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

The workshop will showcase some of the British Library’s digital collections 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. This will be followed by presentations about research at UCLDH. 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 British Library and UCLDH goody bags for the best ones!

Date and Time:
Wednesday 24th February 2016, 1400 -1700

Cost and who can attend:
Free and open to all.

Location:
IAS Common Ground, G11, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building, UCL, London, WC1E 6BT

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 UCLDH 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!

Your research interest: Please let us know what your research interest is and what digital collections you are interested in learning more about out at the event by mailing labs@bl.uk (Please make sure you give us your name and the event you are attending).

Programme:

1400 Introduction
Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL's Department of Information Studies.

1405 Research Overview from UCLDH
David Beavan, Research Manager (Arts and Humanities), UCL.

1420 UCLDH Projects
Julianne Nyhan, Senior Lecturer (associate Professor) in Digital Information Studies at UCL’s Department of Information Studies

1435 British Library Labs
Mahendra Mahey, Project 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.

1450 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.

1520 The Political Meetings Mapper
Dr Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer, 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.

1540 Accessing British Library data on the Mini Network Area Storage Device (NAS)
Labs Team

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 how to access them.

1545 Ideas Lab (Coffee available)
Labs Team

The Labs team will run through this informal activity, where delegates will have the opportunity to work in small groups (min 2 up to 6) and come up with their own ideas. The Labs and UCL teams will be on hand to help and advise. For detailed instructions and information see the Ideas Lab Pack on your table.

1630 Pitching ideas to the panel
UCLDH and Labs Team

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

1700 Finish

Feedback
Please complete feedback form for this event.

Speaker Biographies:

Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL's Department of Information Studies, and Vice Dean of Research in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include "Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts" (2006, Oxford University Press) and "Digital Images for the Information Professional" (2008, Ashgate) and she has co-edited various volumes such as "Digital Humanities in Practice" (Facet 2012) and "Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader" (Ashgate 2013). She is currently serving on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries, and the Board of the National Library of Scotland, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras

David Beavan is Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Research Manager for the faculty and Associate Director for Research for UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH). He manages the development of the extensive Faculty and UCLDH research project portfolio, where he works with researchers, developing ideas and strategies while providing assistance at all stages of project planning and organisation. David’s professional involvements include being a member of the Peer Review College and a Technical Reviewer for the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and he is a member of the British Computer Society (MBCS). Until recently he has served as an elected member of EADH: the European Association for Digital Humanities as Membership Officer. David also served as Membership Officer for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). David has been active in the Digital Humanities community for over 10 years, delivering cutting-edge online Arts and Humanities resources for scholarly research as well as public access. His areas of interest focus on adding value to resources and data-sets, enabling new avenues of research through new and emerging technologies and the promotion of digital resources to wider audiences through public engagement and even stand-up comedy.

Julianne Nyhan, Senior Lecturer (associate Professor) in Digital Information Studies at UCL’s Department of Information Studies She is lecturer (assistant Professor) in Digital Information Studies at UCL’s Department of Information Studies since 2011.She held positions in University College Cork, Ireland (where she was awarded my PhD (2006) on ‘The application of XML to the historical lexicography of Old, Middle and early modern Irish: a lexicon-based analysis’); the European Science Foundation, France; and the University of Trier, Germany.

Her recent publications include the edited collections Digital Humanities in Practice (Facet 2012), Digital Humanities: a Reader (Ashgate 2013) and Clerics, Kings and Vikings: essays on Medieval Ireland (Four Courts, at press). Details of her other publications are availabl ehere. My colleagues and I recently won the 2014 CSDH/SCHN Outstanding Contribution Award for our Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) project (2009-2012).

Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of British Library Labs.
Before 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.

Katrina Navickas, Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire
Her 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 and was published by Manchester University Press on 1st December 2015.