Transcript The Role of Libraries in Supporting Digital Scholarship Stella Wisdom Curator, Digital Research British Library @miss_wisdom http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

The Role of Libraries in
Supporting Digital Scholarship
Stella Wisdom
Curator, Digital Research
British Library
@miss_wisdom
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
“Reading
individual works
is as irrelevant
as describing
the architecture
of a building
from a single
brick, or the
layout of a city
from a single
church.”
Franco Moretti
www.bl.uk
2
www.bl.uk
3
Personal Digital Archives

The nature of personal archive
material has moved from paperbased to electronic – diaries, blogs,
photos, accounts, emails,
correspondence and social media

In 2011, the British Library acquired
the archive of poet Wendy Cope.
The archive includes material in
electronic format, with an extensive
collection of email correspondence
and Word files

Significant challenges in obtaining,
preserving and organising personal
digital information
www.bl.uk
44
www.bl.uk
5
Research trends
Trend
Requirement
• More digital content
• Mass and focused digitisation
• More cross-disciplinary
• Improved discovery
• More collaborative
• Interfaces for sharing and
building services, annotation
• More analysis
• Visualisation tools
• More data-driven
• Conversion to data and
analysis tools
• More repurposing of
content
www.bl.uk
• Open licenses & APIs,
documented formats
6
Digital Scholarship
Definition
Requirements
• The production, use and
integration of digital
content, services and
tools to facilitate
scholarship and research
• Comprehensive digital collections
• Allow research areas to be
investigated in new ways,
using new tools, leading to
new discoveries and
analysis to generate new
understanding
• The ability to apply new tools for
analysis, visualisation, and
experimentation
www.bl.uk
• Core infrastructure to store,
preserve, discover, access
• The ability to apply the tools of
scholarship to digital collections:
annotation, citation, comparison
• Collaboration through social
networking tools, social bookmarking,
wikis, sharing drafts with commentary
• Non-traditional forms of outreach to
draw attention to research
7
Advancing the world’s knowledge
Our vision for
2020
Our Strategic Priorities to
2015
The British Library will be a
leading hub in the
global information
network, advancing
knowledge through our
collections, expertise
and partnerships, for the
benefit of the economy
and society and the
enrichment of cultural
life.
1. Guarantee access for future
generations
www.bl.uk
2. Enable access to everyone
who wants to do research
3. Support research
communities in key areas for
social and economic benefit
4. Enrich the cultural life of the
nation
5. Lead and collaborate in
growing the world’s
knowledge base
8
Digital Scholarship at the British Library
• The Library has spent the last two decades creating digital assets
through digitisation and preserving born-digital objects and will do
far into the future.
• We can now do much more than use technology to simply discover
these digital objects and must embrace the opportunities afforded
by analysing these digital collections at scale.
• If scholars view our archives as an infinite pool of multiple layers of
loosely held data from which new research questions can be
created, then so must we.
• The Digital Research Team and BL Labs aim to provide services
beyond simple resource discovery, that is, beyond helping to point
a single user to a single items via a catalogue
www.bl.uk
9
The British Library Digital Scholarship
Department works to enable innovative
research based on its digital collections
Our activities to support digital scholarship
are organised around four themes:
www.bl.uk
10
1) Digital content
Every day, we are collecting, connecting to, and
creating unique digital content
2) Tools and services
We know that digital scholarship needs tools and
services to support it, but we also recognise that the
practice of researchers is changing rapidly. We are
looking to enable researchers to bring their tools to
our content as well as providing ways to discover,
analyse, visualise, annotate, exchange and re-use it
www.bl.uk
11
3) Engagement
Meeting and collaborating with researchers in order
to find out more about their goals, the content and
data that they need, and the ways that they work
with it. Engagement is at the heart of what we do
4) Skills
Improving staff skills working with digital content and
services
www.bl.uk
12
Who are we?
