Pratt/KCL Summer School 2017

Talk given to visiting Pratt/KCL Summer School 2017
"Digital Research Team: Exploring the Computational Turn in the Humanities"

1. Digital Research Team: Exploring the Computational Turn in the Humanities Nora McGregor @ ndalyrose @ BL_DigiSchol

2. The British Library is the national l ibrary of the UK. By law we receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland which now includes the UK Web Domain !

3. Well over 150 Million physical items alone are stored in London and in Yorkshire….growing by roughly 3 million each year. If you saw 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to see the whole collection . Roughly 3% are digital/digitised but that’s growing with Non-Print Legal Deposit legislation the UK Web Archive and its 11 billion items/500 TB.

4. Meet the Digital Scholarship Department Founded in 2010, we support the innovative use of British Library's digital collections and data through: Working behind the scenes to get content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Supporting collaborative projects Running events, competitions, and awards Teams: BL Labs Digital Curators Endangered Archives Programme

5. The Digital Curators Nora McGregor Asian & African Collections Stella Wisdom Contemporary British Aquiles Alencar-Brayner European & Americas Mia Ridge W estern Heritage Rossitza Atanassova Digitisation

6. Using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms….   Geotagging Data Visualisation Data Mining Georeferencing Digital Mapping Crowdsourcing Text mining Collaboration Digital Scholarship: Research at Scale Big Data and Old History https://youtu.be/tp4y-_ VoXdA

7. The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon . The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift , inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014 ) http://lisacharlotterost.github.io/2015/06/20/Searching-through-the-years/

8. Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards

9. Improving online discoverability Transforming print catalogue records into digital ( retroconversion ) c750,000 printed books held in Asian & African Collections are listed only in hard-copy catalogues. Experimenting with crowdsourcing to tackle this! Have a go! http ://www.libcrowds.com

10. Pilot will see over 4 ,000 items between 1713 to 1914, mostly Bengali to be digitised and catalogued http:// www.bl.uk/projects/two-centuries-of-indian-print Dedicated Digital Curator supporting computationally driven research, such as text mining, with outputs, through creating and curating datasets for inclusion on data.bl.uk and providing digital skills training. Two Centuries of Indian Print Right: Pleasing tales designed to improve the understanding, and direct the conduct of young persons , 1825

11. A word on Optical Character Recognition Benefit=enables search but also research at scale across many items Example: Quarterly Lists-What can the history of book publishing reveal about a particular time period/place? Big challenges! Tables, etc. Solutions tried yielded poor results! Exploring possibilities with Google, Abby Corporate, Tesseract , Indian partners + research centres

12. ICDAR 2017 Transcription Competition

13. Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events , competitions, and awards

14. Digital skill b uilding The Digital Scholarship Training Programme is an internal staff training initiative by the Digital Curator team that launched in November 2012. Helps us to situate our collections and expertise in the realm of digital research. Explore opportunities and challenges. Delivered over 100 courses to over 400 staff members so far! Looking now to go external with this in 2017/2018 https:// www.bl.uk/projects/digital-scholarship-training-programme

15. Example Courses 101 This is Digital Scholarship 103 Digitisation at British Library 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions 107 Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research 108 Geocoding Historical Information and Digital Mapping 109 Data on the Web: Mash-ups, API’s and The Semantic Web 118 Cleaning up Data Example Hack & Yacks Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus From Paper Maps to the Web: A DIY Digital Maps Primer Literary & Historical Network Analysis using Gephi Interactive writing platforms: Twine and Inklewriter Example Readings Recovering Women’s History with Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Fabian News Do Artifacts Have Politics ? Putting Big Data to Good Use: Historical Case Studies

16. Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events , competitions, and awards

17. Big Data History of Music How can vast amounts of bibliographic data held by research libraries be unlocked for music researchers to analyse? Can this data be interrogated in ways that challenge the traditional narratives of music history? Analyses and visualisations exposed previously uncharted patterns in the history of music, for instance the rise and fall of music printing in 16th- and 17th-century Europe ( huge dips in output in Venice were down to plague and war).

18. Getting content in digital form and online Offering digital research support and guidance Collaborative projects Events, competitions, and awards

19. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzzQLaltmVA

20. @ BL_Labs

21. Get in touch! Email : [email protected] Web: http :// www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog : http ://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship / @ BL_DigiSchol