A workshop organised by British Library Labs and the Sussex Humanities Lab as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2016).

The workshop will showcase some of the British Library’s digital content and data, addressing some of the challenges and issues of working with it and how interesting and exciting projects from researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs have been developed via the annual British Library Labs Competition and Awards. There will also be presentations about research at Sussex Humanities Lab. Finally, the session will end with an ‘Ideas Lab’ encouraging participants to explore, experiment and think of ideas of what they might do with the British Library’s digital content and data. A panel will give feedback on the ideas and there will be a British Library goody bag for the best one!

Date and Time:
Monday 4th of April 2016, 1030-1630

Cost:
Free and open to all.

Location:
Sussex Humanities Lab, SILVERSTONE SB211, Arts Road, Falmer, East Sussex , BN1 9RG.

Map:
The Sussex Humanities Lab is located in the School of Media, Film & Music, Silverstone Building which is situated in Arts Road, between Arts blocks B and C (number '16' on the campus map).

Event start: 10:30 – 11:00 (Coffee and Registration) starts 11:00 (prompt). Event ends: 16:30

BL Labs Roadshow (2016)

Hundreds of thousands of digital items and objects are being created and collected for researchers to use such as digitised manuscripts, sheet music, newspapers, maps, archived websites, radio, performances, TV news broadcasts, and artworks, as well as the more expected items like scanned versions of books.

This wonderful cacophony of content is having a significant effect on how institutions like the British Library support the research needs of their users. Will people discover new information when they are no longer restricted to viewing a single page from a single book at a time? How can the BL build systems that provide a coherent route across its content, regardless of whether it is a televised news report or a unique signature drawn in the margins of a map? How can we use crowd-sourced information, computer vision and machine-learning techniques to provide people with better tools to better judge and interpret the context of illustration or work? How can we exploit animations and interactive infographics to better convey the information found in our holdings?

This is the research space that British Library Labs explores and we want to encourage researchers at Sussex Humanities Lab to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.

Technical Requirements: We recommend that you bring a laptop to the event if you would like to access the Labs digital data (see: http://goo.gl/E8aRyQ). If you bring a mobile device such as an IPad, Galaxy Tab and Mobile Phone, you will need to install a File Explorer application in order to browse our digital content!

Programme:

1030 Registration and Coffee

1100 Introduction
Professor Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex

1105 Born digital big data and approaches for history and the humanities
Dr James Baker, Lecturer in Digital History at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy and at the Sussex Humanities Lab

The paper archive has been replaced by the hard disk – a new format that requires historians, archivists, and humanists to think and act afresh. In just 35 years most people – in Britain and worldwide – have come to create text and data in a fundamentally new way. Alongside this, the published record has migrated from paper to screen, from physical to digital. In this talk James will consider what this means for our work. In doing so, he will introduce 'Born digital big data and approaches for history and the humanities', an AHRC-funded network that brings together researchers and practitioners from a range of stakeholder groups, to discern if there is a genuine humanities approach to born-digital data, and to establish how this might inform, complement and draw on other disciplines and practices.

1120 Ecoacoustics: Machine Listening in the Wild, Developing Acoustic Methods for Biodiversity Monitoring
Dr Alice Eldridge, Research Fellow in Digital Technologies/ Digital Performance, Sussex Humanities Lab, School of Media, Film and Music

Numerous major multi-lateral initiatives aim to promote and protect biodiversity -- at the governmental level biodiversity needs to be incorporated into national accounting by 2020 yet cost effective tools necessary to achieve this remain elusive. Operating within the conceptual and methodological framework of the burgeoning field of Ecoacoustics, (Sueur and Farina, 2015) we are investigating the potential for the acoustic environment or soundscape - as a resource from which to infer ecological information. In this talk Alice will give an overview of work at Sussex researching machine listening tools for ‘listening’ to the acoustic environment and invite consideration of how similar tools might be usefully applied in digital archives.

