Digital Scholarship at the British Library: Collecting, Collaboration and Research by Stella Wisdom

Editor's Notes

• #9: Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches…. activities might include incorporation into the traditional arts and humanities disciplines use of text-analytic techniques; GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; and interactive games and multimedia.
• #10: Set up in 2010 the team was formed as a way of dedicating focus on the changing research landscape in the digital realm. Now embedded in collection areas, and as you’ll see later, joining the library explicitly as part of major digitisation projects. Main activities: Getting content in digital form and online Collaborations, Competitions & Awards Digital research support and guidance
• #13: 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.
• #14: 60 seconds The Library digitised 68,000 predominantly 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. There are 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. with no restrictions on use by Microsoft So the question became then, what next? What can 68,000 books tell us?
• #15: 60 seconds As the books were scanned for text, this had a fortunate ‘side effect’ the software not only tries to detect the text on the page but also where the images might be. There had already been some interest in the images from the community of researchers. It seemed easy to extract them. s part of the Labs competition, Matt Prior attended one of our hack events and when examining our book data and was very interested in the images from the books. Meanwhile the algorithm that Ben had written to snip the images from the OCR scans was still churning away, how many were there going to be? The Mechanical Curator could publish them every hour, but was there somewhere we could put them all for people to browse when they wanted. Importantly if we did put them somewhere, could we get people to help us add descriptions to the individual images making them infinitely more discoverable.]
• #17: With an algorithm by Ben O’Steen we snipped out images from digitised books and put them on to Flickr on December 13 2013, there were over a million, but the problem we had was that we knew which books they came from (author/dates), but we didn’t’ have any information about the images. By releasing them onto flickr, we have got people to start tagging them and using them in very creative ways. Hosting them internally was not an option and there was not sufficient metadata to put them on Wikipedia. Flickr seemed the obvious option as it is a platform that can support high usage, did not require metadata, allowed tagging and it is free for public domain images.
• #18: He speaks about his project, how he came across the images and what he did with them. How he learnt about the image = it was pure serendipity Taking images out of the context of books creates potential to reinvent them in a new context. http://youtu.be/3AOa98RsA2Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3AOa98RsA2Q#t=48 Make sure subtitles are on.
• #21: This is a surprising use of the images we put onto Flickr. Once a year in the summer, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever. [This year it took place between August 25 to September 1, Nevada, USA, the show ends by burning an effigy of wooden man! <click>] American Artist David Normal used images from your Flickr Commons collection and worked on a set of collages called "Crossroads of Curiosity".  The finished paintings based on these collages were presented in full colour as ' lightboxes at this year's Burning Man Festival, the theme for which was "Caravansary“. They were presented around the base of the effigy of the Burning Man in the heart of the festival.
• #33: Aims developed quickly at project start Refined over project, flexible mindset Last point: to achieve this chose (needed) to use DIY app platform…