Organised by British Library Labs and History UK with Liverpool John Moores University as part of the British Library Labs Roadshow (2017).

A series of presentations exploring the British Library's digital collections, how they have been used and the lessons learned by working with researchers who want to use them. This will be followed by discussions and feedback around potential ideas of working with the Library's data.

The Roadshow will showcase examples 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, educators and entrepreneurs have been developed via the annual British Library Labs Competition and Awards. This year we intend to focus on some of the lessons we have learned over the last four years of working with the Labs, promote our awards and get attendees thinking of what they might do with the British Library's collections. The team will also talk about future plans at the Library to support Digital Scholarship. The day will include presentations from researchers who are thinking creatively about what it means to be a digital historian in the twenty-first century. Speakers include James Baker, Jennifer Batt, Bob Nicholson and Joanna Taylor.  

Date and Time:
Wednesday 22 March 2017, 12:30 - 16:30
Lunch at 12.30-13.00
Wine reception and networking opportunities from 16.40-17.30

Cost:
Free

Location:
Liverpool John Moores University, John Foster Building, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ.
We will be in room JF 1.10A

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

BL Labs Roadshow (2017)

The British Library Labs project has been running since 2013. The team will reflect on the lessons they have learned over the last four years and focus on some of the typical questions researchers first ask and the common misconceptions they have when wanting to work with the the British Library's digital collections and data. They will also provide examples of what researchers were able to actually achieve and the challenges they faced.

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 British Library 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 historians to work with us and share their research questions and innovative ideas around this.The day will also include presentations from researchers who are thinking creatively about what it means to be a digital historian in the twenty-first century. Speakers include James Baker, Jennifer Batt, Bob Nicholson and Joanna Taylor.  

Programme:

12.30 Lunch

1300  Welcome
Dr Lucinda Mathews-Jones (LJMU) Co-Convenor of History UK

1315  What is British Library Labs and what have we learnt over the last for years?
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs

The British Library Labs project supports and inspires historians 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.

Labs will 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.

There will be an examination and reflection on the lessons the Labs team have learned by working with those who have wanted to use the  over the last four years.

1400 - 1445  ‘Who is the Digital Historian?
Dr James Baker, Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Digital History/Archives) at the University of Sussex

BL Labs Projects

1445  - 1515  ‘Remixing Digital Archives: The Victorian Joke Database’
Dr Bob Nicholson, Senior Lecturer of History at Edge Hill University

1515 - 1545  'Datamining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers'
Dr Jennifer Batt 'Lecturer of English at University of Bristol

1545 - 1610  Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities
Dr Joanna Taylor, Research Associate for Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities at University of Lancaster

1610 - 1640  British Library data and collections and discussions and feedback on ideas, challenges and issues.
Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs

Labs will give an overview of some of the Library's digital collections and lead on a discussion on how they can be used. The team will also give feedback on ideas delegates might have on using the collections.

1640 - 1730  Wine and Networking

Feedback for the event
Please complete the following feedback form.

Speaker Biographies:

Dr Lucinda Mathews-Jones, Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies, Humanities and Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University
Lucie’s research explores the roles of domesticity, gender and class in the British university and social settlement movement. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled 'Settling: Class, Gender and Domesticity in the University Settlement Movement, 1884-1920'. She also has an interest in material religion. She recently edited, with Timothy Jones (University of Melbourne), 'Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things'. Her research has been published in 'Journal of Victorian Culture', 'Women’s History', 'Cultural and Social History', and in the books 'What is Masculinity? and A Cultural History of Home'. She is an editor of the 'Journal of Victorian Culture' and managing editor of its online supplement JVC Online (www.victorianculture.com). She is on the executive committees of History UK and the Women’s History Network and was until recently the Treasurer of the British Association of Victorian Studies. She can be found on Twitter @luciejones83.

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.

Dr James Baker, Lecturer in Digital Humanities -Digital History/Archives (History), University of Sussex
James Baker is Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy and at the Sussex Humanities Lab. He is a historian of long eighteenth century Britain and of contemporary archiving. He is a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and 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.

As an eighteenth centuryist, his research interests include satirical art, the making and selling of printed objects, urban protest, and corpus analysis. His near contemporary historical interests include the curation of personal digital archives, the critical examination of forensic software and captures, the use of born-digital archives in historical research, and scribing and archiving in the age of the hard disk.

