Digital scholarship at the British Library by stella wisdom for Researching Born Digital Archives event

Editor's Notes

• #3: 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
• #4: 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.
• #7: 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/
• #8: 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.
• #9: 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 PalladioProject 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
• #22: Aims developed quickly at project start Refined over project, flexible mindset Last point: to achieve this chose (needed) to use DIY app platform…