1135 More Meaningful Text Analysis
Dr Julie Weeds, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities (Informatics), Sussex Humanities Lab

Increasing access to large volumes of machine-readable text requires users to have more sophisticated ways of searching, classifying and clustering documents at their fingertips. Julie will give an overview of technology being developed for this purpose by members of the Sussex Humanities Lab in Informatics. Method52 is a piece of in-house software which primarily allows users to rapidly build custom document classifiers using a technique called active learning. Distributional semantics refers to a collection of techniques where the meaning of words (or phrases) are represented in terms of their co-occurrences, hence allowing for searching, classification and clustering to be carried out in a more meaning-sensitive way. It also opens up the possibility of exploring the differences between collections or clusters of documents in terms of the meanings of the words within them.

1150 British Library Labs
Hana Lewis, Project Officer of British Library Labs

The British Library Labs project supports and inspires scholars to use the British Library’s incredible digital collections in exciting and innovative ways for their research, through various activities such as competitions, awards, events and projects.

Labs will highlight some of the work that they and others are doing around digital content in libraries and also talk about ways to encourage researchers to engage with the British Library. They will present information on the annual BL Labs Competition, which closes this year on 11th April 2016. Through the Competition, Labs encourages researchers to submit their important research question or creative idea which uses the British Library’s digital content and data. Two Competition winners then work in residence at the British Library for five months and then showcase the results of their work at the annual Labs Symposium in November 2016.

Labs will also discuss the annual BL Labs Awards which recognises outstanding work already completed, that has used the British Library’s digital collections and data. This year, the Awards will commend work in at least four key areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial and Teaching / Learning. The deadline for entering the BL Labs Awards this year is 5th September 2016.

1210 Overview projects that have used British Library’s Digital Content and data
Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs

Labs will further present information on various projects such as the ‘Mechanical Curator’ and other interesting experiments using the British Library’s digital content and data.

1240 The Political Meetings Mapper
Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire

Katrina Navickas, one of the winners of the BL Labs Competition (2015) will talk about her project Political Meetings Mapper, a tool for text mining and geo-locating the records of political meetings, enabling anyone to access the maps and data on an interactive website.

1300 Lunch

1400 Endangered Archives Programme
Jody Butterworth, EAP Curator

The Endangered Archives Programme aims to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide and to make the material available for scholarly research. To date, we have over 5 million images online via our website. A recent example of a project that is now available is the wonderful archive of photographs taken by Annemarie Heinrich - our first project to give us a CC BY NC license. We also have close to 10,000 sound recordings available through BL Sounds.

1430 Examination of British Library data and previous Labs ideas
Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs

Labs will be coming along with terabytes of the British Library’s digital data on the day which the team will give an overview of, highlighting some of the challenges faced when working with “messy” data. They will also give a brief outline of the various ideas and projects which explore working with the British Library’s digital content and data.

1445 Ideas Lab (Coffee Available from 1500)
Labs Team

Delegates will then have the opportunity to work in small groups and come up with their own ideas. The team and Sussex Humanities Lab staff will be on hand to help and advise.

1600 Pitching ideas to the panel
Sussex Humanities Lab and Labs Team

Each group will pitch their ideas to the Labs and Sussex Humanities Lab panel who will give feedback on how they might be implemented - and there’s even the chance to win a goody bag!

1630 Finish and Goody Bag!

Feedback Form
Please complete the following feedback form for the event.

Speaker Biographies:

Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex
Tim is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex. With Professor Robert Shoemaker and others he has been responsible for creating a series of websites helping to give direct public access to a range of primary sources evidencing the history of Britain. Designed to underpin the writing of a new 'history from below', these sites include: the Old Bailey Online, 1674 to 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org); London Lives, 1690-1800 (www.londonlives.org); Locating London's Past (www.locatinglondon.org); and Connected Histories (www.connectedhistories.org). He is currently Co-investigator on a five year, AHRC funded project: The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925.

James Baker , Lecturer in Digital History at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy and at the Sussex Humanities Lab
James is a historian of long eighteenth century Britain and a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow. He holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian satirical artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. His research interests include satirical art, the making and selling of printed objects, urban protest, and corpus analysis. He has an emerging research interest in the curation of personal digital archives, the critical examination of forensic software and captures, and the use of born-digital archives in historical research.