Prior to joining Sussex, James has 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 member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar and a member of the History Lab Plus Advisory Board.

Dr Bob Nicholson, Senior Lecturer of History at Edge Hill University

Bob works on the history of nineteenth-century Britain and America, with a particular focus on journalism, popular culture, jokes, transatlantic relations, and the Digital Humanities.

He's currently working on two research projects. The first explores representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture, in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The project builds upon my AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, which examined the crucial role played by popular journalism in mediating Anglo-American relations in this period. He is currently writing a monograph which expands this analysis beyond the press and examines transatlantic cultural encounters across a range of different contexts, including Wild West Shows, department stores, boxing rings, cocktail bars, cheap literature, and music hall.

The second project focuses on the neglected history of Victorian jokes. He is currently working with Dr Mark Hall (Computing) and the British Library on a digital humanities project that aims to create an online archive of one million Victorian jokes. The archive is still under construction, but they have already shared hundreds of jokes on Facebook and Twitter. The project was awarded the British Library Competition prize in 2014 and has since received press coverage from Radio 4, BBC History, The Telegraph, and the Smithsonian Magazine. The project is described in detail in this article for the journal 19.

His research has been published in a range of academic books and journals, including the Journal of Victorian Culture, Media History, Victorian Periodicals Review, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Nineteenth Century. In addition to my scholarly publications, he writes occasional articles for The Guardian, blog at DigitalVictorianist.com, and tweet @DigiVictorian.

He trained at the University of Manchester where he completed a BA in History (2007), MA in Victorian Studies (2008), and an AHRC-funded PhD exploring the role played by newspapers in shaping Victorian ideas about the United States (2012). While finishing his doctoral project he obtained a 6 month lectureship at Swansea University before joining Edge Hill in the summer of 2012.

He teaches across the BA History degree programme at Edge Hill. In particular, he is responsible for leading modules on Victorian journalism and the history of Crime and Society in 18th and 19th century England. His teaching methods make particularly extensive use of digital tools and archives and his modules are all designed to encourage students to use these resources in the pursuit of original historical research. He supervises BA and MA dissertations on subjects relating to nineteenth century social and cultural history. He is currently Director of Studies for two PhD students, both of whom are working on the history of nineteenth-century journalism.

Dr Jennifer Batt, Lecturer of English at University of Bristol
Broadly speaking, her research interests lie in eighteenth-century literature, book history and reception history, and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in the publication and reception history of eighteenth-century poetry, and in exploring how poetic culture was constructed across a range of media, including newspapers, magazines, miscellanies and pamphlets. She is also interested in investigating how that poetic culture reached across social and geographical boundaries, and especially in tracing how it stretched beyond metropolitan or polite limits to include men and women in the provinces and of all social classes.

Before coming to Bristol, she was project manager of the Digital Miscellanies Index. Based at the University of Oxford and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this project has created a freely available online database that will enable the writing of a new, data-driven reception history of eighteenth-century poetry. The database was launched in beta in September 2013 and contains records relating to over 1,400 miscellany volumes, 80,000 poems, and several thousand poets, printers and booksellers. With Abigail Williams (the project's PI) she is co-editing a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life which showcases new research made possible by the DMI. In particular the DMI has prompted her to think more about authorship and anonymity in eighteenth century poetry, and she is at work on an article exploring this.

She is also currently completing a book on the 'thresher poet' Stephen Duck, the most famous/infamous labouring class poet of the eighteenth century.

Another project will see a shift from verse in miscellanies to verse in magazines and newspapers, an interest that I've begun to sketch out in my chapter on 'Poems in Magazines' in A Handbook of British Poetry 1660-1800 ed. Jack Lynch (Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming 2014).

Jennifer is currently working with BL Labs to identify poems in 18th Century digitised newspaper collections.

Dr Joanna Taylor, Research Associate for Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities at University of Lancaster

Joanna is a Research Associate on ‘Geospatial Innovations’. She submitted her PhD, titled ‘Writing spaces: the Coleridge family’s agoraphobic poetics’, at Keele University in 2015. Her research interests are in nineteenth century literature, particularly representations of and responses to space and place, literary cartography and issues of inheritance.

Event supported by:

http://www.history-uk.ac.uk/

https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/