BL Labs and Digital Humanities

British Library Labshttp://labs.bl.uk

British Library Labs and Digital Humanities

Monday 10th February, 1600 - 1700

University of Sunderland

Panizzi, British Library, NW1 2DB

London

Mr Mahendra Mahey

British Library Labs Project Manager

Scholarship and Collections, Digital Scholarship

http://labs.bl.uk 2#bl_labs

Overview

•Background, People, Details, Plan

•Content used with Labs

•Research methods

•The competition and engaging with Labs

http://labs.bl.uk 3#bl_labs

Encouraging scholars and

developers to do research

and development with and

across British Library

collections and data (+other)

The project in a nutshell…

http://labs.bl.uk 4#bl_labs

People involved in Labs

Project

Board

Advisory

Board

Digital

Scholarship

Team

Digital

Curators Access and

Reuse

Group

©

Over 200

Curators

Labs

Researchers

Developers

Researchers

Developers

British Library

Universities & wider

http://labs.bl.uk 5#bl_labs

Our Brand…

http://labs.bl.uk 6#bl_labs

Background• The Andrew Mellon Foundation

• 2 year initial project

http://labs.bl.uk 7#bl_labs

Labs details…what• No digitisation involved, just digitized and born digital Library content

• Some content online

• Other in digital form but not online yet

– e.g. too big, needs work, technical challenges, license restrictions

(e.g. onsite access etc.)

• Examine and analyse the content, especially entire collections (i.e.

cross collection research)

• Do research, publish

• Make things, e.g. tools, services, apps etc…

• Transforming processes, services and tools for scholars / developers

using Library digital collections

http://labs.bl.uk 8#bl_labs

Lab details…how• Competitions, events and various activities

• Creating environment where scholars / developers can

work intensively with Library’s digital collections (winners will

be resident), but not only…

• Encourage research / developers generally to do

interesting things with BL digital content (+other) with and

across collections (a data driven approach)

• Labs is more than the competition!

• Ideas can be pursued by talking to Library staff , scholars /

developers interested in conducting research / making

things, e.g. meetings, events etc., business opportunities

http://labs.bl.uk 9#bl_labs

Labs Competition• At least 2 Competitions, winners will work ‘in residence’ where

possible

• Review and feedback to examine approach, at the moment

‘Data Driven Research’, i.e. here is our data come and do stuff

with it!

• Focus particularly on cross collection research, research at

scale

• Other research and development encouraged too!

• Help develop tools and services to support digital scholarship

• Any suggestions for next competition? When to visit?

http://labs.bl.uk 10#bl_labs

How Labs works…

BL LabsCompetition

Events

Contact

Software

Publications

Tools and

services to

support Digital

Scholarship

BL Digital

Collection /

Data

idea

BL Digital

Collection /

Data

Other Digital

Collection

idea

idea

idea

idea

http://labs.bl.uk 11#bl_labs

The plan in time…• Launch Event – 25th March 2013 – draft details of competition and feedback, launched end

of April

• Virtual 17 May (Video of Hangout Available), more virtual event?

• Hack Event 28/29 May London

• AHRC research network - 'the infinite archive‘, Open University, University of Nottingham,

University of Warwick

• Winners announced at 6 July 2013, York (Digital Heritage Conference)

• Best two ideas work in residence and showcase their work on the 11th November 2013,

when the next competition will be launched (deadline end of March 2014, work on entry

May to end of October 2014, Nov/Dec Showcase and final event

• Other ideas, look at supporting in other ways e.g. through Labs, other Library departments,

Business opportunities etc.

• Case studies produced around Nov/Dec for first iteration 2013 and second iteration 2014

http://labs.bl.uk 12#bl_labs

BL Labs Services• Developed for scholars / developers wanting to use digital

Library collections for research and development

• Application Programming Interface (APIs) for data /

collections

• Powerful interface for researchers and developers for

conducting innovative and transformative projects

• We are currently doing an audit of what web services the BL

has.

• Lead by Technical lead

http://labs.bl.uk 13#bl_labs

Labs Hack Days…• Bringing researchers, developers, curators and anyone

interested with collections together at events, want to do

more!

• Brainstorming ideas – ideas lab

• Scoping research, ideas, solving problems and developing

prototypes

Brainstorm ideas and group

Consider and choose

Work into the night and show

what has been done

http://labs.bl.uk 14#bl_labs

Case studies…• Research generated from the competitions and general

activity of Labs

• Inform the Library / Other libraries around the world about

the issues, challenges, solutions and benefits generated

when using a Labs approach

http://labs.bl.uk 15#bl_labs

Labs Content• Work with curators to identify those digital collections that

are suitable for Labs

• Focus on those that are copyright cleared at the moment

• Others considered in light of challenges, i.e. in scope for

Labs work

• Engage researchers/developers with these materials

through meetings, road-shows, hack days, promotions

(including competitions and events)

• Have list of 100s of digital collections

• Need a filter

http://labs.bl.uk 16#bl_labs

Where do you start?

http://labs.bl.uk 17#bl_labs

British Library Digital Collections

• Most content unique!

• Copyright cleared for research

and non-commercial use?

• Curated?

• Collection Level

Metadata available?

Available

only in

Reading

Rooms

Available

on site

Digital but

not online –various storage

devices

Available only onsite at the moment

Hack Events, In residence

Digital and

online

http://labs.bl.uk 18#bl_labs

http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

We are hoping to launch

http://data.bl.uk at some point

http://labs.bl.uk 19#bl_labs

Types of content

• Datasets

• Books / Text

• Images / Music

• Maps

• Sounds

• Multimedia

http://labs.bl.uk 20#bl_labs

British National Bibliographic Data• bnb.data.bl.uk (part of data.bl.uk)

• 2.8 Million individual records

• Available as Linked Open Data, Basic

RDF/XML and Marc21.

http://labs.bl.uk 21#bl_labs

UK Web Archive Data• data.webarchive.org.uk/o

pendata

• 32TB subset of the

Internet Archive’s web

collection relating to the

UK.