James has also held positions of Digital Curator at the British Library and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art. He is a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar and a member of the History Lab Plus Advisory Board. James is currently completing a book length study of the business of satirical printing in late-Georgian London and piloting Library Carpentry, an exploratory programme of software skills training aimed at research librarians.

Alice Eldridge, Research Fellow in Digital Technologies/ Digital Performance, Sussex Humanities Lab, School of Media, Film and Music
Alice Eldridge’s background in Psychology, Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, Informatics and Music informs systemic sound-based research across disciplines. She returned to Sussex in 2012 to lead the Music Informatics Programme within the school of Engineering & Informatics and currently holds a Research Fellowship at the Sussex Humanities Lab. Her research includes collaborations with conservation biologists investigating the potential for acoustic approaches to biodiversity assessment and with musicians to explore the use of networking technologies in ensemble music making. As a cellist Alice regularly performs with some of the UK’s most adventurous musicians in a range of settings from derelict Napoleonic forts to the Albert Hall.

Julie Weeds, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities (Informatics), Sussex Humanities Lab
Julie’s background is in Computer Science and more specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP). She holds degrees from Cambridge and Sussex, where latterly she completed her doctorate looking at measures and applications of lexical distributional similarity. She returned to Sussex in 2012 to work part-time in the NLP group. Before joining the Sussex Humanities Lab in November 2015, she was working on DisCo, a joint research project between the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Sussex and York, which was investigating distributional models of meaning and their compostion. She has also previously worked on database-guided dialogue and the use of ontologies in the area of natural language service composition. Her specific interests are the evaluation of models for composing vector representations of meaning, distinguishing different semantic relations automatically and automatic word sense acquisition.

Hana Lewis, Project Officer for British Library Labs

Hana’s role provides support for the everyday management of the Labs project. She also has experience of working as a Leading Library Assistant in the British Library’s reading rooms. Hana was previously a senior archaeologist at Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) and holds a BA and an MA in archaeology. She specialises in London archaeology and Anglo-Saxon studies and has produced several publications. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs

Previous to working for Labs Ben was a freelance developer in the academic sector. While his expertise lies in solving interesting problems using computers, his formal training is in chemistry: He has authored a Physics GCSE training course, created electronics for art installations, co-founded the “Developer Happiness” conference (dev8d.org), and he was the lead developer in the Bodleian Library’s Research and Development department building their Resource Description Framework (RDF) - powered repository and digital asset management systems. In recent years, Ben has worked on Jisc funded projects (OpenBibliography, OpenCitation), wrote reports for funders on topics such as text-mining and sat on technical advisory boards for the Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) protocol , ORCID and other groups.

Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire
Katrina's research interests are the history of popular protest and democratic movements in 18th and 19th century Britain. She is currently developing her digital skills in applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Space Syntax methods to historical research. Her new book, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 was published by Manchester University Press on 1st December 2015, which has a companion website with interactive maps at http://protesthistory.org.uk

Jody Butterworth, EAP Curator
Jody lived in Asia for almost seven years and during part of that time studied Tibetan Buddhist painting at Gandan Monastery, Ulaanbaatar. After returning to London she studied Asian art history and museum studies. She has been working at the British Library for almost ten years, working in both the Prints, Drawings and Photographs department and Collection Care. Just over three years’ ago, Jody became the Curator for the Endangered Archives Programme – an ideal job as she gets to travel the world from the comfort of her desk at St Pancras.

Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs
Before Labs, Mahendra was at UKOLN (University of Bath) working for 4 years on the Jisc funded the UK Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) initiative (organising several Developer Happiness” conferences (dev8d.org) and 5 years together on a project focussing on how academic institutions could manage their research information using a common metadata standard and one supporting research in digital repositories of scholarly outputs. He was an adviser for the Jisc Regional Support Centres encouraging academics / librarians to use electronic learning resources and make effective use of e-learning technologies and techniques in their practice. Mahendra also worked as a lecturer for over 10 years in Social Sciences, Computing, Multimedia and English for Speakers of Other Languages in Further and Higher Education internationally.