BL Labs at ArtLab 2016

Editor's Notes

• #2: 25 Seconds (68 Words) My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• #3: https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
• #4: 140 seconds The British Library is the national library of the UK and one of the largest research libraries in the world . The Library moved to a new purpose built building in 1997 <click> the largest of it’s kind that was built in the UK in the 20th century. Many frequently used items are stored 5 stories below the main building at St Pancras in London and many might not know that part of the building is meant to look like a ship on a journey to discovery!<click>. <click to switch off> The building can sit 1,200 researchers at any one time across 5 reading rooms. <click>Medium and long term requested items are held at Boston Spa in Yorkshire in a low oxygen warehouse, using robot to retrieve items. In total, the library has 625 km of shelving, growing by 12 km every year. Whilst we acquire items through purchase or gifts, much of the collection has been built up through legal deposit. That is, by law, a copy of every UK and Ireland print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers. Around 3 million items are added per year. In 2013, legal deposit was extended to cover non-print material which means by law we take in digitally published items as well, which means regular mass crawls of the entire UK web domain as well as ebooks, ejournals etc.
• #6: 85 seconds The picture you can see is inside the main building in London, it’s the King’s Library – King George the Third’s personal library! Sometimes known as the ‘stack’, I walk past this everyday and I sometimes forget that the collections the British Library have are truly staggering! We currently estimate them to exceed <click>150 million items, representing every age of written civilisation and every known language. Our archives now contain the earliest surviving printed book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, written in Chinese and dating from 868 AD…. So some big numbers… Over …<click>14 million books <click>60 million patents <click>8 million stamps <click>4 million maps <click>3 million sound recordings <click>1.6 million music scores <click>over .3 million manuscripts <click>0.8 million serials titles (which are of course made up of many many volumes/editions), this is where a lot of our content is, just in case you thought the numbers didn’t add up!
• #7: 33 Seconds (100 Words) In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and anyone else, <Click> to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those who have questions which focus on the potential to find and create NEW things through access to the digital content. For example, being able to ask a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers using computational techniques would not feasible using manual methods. Let’s look at a clear example. <Click>
• #8: 17 Seconds (53 Words) <Click>The British Library is one of the largest Library’s in the world <Click> with an estimated 180 million physical items, with only a small proportion being digitised. <Click>We estimate this is around 1-2%, but no one really knows exactly how much. However, increasingly more items are being stored as ‘born’ digital, such as the UK Web Archive<Click>
• #9: 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
• #10: https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc Finding openly licensed collections is sometimes like detective work and from lessons learned Labs, uses the following 4 methods for filtering digital content: <click>Is the Copyright cleared for research and non commercial use? <click>Is it Curated (Is there someone who knows the ‘story’ about the collection?) <click>Is there Collection / Item Level Metadata available? And importantly what state is it in, does it need cleansing? <click>Finally, where is it? <click>These have been effective filters in doing the work of Labs in an agile way. <click>Labs has therefore identified several collections at the website above, some are shown in the slide: <click>Due to our licensing conditions, we are in the process of text mining the abstracts for a large number of journal titles in electronic form. The visualisation indicates the subject spread of our collections. <click>We have been harvesting the UK Web since 1993 and this is available as a resource under specific conditions for research. <click>We are also investigating the use of our item request data (around 17 million records) and anonymised reader data, data protection allowing. <click>The British National Bibliography has over 3 million catalogue records available as linked open data, licensed under CCO from the British and Irish National Library catalogues. More information is available on the Labs website, and we hope to one day develop data.bl.uk a place where all our open content and data lives with a unique identifier for each data set.
• #11: <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
• #12: 35 Seconds overall We have created collection guides detailing some of these digital collections <Click>on our Digital Scholarship site. <Click>and some on the Labs site. <Click> Soon data.bl.uk will be the place where people can directly access some of the digital collections we have available. <Click> Today we have brought data with us, see the guide on how to access it and print outs on the tables. A pause for thought and reflection however, digital is just a current technology to deliver information. Perhaps in Years to come <Click>we won’t be using the word ‘Digital’ <Click>in front of the word ‘Scholarship’. It will just be ‘Scholarship’, digital tecnology will be part of the EVERYDAY process of research. Any way back to the present.
• #13: Have balance of Multimedia Broadcast news and radio, sounds asave our sounds Books and newspapers Images BNB Qatar Digital library Hebrew manuscripts
• #14: 50 seconds In his book, The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice, Martin Weller suggests that a short hand term should be used to loosely define a Digital Scholar. First of all, <click>the person does not necessarily need to be a recognised academic or someone who posts online<click>. It is someone who employs <click>digital, <click> networked and open<click> approaches to demonstrate their specialisms. Offering digital content on large scale means scholars can ask questions they had not dreamed of doing before.
• #15: Adam Crymble was doing his PhD research on Distant Reading at King’s College. He won a competition to explain his thesis in 2 minutes in the PhD Comics competition. Examples like this will hopefully INSPIRE YOU to use the British Library’s digital content in some way in your work by showing some of what others have done.
