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


Encouraging scholars and

developers to do research

and development with and

across British Library

collections and data (+other)

The project in a nutshell…


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


Our Brand…


Background• The Andrew Mellon Foundation

• 2 year initial project


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


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


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?


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


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


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


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


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


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


Where do you start?


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/Digital+Collections

We are hoping to launch

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

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

http://data.bl.uk/


Types of content

• Datasets

• Books / Text

• Images / Music

• Maps

• Sounds

• Multimedia


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.


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?


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


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?


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?


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?


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?


Resonance FM

• London Community Arts Radio Show

• http://resonancefm.com/

• 10 year sound archive!

• Speech to text?


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


Examples from Launch event

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


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


What’s happening at the moment?

• Working with competition entrants

• Working on first year project deliverables

• Planning for next competition and dissemination


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


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


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


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.


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://benosteen.com/dewey/

http://benosteen.com/dewey/


Workshops – Ideas Labs

• Datasets

• Ideas

• Outputs


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


Speak to me: 0207 412 7324

Email me: [email protected] or [email protected]

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?

Education

BL Labs and Digital Humanities