The 1911 Stanley Cup holders, Ottawa. Photographed by A. G. Pittaway [shelfmark HS85/10, copy. num. 23753]

These works are free of known copyright restrictions.

After a dramatic season on and off the ice the NHL playoffs start tonight. Since long before I was a curator I've taken an interest in most North American team sports and so I'm the one in the office who's been losing sleep to the NBA playoffs and, from tonight, the NHL.

The impending playoffs also reminded me that the Picturing Canada project has digitised a number of hockey photographs I should share on the blog. Included in this are photographs of the 1909 and 1911 winning teams from Ottawa, taken by local photographer Alfred George Pittaway who it would seem specialised in sports-related photography.

The 1909 Stanley Cup holders, Ottawa. Photographed by A. G. Pittaway [shelfmark HS85/10, copy. num. 20618]

Sports feature quite heavily in the collection, with everything from lacrosse and hockey to rugby and football photographed (alas, no cricket). Hockey though is unusual as a number of the photographs in the collection have more joviality in them than the usual photos of games in process or deeply serious team photos. It's also the only sport in the collection represented by women, as seen below (although I bet that assertion comes back to bite me). As with many sports the Library holds a surprising amount of material relating to hockey and its various influencing games, although that's a post for another time.

'Canadian Hockey Girl, Benched'. Photographed by W. E. Maw [shelfmark HS85/10, copy. num. 15498]

While all of this is very interesting I'd be surprised if any hockey fans reading this will be too concerned with researching the history of the sport in coming weeks. That said, there are historically significant notes dotted through this year, not least with two Original Six members facing off when Boston and Toronto meet. So, good luck to all your teams, enjoy the end of season spectacle and I hope you've enjoyed these glimpses into hockey's past.

[PJH]

Miniature panorama of Parliament Hill, Ottawa [copyright number 22264, shelfmark: HS85/10]

This work is free of known copyright restrictions.

So, the day is here when Andrew and I get to show the first fruit of the Picturing Canada project to the world. Friday sees us present the initial outputs from the project to attendees of the GLAM-WIKI 2013 conference and it only seemed right to share it with our Americas blog readers too.

Digitisation is almost complete, with just the largest images still to come (a nice treat to end the project with), and while a few things need putting in place before we can host the images on the Library's Digitised Manuscripts page they are being gradually uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Here the collection has a dedicated area which will soon have an introductory blurb and you can browse the collection as it grows over coming weeks.

That said, what have we got to show you? I briefly described the history and content of the collection a few weeks ago on the Americas blog but here are some fun extra facts. First off, we have so far mapped the collection's contents to over 300 different locations in Canada and you can browse this on the map above. This time it's a vector map so you can zoom in and out, clicking on the buttons for details on the location, how many photographs there are from each area and what time period they cover. I'm afraid there's no direct link to the photographs yet, as we're still uploading, but it will be available in the coming months.

 

I've also got back to thinking about how the collection reflects the history of Canada. It provides a dynamic (and sometimes irreverent) lens on the many significant events that occurred between 1895 and 1924, both inside and outside of Canada. The above is one of the slides from Friday's presentation and it gives a highly selective and somewhat hap-hazard view of Canada's history during the period - but hopefully it provides a sense of some of the significant and / or interesting events of the period.

Over the course of the project Andrew and I have worked hard to make the metadata attached to these photographs usefully available as well as refining it and putting it to new uses. Hopefully the result of this will be a collection of photographs of use to historians of Canada, historians of photography, the writers of myriad Wikipedia articles and - you never know - the creator of the next cat-based meme.

I can live in hope... That said, if you put the photographs to any interesting uses please let us know.

[PJH & AG]

The British Library has recently acquired a fantastic digital resource on Latin America: 'Latin American Newspapers 1805-1922'. This database includes over forty titles and tens of thousands of digitised issues of Latin American newspapers from across the region – Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil and the Southern Cone. You can find the resource on the Library's e-databases page and registered readers no longer have to be in our reading rooms to get access!

Detail from Estado de Sao Paulo. Image from Wikipeida.

In his seminal work Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson argues that newspapers, and the spread of newspapers in Latin America in particular, were the cornerstone of the formation of the modern nation. And you will find in this collection contemporary accounts of the struggles for independence, nation building, and the abolition of slavery in Latin America. So whether here at St. Pancras or at home, login and enjoy a fascinating read!

[ENC]

An early visualisation of the collection contents (click for more detail)

The works contained in this post are free of known copyright restrictions.

Those of you who enjoyed Team Americas' cat-themed post a few weeks ago will know that we are currently working to digitise a collection of Canadian photographs held at the Library. Since the digitisation is almost done Andrew and I are beginning to think about ways of displaying the collection and allowing access to the images, beyond hosting them on the British Library Digitised Manuscripts site and Wikimedia Commons.

Since I spent all my university life in geography departments one possibility popped straight into my mind - we could try and map the collection. The picture above is an illustration of the first attempt at this and hopefully I can soon share an interactive version with you. Why a picture at this stage? Well, truth be told, the first results contain a few bugs and I didn't want to give the wrong impression with an early version.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier speaking in Montreal, 27th Sept 1916. British Library shelfmark: HS85/10

That said this first try suggests that mapping would work as a way of opening access and providing users with an easy overview of the collection. It also begins to give a sense of the pattern and density of photographic deposits (important given this is a copyright collection), although this is skewed by the fact that the current map will only add one item to each location.

