Digital scholarship blog

Image taken from page 203 of '[Griffith's new historical description of Cheltenham and its vicinity ... with ... engravings. L.P.]'

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs

The BL Labs team are pleased to announce that the seventh annual British Library Labs Symposium will be held on Monday 11 November 2019, from 9:30 - 17:00* (see note below) in the British Library Knowledge Centre, St Pancras. The event is FREE, and you must book a ticket in advance to reserve your place. Last year's event was the largest we have ever held, so please don't miss out and book early!

*Please note, that directly after the Symposium, we have teamed up with an interactive/immersive theatre company called 'Uninvited Guests' for a specially organised early evening event for Symposium attendees (the full cost is £13 with some concessions available). Read more at the bottom of this posting!

The Symposium showcases innovative and inspiring projects which have used the British Library’s digital content. Last year's Award winner's drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our digital collections.

The annual event provides a platform for the development of ideas and projects, facilitating collaboration, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field as well as being a focus on the creative reuse of the British Library's and other organisations' digital collections and data in many other sectors. Read what groups of Master's Library and Information Science students from City University London (#CityLIS) said about the Symposium last year.

We are very proud to announce that this year's keynote will be delivered by scientist Armand Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Imperial College, London.

Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College
will be giving the keynote at this year's BL Labs Symposium (2019)

Professor Armand Leroi is an author, broadcaster and evolutionary biologist.

He has written and presented several documentary series on Channel 4 and BBC Four. His latest documentary was The Secret Science of Pop for BBC Four (2017) presenting the results of the analysis of over 17,000 western pop music from 1960 to 2010 from the US Bill Board top 100 charts together with colleagues from Queen Mary University, with further work published by through the Royal Society. Armand has a special interest in how we can apply techniques from evolutionary biology to ask important questions about culture, humanities and what is unique about us as humans.

Previously, Armand presented Human Mutants, a three-part documentary series about human deformity for Channel 4 and as an award winning book, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and Human Body. He also wrote and presented a two part series What Makes Us Human also for Channel 4. On BBC Four Armand presented the documentaries What Darwin Didn't Know and Aristotle's Lagoon also releasing the book, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science looking at Aristotle's impact on Science as we know it today.

Armands' keynote will reflect on his interest and experience in applying techniques he has used over many years from evolutionary biology such as bioinformatics, data-mining and machine learning to ask meaningful 'big' questions about culture, humanities and what makes us human.

The title of his talk will be 'The New Science of Culture'. Armand will follow in the footsteps of previous prestigious BL Labs keynote speakers: Dan Pett (2018); Josie Fraser (2017); Melissa Terras (2016); David De Roure and George Oates (2015); Tim Hitchcock (2014); Bill Thompson and Andrew Prescott in 2013.

The symposium will be introduced by the British Library's new Chief Librarian Liz Jolly. The day will include an update and exciting news from Mahendra Mahey (BL Labs Manager at the British Library) about the work of BL Labs highlighting innovative collaborations BL Labs has been working on including how it is working with Labs around the world to share experiences and knowledge, lessons learned . There will be news from the Digital Scholarship team about the exciting projects they have been working on such as Living with Machines and other initiatives together with a special insight from the British Library’s Digital Preservation team into how they attempt to preserve our digital collections and data for future generations.

Throughout the day, there will be several announcements and presentations showcasing work from nominated projects for the BL Labs Awards 2019, which were recognised last year for work that used the British Library’s digital content in Artistic, Research, Educational and commercial activities.

There will also be a chance to find out who has been nominated and recognised for the British Library Staff Award 2019 which highlights the work of an outstanding individual (or team) at the British Library who has worked creatively and originally with the British Library's digital collections and data (nominations close midday 5 November 2019).

As is our tradition, the Symposium will have plenty of opportunities for networking throughout the day, culminating in a reception for delegates and British Library staff to mingle and chat over a drink and nibbles.