• #16: Get clearer annotation image and transcription (perhaps TILT)
• #17: https://goo.gl/WutNyi http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2 https://goo.gl/9NWZUW https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf https://goo.gl/x7b4tg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg
• #19: 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
• #21: 41 Seconds (123 Words) One way is by running an annual competition which is open to the world! All you have to do is <Click>submit and idea by 11 April 2016. <Click>The two finalists will be announced in late May <Click>and they work with in residence between June and October, <Click>where they will get up to £3600 financial support, together with technical, curatorial and other types of support. <Click>The winners will showcase their work and receive their prizes at our symposium on Monday 7th of November. <Click>£3000 will be awarded to the winner and £1000 for the runner up.
• #22: 15 Seconds (45 Words) The next way we try to engage those interested in using our digital content is through our Awards, <Click>these recognise work already carried out using our digital content.<Click>The deadline for this year is the 5 September. You can submit previous and new projects<Click>in one of four categories: Artistic, Commercial, Research and Teaching & Learning <Click> Winners will be announced on Monday 7th of November <Click> where each category winner, winning £500 with £100 for the runners up.
• #23: 8 Seconds (24 Words) The final way to engage with our digital collections and data is to simply examine and use our data. We have learnt ideas usually change when we have done this. Talk to us about projects or ideas you would like to work on whether it’s for the competition, awards or something else.<Click>
• #24: 6 Seconds (20 Words) So <Click> ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in the BL’s digital collections and data? <Click>
• #25: 7 Seconds (21 Words) So focusing back on the competition, let’s look at a few examples.
• #27: 21 Seconds (65 Words) Katrina Navickas was particularly interested in the <Click>Chartist Movement who were a group who were campaigning for the vote for working people. <Click>They were the biggest popular movement for democracy in 19th century British history, just as this is early picture shows a huge monster meeting at Kennington Common<Click>She wanted to use a combination of manual and computational methods to explore our Digitised Newspapers to find out when and where they met and plot them on map. <Click>and hopefully unearthing new history.
• #28: 33 Seconds (101 Words) Katrina’s previous research has primarily focussed on the North of England.<Click>She was surprised to learn that many Chartists’ meetings were held in London. See the map of Chartists’ meetings in London and heat map where they met most. <Click>The map at the bottom left shows the route of a walking tour she organised in London visiting sites where the Chartists met.<Click> The photo at the bottom right is a Historical re-enactment of a Chartist meeting that took place in the Red Lion pub. Let’s take a peek at have happened …
• #29: 54 Seconds Video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lx0CL_dsQs 2.39 – 3.07 From 2.13 – 3.07 – 54 seconds <Click> From 1.18 – 3.09 – Longer clip – 1 minute 51 seconds
• #32: 9 Seconds (25 Words) Now on to our Awards, these recognise work *already* carried out using our digital content. Last year’s categories were Artistic, Entrepreneurial and Research. <Click>
• #33: 26 Seconds (78 Words) Dina Malkova was the winner of Commercial category. <Click>Inspired by a small digitised fragment of an <Click>illustration of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground original handwritten manuscript<Click>Dina made handmade and bespoke bow ties and cufflinks. <Click>You can still buy these items in the Alice pop up shop in London and of course online on Etsy.
• #35: 7 Seconds (21 Words) So focusing back on the competition, let’s look at a few examples.
• #36: 105 seconds Curator Cheryl Tipp Curator of Environment and Nature Sounds <click>in Digital Scholarship worked with the creative industries department at the British Library and a company called Ideas Tap to launch the <click>‘Sound Edit Wildlife Films Competition’ which challenged animators, filmmakers and photographers to create a short film inspired by the Library's collection of 10 wildlife sound recordings. <click>The winning entry was 'Dave's Wild Life' from Samuel de Ceccatty, a fantastic short which follows Dave, an amateur naturalist whose sole aim is to have his own TV show. The clip I will show uses the ‘Haddock drumming calls’ to give a voice to the cranes or, as Dave liked to call them, the Diplodocus longus cranum. Cue up video and play from 47 s- 1.58
• #37: http://vimeo.com/60401313 Cue up video and play from 45 s- 1.58
• #39: Off The Map challenges budding game makers to use collections from The British Library as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media. It’s associated with the British Library’s upcoming Shakespeare exhibition (15 April 2016 to 6 September 2016).
• #40: 75 seconds The work of Labs is really about a number of stories, stories about digital collections and about researchers wanting to ask fascinating research questions about them. Let’s now tell you a story about one collection and the intended and unintended consequences of working with it. The Library digitised 65,000 17th to 19th century books from our collections a few years ago (around 2.7 % of the physical total in that period). You can view them from our catalogue or read them on your <click>IPad via the Historical Books app developed by BiblioLabs. We also captured 22 million individual page images, along with full text scans of these images all of which contain untold quantity of useful data such as names of people, places, historical events, dates. So the question became then, what next? What can 65,000 books tell us?
