defines digital research as using computational methods like data visualization, mining, and crowdsourcing to answer research questions or challenge theories. 3) It engages the public through projects like the UK SoundMap, which crowdsources audio recordings to document environmental sounds across Britain.
Cpd25_Aquiles Alencar Brayner
- 1. Doing Digital Research @ British Library An intro to the Digital Research Team Aquiles Alencar-Brayner Digital Curator @AquilesBrayner
- 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. If you saw 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 Over 150 Million items are stored in London and in Yorkshire But…the Library is becoming as much a place full of data as it is a place full of physical stuff, and there is a growing community of users who see it that way. http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/facts/
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 Meet the Digital Research Team The Digital Research Team is a cross- disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and technologists supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections.
- 6. www.bl.uk 6www.bl.uk Living knowledge: six core purposes
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 Custodianship: Getting content in digital format • Transforming print catalogue records into digital (retroconversion) • Example: c750,000 printed books held in Asian & African Collections are listed only in hard-copy catalogues. • AAC Department is tackling this through innovative digitisation/ crowdsourcing approach http://www.libcrowds.com/
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Getting content in digital form • Mass Digitisation Private/Public Partnerships (Google) • Large Fundraising Campaigns (#SaveOurSounds) • Research Grants (Two Centuries Indian Print) • Preservation of at risk formats (Degrading microfilms) • Non-Print Legal Deposit Acquisitions (UK Web Archive) • See: http://www.bl.uk/help/initiate-a-new-digitisation-project- with-the-british-library
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 How we define Digital Research 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
- 10. www.bl.uk 10www.bl.uk Defining Digital Research Using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms…. Machine learning Data Visualisation Data Mining Georeferencing Digital Mapping Crowdsourcing Text mining Collaboration
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 Getting Content Online • Images published on Flickr • https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary • Wikimedia Synoptic Index • Search Interface: BL 1 Million Images
- 12. www.bl.uk 12
- 13. www.bl.uk 13 Collaborations, Competitions & Awards http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
- 14. www.bl.uk 14 2015 Winner: 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 5,519 meetings discovered in 462 towns and villages across the UK! http://www.bl.uk/case-studies/political-meetings-mapper
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 Business, culture, learning: Collaborations, Competitions & Awards… https://vimeo.com/92272538 http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map-winners-announced/
- 16. www.bl.uk 16 Public engagement: UK SoundMap • In 2009 British Library sound archive staff began tests for a new kind of field recording project to aggregate user-generated digital audio content using mobile phones. Named the UK SoundMap, the project represents a radical departure from the more traditional, curator-led professional archival practices we were used to. • The UK SoundMap uses an informal community of mobile phone users (via Audioboo) to capture and describe their environmental sounds, then enable near-instant public sharing on a dedicated website: in effect, contributors as curator-publishers. • http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmap
- 17. www.bl.uk 17 Georeferencer The British Library began a project to crowdsource the georeferencing of its scanned historic mapping in 2011 by partnering with Klokan Technologies. Over 8,000 maps have already been "placed" by participants checked for accuracy and approved for reviewers. We are currently on the sixth release, which features over 50,000 maps from the 17th, 18th, and 19th-century book illustrations on Flickr http://www.bl.uk/maps/ Video explanation: https://vimeo.com/36419466
- 18. www.bl.uk 18 International: Endangered Archives Programme • http://eap.bl.uk/
- 19. www.bl.uk 19 Getting in touch Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ Email: [email protected] Twitter: #bldigital
Editor's Notes
- #5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp4y-_VoXdA
- #6: Clockwise from top Left: Aquiles Alencar-Brayner, European & Americas Nora McGregor, Asian & African Collections Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, Contemporary British Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager, Mellon funded BL Labs Project Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead, Mellon funded BL Labs Project Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage
- #8: Support projects around
- #12: 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.
- #13: 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.
- #15: Video: 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/
- #16: 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