A workshop organised by British Library Labs and Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis Project (University of Nottingham) as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2016).

The workshop will open with an introduction followed by two presentations of examples of creative use of collection and technology research conducted through the DHA Praxis project. The British Library Labs team will then 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. 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:
Wednesday 3rd February 2016, 1230-1600

Cost:
Free

Location:
The Lounge, The National Videogame Arcade, 24-32 Carlton Street, Nottingham, NG1 1NN

Map:
Please refer to the following map detailing how to get to the event.

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 and developers in Nottingham to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.

Programme (a more detailed programme is available here):

1230 Registration and Lunch

1300 Introduction and Presentation: From Metadata to Experience: the ArtMaps Crowdsourcing Platform
Dr Laura Carletti, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham

Details to follow.

1320 Quick and Dirty Location-based Experiences Using Wander Anywhere
Dr Benjamin Bedwell, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham

Details to follow.

1335 British Library Labs Competition and Awards
Mahendra Mahey, Manager 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 four key areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial and Teaching / Learning. The deadline for entering the BL Labs Awards this year is 5th September 2016.

1350 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

1420 Examination of British Library data and previous Labs ideas
Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead 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.

1430 Ideas Lab (includes a coffee break at 1515)
Labs Team

Labs will present an outline of the various ideas and suggestions from other researchers that have been made which explore working with the British Library’s digital content and data. The delegates will then have the opportunity to work in small groups and come up with their own ideas. The team and Nottingham staff will be on hand to help and advise.

1530 Pitching ideas to the panel
Nottingham and Labs Team

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

1600 Finish

Feedback about the event
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Speaker Biographies:

Dr Laura Carletti, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham

Laura is a Research Fellow at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute. Her research focuses on digital culture and learning innovation, specifically on the use of new media and technologies for citizen participation and audience development in the creative and cultural sectors. Her areas of interest are public engagement strategies, co-creation practices, crowdsourcing, and digital learning. She regularly collaborates with heritage institutions in exploring and designing alternative forms of visitors’ interactions with archival resources and online collections. At the University of Nottingham, she is also co-leader of the “Design of the Visiting Experience” theme of the China Cultural Visiting Hub, and member of the board of the “Creative and Cultural Industries” Research Priority Area. Previously, Laura has worked several years as project manager of European funded initiatives in the fields of culture and education and - since January 2016 – she is Member of the Council of Europeana, the European cultural heritage platform.

Dr Benjamin Bedwell, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham

Ben is a Research Fellow in Computer Science at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute. His research interests are in the effects that the design of technology has on the behaviour of its users, revealed via a grounded theory approach combining ethnography, contextual inquiry and participatory design/co-design with real users. He has applied these methods to develop and study technology with a broad spectrum of users and settings, with a focus on exploring the role that Internet-of-Things and mobile technologies can play in encouraging sustainability (both from ecological and cultural heritage perspectives). He co-leads the University of Nottingham’s “Heritage and the Digital” research priority area - a network of leading academics from backgrounds that span Digital Economy and Humanities - identified as an area of existing and emerging research strength.

Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs.

Previous to Labs he 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. He 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.

Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs.

Previous to working for Labs he 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, he 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.