• A cross-disciplinary mix of
curators, librarians and
programmers
• The Digital Research Team
explores how digital technologies
are re/shaping research and how
this informs how the library does
its business
Aquiles
Alencar-Brayner
James Baker
Mahendra Mahey
Nora McGregor
Ben O’Steen
Stella Wisdom
• We encourage and support
scholars of all disciplines &
developers to do innovative
research with and across the
library’s diverse digital content
www.bl.uk
13
Digital Scholarship Training Programme
An ongoing internal training
initiative created by the Digital
Research team and launched in
November 2012
Fifteen bespoke one-day courses
for staff covering the basics of
Digital Scholarship which we
deliver on a rolling basis
The programme evolves as
necessary overtime
www.bl.uk
14
The Initial Courses
101 What is Digital Scholarship?
102 Digital Collections at British Library
103 Digitisation at British Library
104 Communicating our collections online
105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions
106 Text Encoding Initiative
107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research
108 Geo-referencing and Digital Mapping
109 Information Integration: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web
110 Managing digital research information
111 Social Media: Introduction to Twitter, and Blogging
112 Working collaboratively: Using the BL Wiki and Beyond
113 Presentation skills: From Powerpoint to Prezi
114 Foundations in working with Digital Objects: From Images to A/V
115 Metadata for Electronic Resources
www.bl.uk
15
Initiatives:
Georeferencer
Europeana Collections 1914-18
Off the Map Competition
Beautiful Science Exhibition
Mechanical Curator
British Library Labs & 2014 Winners Announcement
www.bl.uk
16
Geo-reference maps from the collection
http://www.bl.uk/maps/
• Goal
• Make maps easy to find, access, use
• Results
• Crowd-sourcing map geo-referencing
• 725 maps assigned spatial metadata
over 5 days
• Built on previous crowd-sourcing projects
• Publicity minimal – social media key
• Addressed key challenges – awareness,
engagement, productivity
• ~90 participants
• Approach
• Accessible and convenient application
• Top five completed half the work
• Data quality good: <3% had errors
• Immediate results and feedback
• Competitive tools
• Recognition and visible contribution
www.bl.uk
17
Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows
Public invited to bring WW1 photographs, letters, diaries, film
or audio recordings, together with the stories of who they
belonged to and why they are important to their families to
Europeana 1914-1918 roadshow events across Europe
Staff from museums and national libraries digitised the
objects during the roadshow and uploaded the digitised
images and stories to http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en
www.bl.uk
18
Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows
More than 200 people visited the Museum of Lancashire in
Preston on 10th March 2012. More than 2,300 images were
taken of a wide variety of items, including: letters, diaries,
medals, birth and death certificates, nurses’ autograph
books, cartoons, pictures and trench art – made from
anything the soldiers found, such as shell casings and spent
ammunition.
www.bl.uk
19
Europeana 1914 – 1918 Roadshows
www.bl.uk
20
Europeana Collections 1914 – 1918
Digitised 10,000 items (up to 250,000 digital images) of a
wide range of material related to the First World War
Digitised content retrievable via the Europeana portal, as well
as via the BL website
http://www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu/
http://www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu/watchcollection-items-provided-by-all-europeana-collections-19141918-partners/
www.bl.uk
21
Europeana Collections 1914 – 1918 Partners
• Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, France
• Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg, France
• Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma “Vittorio Emanuele II”, Italy
• Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Italy
• Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique – Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, Belgium
• The British Library, UK
• Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark
• Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Austria
• Narodna biblioteka Srbije, Serbia
• CLIO-Online, Germany
• Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche, Italy
www.bl.uk
22
Off the Map
www.bl.uk
23
www.bl.uk
24
www.bl.uk
25
www.bl.uk
26
Sophia George in her studio at the Victoria & Albert Museum
www.bl.uk
27
The UK Web Archive videogame collection:
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/collection/64290977/page/1/
www.bl.uk
28
28
www.bl.uk
29
C.J. Visscher, London , 1616 (detail) Maps C.5.a.6
www.bl.uk
30
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
www.bl.uk
31
Off the Map Competition
A challenge for videogame design students to turn historic maps and engravings from the
British Library collections into a 3D environment using Crytek's CRYENGINE software.
Pudding Lane Productions, a team of six second-year students from De Montfort
University, Leicester, won first prize.
Their work was showcased at GameCity, an annual festival of videogame culture.
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)
www.bl.uk
32
New Off the Map competition for 2014
Gothic theme, to tie-in with the Library's Terror and Wonder:
The Gothic Imagination (3 October 2014 - 27 January 2015)
exhibition
Three sub themes:
• Fonthill Abbey, home of William Beckford, author of
Vathek
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death
• Whitby and its association with Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
www.bl.uk
33
Harry Clarke illustration for
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story,
The Masque of the Red Death
www.bl.uk
34
Harbours on the East Coast of England. (Whitby Harbour.) [Admiralty Chart], 1895
www.bl.uk
35
Sounds and music clips provided: http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/Sound-effects
www.bl.uk
36
Student teams visit the British Library April 2014
www.bl.uk
37
Student team blogs & YouTube clips for the 2014 Off the Map competition:
http://www.theflyingbuttress.co.uk/
www.bl.uk
38
Beautiful Science:
Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight
20 February - 26 May 2014
Folio Society Gallery
Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the
meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist.
This is as true in today's era of genome sequencing and climate models
as it was in the 19th century.
Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our
planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the
mass data of the time.
www.bl.uk
39
Beautiful Science:
Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight
William Farr, Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England 1848-49, 1852
www.bl.uk
40
Beautiful Science:
Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight
Martin Krzywinski, Circles of Life, 2013 (© Martin Krzywinski)
www.bl.uk
41
Every book tells
a story, but what
can 68,000 tell us?
www.bl.uk
42
www.bl.uk
43
www.bl.uk
44
www.bl.uk
45
www.bl.uk
46
www.bl.uk
47
British Library Labs
British Library Labs is an initiative funded by the Andrew
Mellon Foundation that enables researchers to unlock the
British Library’s vast and rapidly growing digital collections
and data
Each year we hold a competition to identify innovative ideas
that showcase the Library’s collections
www.bl.uk
48
BL Labs 2013 Competition Winners
Sample Generator
Pieter Francois, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University
of Oxford
A software tool to extract samples from digitised text –
custom corpora – from a larger collection. Exploring
methodological issues around data-focused hypothesis
formation and testing in the context of large corpora. This
project brings together Pieter’s interests in data, statistics,
and nineteenth century travel
www.bl.uk
49
BL Labs 2013 Competition Winners
Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection
Dan Norton PhD researcher at the University of Dundee and
Artist in Residence at the Hangar Centre for Art and
Research in Barcelona
Dan Norton applied the model of information interaction,
developed as part of his doctoral study, to develop an
innovative prototype for working with multiple content sources
and data-representations from British Library digital
collections
www.bl.uk
50
BL Labs 2014 Competition Winners
www.bl.uk
51
BL Labs 2014 Competition Winners
Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)
Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber of the University of
Queensland
Victorian Meme Machine
Bob Nicholson of Edge Hill University
www.bl.uk
52
Desmond Schmidt has degrees in classical
Greek papyrology from the University of
Cambridge, UK, and in Information
Technology from the University of
Queensland, Australia. He has worked in the
software industry, in information security, on
the Vienna Edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein, on
Leximancer, a concept-mining tool, and on
the AustESE (Australian Electronic Scholarly
Editing) project. He is currently a Research
Scientist at the Institute for Future
Environments, Queensland University of
Technology.
www.bl.uk
53
Anna Gerber is a software developer and
technical project manager specialising in
Digital Humanities projects at the
University of Queensland’s ITEE
(Information Technology and Electrical
Engineering) eResearch group. Anna was
the senior software engineer for the
AustESE project, developing eResearch
tools to support the collaborative authoring
and management of electronic scholarly
editions. She is a contributor to the W3C
(World Wide Web) Community Group for
Open Annotation and was a co-principal
investigator on the Open Annotation
Collaboration project.
www.bl.uk
54
Visualising manuscript regions to enable
linking to transcriptions
In order to make old printed books and manuscripts
accessible to a Web audience, it is essential to display the
page image / facsimile of the original document next to its
transcription. This allows the user to comment on the text,
and to read it clearly, but because original documents are
often hard to read, or have different line-breaks than text on a
computer screen, it is easy to get lost trying to match up
words in the document with words in the transcription. To
overcome this, the team are developing semi-automatic
methods to generate links that highlight corresponding parts
of the page image and the text.
www.bl.uk
55
Visualising manuscript regions to enable linking to transcriptions
www.bl.uk
56
Play video
www.bl.uk
57
Bob Nicholson is lecturer in history
specialising in nineteenth-century Britain and
America, focusing on journalism, popular
culture, jokes, and transatlantic relations.
Bob has been exploring representations of
the United States, and the circulation of its
popular culture in Victorian newspapers and
periodicals. He is a keen proponent of the
Digital Humanities and has written for The
Guardian, had his research covered by The
Times, and was shortlisted by the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
in their first search for New Generation
Thinkers (2011).
www.bl.uk
58
The Victorian Meme Machine
What would it take to make a Victorian joke funny again?
While the great works of Victorian art and literature have
been preserved and celebrated by successive generations,
even the period’s most popular jokes have now been lost or
forgotten. Fortunately, thousands of these endangered jests
have been preserved within the British Library’s digital
collections. This project aims to find these forgotten jokes
and bring them back to life.
www.bl.uk
59
The Victorian Meme Machine
The ‘Victorian Meme Machine’ [VMM] will create an extensive
database of Victorian jokes that will be available for use by
other scholars. It will analyse jokes and semi-automatically
pair them with an appropriate image (or series of images)
drawn from the British Library’s digital collections and other
participating archives. Users will be able to re-generate the
pairings until they discover a good match (or a humorously
bizarre one) – at this point, the new ‘meme’ will be saved to a
public gallery and distributed via social media. The project
will monitor which memes go viral and fine-tune the VMM in
response to popular tastes.
www.bl.uk
60
Play video
www.bl.uk
61
www.bl.uk
62