A pageant from the celebration of Quebec's Tercentenary, 1908. British Library shelfmark: HS85/10

There are a number of ways we could begin to use this as a tool to ask questions of the collection but it is important to note too that such a visualisation will be a good way for people to find the photographs that are of personal interest to them. In short, a map is by far the easiest way to see how many photos of Vancouver, Moose Jaw or Dawson the collection holds.

The above photographs are some examples of photographs that users will eventually be able to find via the map. I should note that the location data in any first version will be generic, pinning photographs to 'Vancouver, BC' as oppose to, 'Stanley Park Drive, Vancouver, BC'. It occurs to me that this level of refinement is something users could help to provide in the future, but one step at a time for now.

The next stage of the project, as Andrew mentioned a few weeks ago, is to tidy up the photographs we have already digitised and we are hosting an editing day on the 18th March. If the above map whets your appetite and you want to come along details can be found here.

[PJH]

 

Phil has been helping our office neighbours in the UK Web Archive team by putting put together a collection of websites on slavery and abolition. Since we know these are subjects of interest to our readers, we thought we'd flag up his latest blogpost. You can read his thoughts on web archiving and the selection process here, and you can go straight to the selected sites here.

Map of Nevis and St. Christopher (St. Kitts), 1684 [Sloane MS 45] 

 
This work is free of known copyright restrictions.

There are two reasons for sharing the above with you, firstly that it is a rather beautiful and interesting old map. Secondly, that it's an example of how digital objects created by the Library in the last few years continue to evolve.

I was looking over the Caribbean Views collection, which hosts this map and a short text about it, when I noticed that its page now has a shiny 'View in Google Earth' button. Intrigued, I clicked it; only to find I don't have the plug-in installed here at the office. However, I gave it a whirl at home and rather enjoyed what I saw.

If you'd like to do the same head on over to the map's Caribbean Views page and give it a whirl. This piece of geotagging is part of the continuing BL Georeferencer project which you can find out more about here and see some of the results of here. Enjoy!

[PJH]

 In Matt’s last blog Film and On the Road, he referenced Truman Capote’s quote (often misquoted),'That's not writing. That's typewriting.'  At the time, a dim memory surfaced in my foggy brain, only to disappear again almost immediately. But it reappeared at the weekend, when a friend and I were browsing in the wonderful bookshop at the Whitechapel Gallery. My friend suddenly waved in front of me a copy of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing: managing language in the digital age. And then I remembered – Goldsmith includes a piece in the book entitled ‘Retyping On the Road.’ He talks of meeting some students who had been given assignments to write a piece in the style of their favourite author. One had chosen Kerouac and complained at how meaningless the exercise had seemed. Goldsmith thought she would have been better off going on her own road trip, - but then came to a another conclusion. He recalled often seeing art students engaged in copying old masters – and wondered if such ‘copying’ could be applied to literature, quoting from Walter Benjamin’s Reflections ‘the power of the text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.’ Perhaps the student could retype some (or even better, all) of On the Road, and she might thereby succeed in getting ‘inside the text.'

The British artist Simon Morris came across Goldsmith’s suggestion and decided to carry it out. Using the scroll edition of On the Road, he began to retype one page a day from the book on his blog Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head. He began on May 31, 2008 with that first sentence ‘I first met Neal not long after my father died,’ (of course, I immediately wondered why he had omitted the second met – it should be 'I first met met Neal'), and continued to the end of the page (ending in mid sentence), then continued the next day with the next page and so on. Every day he would spend c.20 minutes typing a page, finally completing his task in March 2009. Morris says that he would proofread each page, checking for mistakes (so how did he miss that met met?). Having never read the book before, he describes it as ‘the most thrilling read/ride of my life,’ and talks of the insights he gained into Kerouac’s writing. Goldsmith picks up on the fact that Morris found himself accidentally adding his own words – as Kerouac’s ‘shorthand’ allows the reader to complete sentences in their heads. Morris would then delete his own additions in the checking process, but acknowledges that he might have missed some. Goldsmith suggests that Morris’s appropriation of the text ‘need not be a mere passing along of information,’ but something more creative which could lead to ‘producing different versions and additions – remixes even- of an existing text.’  Appropriation and re-purposing are of course recurring themes in Goldsmith’s writing – often controversial but always challenging and thought-provoking (see for example, his piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education).

The web was the perfect conduit for Morris’s performative project – predigital it would have been an altogether different proposition. So the rather surprising culmination to the project was the publication – in print – of Morris’s Getting Inside of Jack Kerouac’s Head. The book mimics almost exactly the design and typography of the Penguin edition of On the Road (google it), and includes Morris's blog, but commences with the last blog and works backwards. As Goldsmith comments, ‘it was jarring to see a blog-driven project reborn as print.’ For me, it's a step too far - the blog I get, but not the book.

So has the project been a success for Morris? ‘One would hope for some truly profound response but really there is none. I don’t feel anything at all. A bit like Jack Kerouac’s own journey on the road and into himself in search of something he never really finds…… all I can really say with any certainty is I’ve never spent such a long time with a book or thought about any book as much.'

For those of you wishing to engage with Kerouac's own typing, the On the Road scroll is on display at the Library until December 27.

[C.H.]

 

Facebook logo from Wikicommons

Team Americas now has a rough-and-ready Facebook page. 'Like' us, if you like, and receive the odd update on British Library events, things we spot on the web, and news of when we've posted to the blog, as well as ask us questions via the 'Wall'.  Let us know what you think of it.

[MJS]