Experimenting with the British Library’s Digital Content and Data for your...

A workshop organised by British Library Labs, the University of Bristol and GW4 as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2016).

The event will open with presentations about research involving the University of Bristol and GW4. 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 BL Labs Competition and Awards. The event will close with a 'Questions, Ideas and Discussion' session, in which the delegates will have the opportunity to ask questions, engage in discourse and to work in small groups and come up with their own ideas. A panel will give feedback on the ideas and there is the chance to win a British Library goody bag!

Date and Time:
Monday 21st March 2016, 1100-1500

Cost:
Free

Location:
Lacey Meeting Room, 1st Floor, Howard House, Queen's Avenue, The University of Bristol, BS8 1SD.

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 at GW4 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
Tim Cole, Professor of Social History and Director of the Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol

1105 Lost Visions: Retrieving the Visual Element of Printed Books from the Nineteenth Century
Ian Harvey, Software Developer, Cardiff University

Although many historical texts have been digitally stored, the illustrations in these texts are frequently without the information needed to help people understand them. Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it. This AHRC-funded Big Data project has made searchable online over a million book illustrations from the British Library’s collections. The images span the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, cover a variety of reproductive techniques (including etching, wood engraving, lithography and photography), and are taken from around 65,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy. The Cardiff team has devised methods that enable the collection of illustrations to become fully searchable online.

Ian Harvey will present the current status of the Illustration Archive at the end of the Lost Visions project, with focus on the design for a "positive feedback loop" between machine vision and crowd sourcing methods of data collection. A demonstration of the crowd-sourcing website and the successes and challenges of the use of machine vision algorithms will also be given.

1125 Using Digital Humanities to open up our thinking about Mapuche intellectual networks in Chile
Dr Jo Crow, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, School of Modern Languages, Bristol

Three indigenous Mapuche intellectuals stood out on the Chilean national stage during the first half of the twentieth century: Manuel Manquilef, Manuel Aburto Panguilef and Venancio Coñuepán. There is a rich and expanding body of scholarship available on the political discourses of these three figures, but we know far less about the social worlds in which they operated. In this presentation, I will talk briefly about a collaborative project that I am involved in with a colleague at the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile entitled Interconnected Histories: Tracing the Social Networks of Mapuche Intellectuals in 20th Century Chile, which aims to fill this gap and, more broadly, to explore different approaches to the study of indigenous intellectuals. In this context, it both embraces and interrogates the new possibilities offered by Digital Humanities. One of its principal outputs is a bilingual database that collates the details of the trajectories of Manquilef, Aburto Panguilef and Coñuepán, showing whom they were talking to, when, where and with what consequences. We will make this widely accessible through a dedicated webpage. We are also creating visualisations of the collated data, such as spaghetti diagrams, maps and timelines, in order to open out the life stories of Manquilef, Panguilef, and Coñuepán, and using text-mining software to revisit their public speeches and writings.

1145 Doing digital research at the British Library
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library

The Digital Research Team is a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections. In this talk Stella will highlight how they work with those operating at the intersection of academic research, cultural heritage and technology to support new ways of exploring, accessing the Library's collections through; getting content in digital form and online; collaborative projects; offering digital research support and guidance. Stella will give an overview of the 'Off the Map' competition which she has been running for the last 3 years which encourages computer games developers to use British Library digital asset packs to create games and interactive experiences for users based on a theme that is linked to a British Library exhibition.

1215 British Library Labs
Hana Lewis, Project Officer, 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.

1230 Lunch

1315 Overview projects that have used British Library’s Digital Content and data

Ben O'Steen, Technical Lead of British Library Labs

Ben 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.

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.

There will be an opportunity for questions at the end of this session for the British Library Team.

1400 Questions, Ideas and Discussion
Labs and GW4 Team

The delegates will then have the opportunity ask questions, have a discussion and to work in small groups and come up with their own ideas. The Labs team and GW4 staff will be on hand to help and advise.

1445 Pitching ideas to the panel
GW4 and Labs Team

Each group will pitch their ideas to the Labs and GW4 panel who will give feedback on how they might be implemented - and there’s even the chance to win a goody bag!

1500 Coffee and Finish

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

Speaker Biographies:

Ian Harvey, Software Developer, Cardiff University
Ian Harvey is a Research Associate at Cardiff University, where he has designed and developed software for research projects in the Computer Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Social Sciences. His research interests include interoperability of experimental and production data and computing resources, utilising scalable computing infrastructures such as Cloud and Grid Computing environments, and development of tools useful to the research community.

Dr Jo Crow, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, School of Modern Languages, Bristol
Dr Crow’s research interests include Chilean cultural history, nationalism and nation building, and Mapuche history, intellectuality and politics. Her new research project investigates the production of knowledge and circulation of ideas about race and indigenous cultures in twentieth century Latin America, focusing specifically on Chilean-Peruvian intellectual networks.

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library

Stella’s role at the British Library explores and promotes new methods of research using both born digital content and digitised collections. In 2013, Stella co-founded with GameCity a competition for Higher Education videogame design students called Off the Map, where students are challenged to create videogames inspired by British Library collections. Prior to working in Digital Research, she managed Collection Storage at the British Library's site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Stella has also previously worked at the Library and Information Statistics Unit based at Loughborough University, the Warburg Institute Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Hana Lewis, Project Officer of 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 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.

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.