• Collecting freely since e-

legal deposit

• Comparing events across

media types?

http://labs.bl.uk 22#bl_labs

19th Century Digitised Books• 68,000 digitised volumes and their

accompanying JP2, PDF, metadata

and OCR text files

• Many rare or inaccessible books

published between 1789 and 1870

and covers a wide range of subject

areas including philosophy, history,

poetry and literature, travel

• Representative materials here:

britishlibrary19c.tumblr.com

• Text mining? Text is 29Gb

http://labs.bl.uk 23#bl_labs

International Dunhuang Project

• IDP international collaboration

• images of all manuscripts,

paintings, textiles and artefacts

from Dunhuang and

archaeological sites of the Eastern

Silk Road freely available on the

Internet and to encourage their

use through educational and

research programmes

• http://idp.bl.uk/

• Time-lining the silk road?

http://labs.bl.uk 24#bl_labs

Book ordering data…• Every day thousands of items are ordered up from the

library stacks and delivered to researchers in our reading

rooms. We can provide daily anonymised reports of these

titles including shelfmark information and reading room

location

• Visualising what readers are reading?

Anonymised reader data…• Anonymised information about our readers

• Big buckets

• Social trends?

http://labs.bl.uk 25#bl_labs

Bringing Text Mining to the Library

Many electronic journals we have negotiated text mining

rights for (50%) journals

A project to get the tools to readers?

http://labs.bl.uk 26#bl_labs

Environment and Nature Sounds

• thousands of recordings from the Sound Archive's unrivalled

natural sounds collection is available for free download as

MP3’s to staff and students UK higher and further education

institutions

• http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/

• Adding sounds to poetry?

http://labs.bl.uk 27#bl_labs

Resonance FM

• London Community Arts Radio Show

• http://resonancefm.com/

• 10 year sound archive!

• Speech to text?

http://labs.bl.uk 28#bl_labs

Example Research Methods• Corpus Analysis tools

• Visualisations

• Topic Models

• Location based searching

• Geotagging

• Annotation

• APIs for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

• Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

• Natural Language Processing

• Transcribing

http://labs.bl.uk 29#bl_labs

Examples from Launch event

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event

http://labs.bl.uk 30#bl_labs

Ideas from first competition

• Text mining in the reading rooms

• Curatorial – funded through other stream

• Visualising large collections of sound at a glance (thumbnails)

• Using sheet music – combined with AHRC proposal being submitted

now

• Working with a radio archive – possibly funded through another stream

– semantic media

• Serious news

http://labs.bl.uk 31#bl_labs

What’s happening at the moment?

• Working with competition entrants

• Working on first year project deliverables

• Planning for next competition and dissemination

http://labs.bl.uk 32#bl_labs

Dan Norton

• Mixing the Library: The Disc Jockey and the Digital Collection

• Dan Norton is a PhD Researcher, University of Dundee and is Artist in Residence at

Hangar, Centre for Art and Research, Barcelona.

• Building an interface for interacting in digital collections developed from the DJ's

interaction with information. His project uses selecting and mixing as creative behaviours

for exploring, learning, and authoring with digital collections.

• The prototype will demonstrate the interface requirements necessary for collecting,

enriching (organizing, annotating),and mixing information from digital libraries; for building

aesthetic, experimental, or logical links between resources; and for developing ad hoc

visualizations, or publishing annotated data.

• Working on functioning prototype to collect URLs for different media types e.g. text, video,

sound and images, shuffle order and then comparing two digital objects and being able to

annotate in real time

http://labs.bl.uk 33#bl_labs

Pieter Francois

• The Sample Generator for Digitised Texts

• Pieter Francois is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.

• The ‘Sample Generator for Digitized Texts’ is a relatively simple piece of software which

connects one or more major catalogues or bibliographies with one or more collections of

digitized texts through the metadata.

• The main aim is to tell the story of over a million nineteenth-century books through a

structured sampling of 68,000 books, focus is on travel routes/accounts

• Creating demonstrator which searches across 1.8 million records and where possible find

highly significant digital samples for further research from the books we have digitised so

far

http://labs.bl.uk 34#bl_labs

Images from the 19th Century books

From late 1600sFrom 1700s

600,000 small images so far

(estimated)!

Work on going with

BL Labs Technical Lead

http://labs.bl.uk 35#bl_labs

The Mechanical Curator!

• Just launched, lot’s of interest!!

• Randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations,

posted on the hour.

• Rediscovered artwork from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th

Century books.

http://labs.bl.uk 36#bl_labs

Distribution of the use of DDC in BnB

Work by Ben O’Steen, BL Labs Technical Lead

Looking at the metadata for the books they have limited

metadata for subject classification

http://labs.bl.uk 37#bl_labs

Workshops – Ideas Labs

• Datasets

• Ideas

• Outputs

http://labs.bl.uk 38#bl_labs

Engaging with Labs

• ENGAGE

• Submit your name, contact details and lets speak!

• AHRC Big Data Call, a number of requests to use BL

Collections / Data if successful

• Next competition? Launch 11 November!

• Just talk to us, work with our collections!

• Ideas labs, workshops and hack events

http://labs.bl.uk 39#bl_labs

Speak to me: 0207 412 7324

Email me: mahendra.mahey@bl.uk or labs@bl.uk

Labs Website: http://labs.bl.uk/

Twitter: @BL_Labs

Hash Tag: #bl_labs

Jiscmail: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BL-LABS

Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

What next?