• #41: Posts small illustrations taken almost at random from the digitised book corpus to a Tumblr blog. This experiment with undirected engagement was a by-product of work to uncover the hidden wealth of illustrations within the digitised pages.
• #42: 50 seconds Here is the anatomy of a Flickr record, importantly we have created links to many of the Library’s services <click>some of this lovely traffic is going back to the Library and hopefully generating more interest in our services, from downloading a pdf of the book to purchasing a high res scan of the image. <click>Tags are added from the original book record, including the approximate page number the image came from<click>users of Flickr can add their own tags, and I have mentioned they have already started doing it.
• #43: Change link to presentation!
• #45: 37 Seconds (112 Words) The artistic winner was Mario Klingemann otherwise known as ‘Quasimondo’ . He tries to use computers to generate art or do clever and interesting things such as find images. He worked a lot a collection of un-described images largely from the 19th Century. <Click> Here you can see a picture of a 44 men he found algorithmically who looked around 44<Click>notice how the eyes of the faces change from left to right. <Click>Bottom Left is an attempt to use code to find images of <Click> ‘Tragic looking women’ and <Click>Top Right above is an attempt to create computer art by snipping bits of images together computationally.
• #46: 18 Seconds (56 Words) Indexing BL the 1 million & Mapping the Maps – was led by James Heald and collaboration with others <Click>They produced an index of 1 million 'Mechanical Curator collection' images on <Click>Wikimedia Commons from a collection of largely un-described images. <Click>This gave rise to finding 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon <Click>These are now being geo-referenced. <Click>
• #47: 27 Seconds (82 Words) Adam Crymble <Click>wanted to harness the power of playing fun games on arcade machines to help with crowdsourcing the tagging of un-described images. He particularly wanted to engage a younger audience into crowdsourcing .<Click>On the right you can see a replica 1980’s arcade machine we built and <Click>and on the bottom left some tagging games that were developed through a ‘Games Jam’ for the machine. <Click>. Let’s take a closer look at two of the games…<Click>
• #48: 79 Seconds Video Clip We are close to installing the machine at the National Video Arcade in Nottingham to see how successful the games will be. If you’re interested in having the machine in your institution, please contact us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCgHo2rwN4 (Switch on Subtitles) 1.47 – 3.06 1 min 19 seconds <Click> From 1.47 to 2.28 – Art Treachery – 41 seconds From 2.28 to 3.06 – Art Attack – 38 seconds Total for both clips – 1 min 19 seconds
• #49: Play from 4m 50 seconds to 5m 19 seconds
• #50: 1m 18seconds
• #51: 1m30seconds
• #52: Let’s look at the finished work! 16 Seconds Video Clip https://goo.gl/QilqqT 1.27- 1.43 – 16 seconds
• #61: 5 Seconds (15 Words) <Click> Why is the Library doing this? Well there are many reasons, but essentially it is about…
• #62: 20 Seconds (62 Words) <Click>Labs is learning important lessons on how we are supporting researchers who want to experiment with our digital content using digital methods. <Click>We are learning what we are doing right.<Click>Understanding what researchers want, <Click>learning if we provide the appropriate services, tools and resources to support them. Trying to understand where the gaps are <Click>and what we should be doing in the future. <Click>
• #63: <click>The British Library faces many challenges of access to our Digital collections! <click> Sometimes digital content is only available onsite due to license restrictions, <click>or even only on a specific computer in a reading room! Technically there are very few reasons why digital content can’t be online <click> though it might be too big or hasn’t been transferred from other digital storage media. <click>Sometimes access is through a paywall. Finally, <click>some content is in the happy sunny place, online, open and freely available. The real reasons why there are challenges to accessing digital content are of course human. They require different approaches from the Library and may often involve an honest, open dialogue and negotiation with the publishers. The Labs project has tried to address this problem my creating a ‘residency model’ for researchers to work intensively with a digital collection on-site, so as to not infringe access conditions, I will say more about this later.
• #64: 28 Seconds (86 Words) We have learned many lessons. I will touch on a few briefly here. <Click>There is a tremendous appetite from researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and others who want to use our digital content/data (see our Flickr Commons Image statistics later). <Click> We are identifying and bridging gaps for researchers to access BL data.<Click> and helping researchers navigate through the Library’s systems and processes to get to it. <Click>At our first roadshow, student Alison Pope suggested that BL Labs acts like a human API (or access point) connecting people to the BL’s digital data.
• #67: 20 Seconds (62 Words) The Labs is a place where we do many small experiments quickly. Most importantly it’s where it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them. Fail faster and fail better! Perhaps Jimmy Wales’ advice (founder of Wikipedia) can sum what we have learned time and time again.<Click> 40 Seconds Video Clip http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34808495
• #68: 25 Seconds (68 Words) My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department and we work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.