Finally, we have teamed up with the interactive/immersive theatre company 'Uninvited Guests' who will give a specially organised performance for BL Labs Symposium attendees, directly after the symposium. This participatory performance will take the audience on a journey through a world that is on the cusp of a technological disaster. Our period of history could vanish forever from human memory because digital information will be wiped out for good. How can we leave a trace of our existence to those born later? Don't miss out on a chance to book on this unique event at 5pm specially organised to coincide with the end of the BL Labs Symposium. For more information, and for booking (spaces are limited), please visit here (the full cost is £13 with some concessions available). Please note, if you are unfortunate in not being able to join the 5pm show, there will be another performance at 1945 the same evening (book here for that one).

So don't forget to book your place for the Symposium today as we predict it will be another full house again and we don't want you to miss out.

We look forward to seeing new faces and meeting old friends again!

Image taken from page 99 of 'Festival of Song: a series of Evenings with the Poets. Prepared by the author of “Salad for the Solitary” ... (F. Saunders). With ... pictures by Members of the National Academy of Design. Engraved by Bobbett and Hooper'

For any further information, please contact [email protected]

Posted by Mahendra Mahey Manager of BL Labs.

I can't believe it's been a year since people from national, state, regional, university libraries (as well as a few galleries, archives and museums) met in London to attend the first global 'Library Labs' event at the British Library on 13th and 14th of September 2018. These 'Labs' are increasingly found in cultural heritage and academic institutions around the world and offer a space for their users to experiment and innovate on-site and on-line with their own (and others') digitised and born digital collections and data.

We had over 70 people from 43 institutions and 20 countries attend the London event and it was really wonderful, with a very full programme. There was a palpable sense of excitement and willingness to want to share experiences, build new professional relationships and witness the birth of a new international 'Labs' community. Through the event, we were able to understand more about the digital 'Labs' landscape around the world from the results of Library Labs survey. For example, we learned that many institutions were in the process of planning a 'Lab', many wanted to learn more about how to set them up, maintain and sustain them and learn the lessons from those that had already done it. About half of the attendees in London had already set up Labs in their organisations and wanted to share their experiences with other professionals so that they could build better Labs and help others so they didn't have to reinvent the wheel to save time and precious resources.

Some of the presenters from the first Building Library Labs Event at the
British Library, London, UK on 13-14 September 2019

The event was a mixture of presentations and lightning talks, stories of how labs are developing, parallel discussion groups and debates, many of which were videoed. At the end of the event, the collaborative document we had created contained over 60 edited pages of notes, together with a folder of other useful documents and presentations. It was concluded that it would be wonderful to come together to perhaps convert these shared experiences into a useful book/guide, perhaps through a Book Sprint. A Book Sprint is where up to 15 people come together for a week, and with minimal distractions work together to create a book. Each day when the participants sleep, a team of illustrators and editors transform their content for the next day remotely. The week ends having created a book! A great idea for busy people! We felt it was a nice fit for the Labs community we work in or want to create, which are largely based on a 'mindset' of experimentation, taking risks and being prepared to learn from your mistakes. I started to research how it might be possible to hold such a Book Sprint by talking to the Book Sprint company that has had over 20 years experience organising and running these book creation events.

Collectively as a group we decided that we would continue to build the Labs community and establish a mailing list. Clemens Neudecker wrote an excellent blog post about the event.

A screen grab from a virtual zoom meeting of the building Labs community

Subsequently, we held various meetings from October 2018 through to February 2019 (some virtual and some face to face) and agreed to hold our next global Labs meeting at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 March 2019, again with an action packed programme with the help of Katrine Gasser and her team at kbtechlab. Directly after that event, some of us participated in a pre-conference workshop as part of Digital Humanities Nordic 2019, DHN-Labs - Digital Humanities and the National and University Libraries and Archives (in the Nordic and Baltic Countries) on the 6 March 2019.

Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark where the second
Building Library Labs event was held between 4-5 March, 2019

Over 50 people attended the 2-day event in Copenhagen, although similar to the previous event in London, this time we agreed we would hold it under Chatham House rule (an idea from Kirsty Lingstadt from the University of Edinburgh) which many of us found was very liberating.

Again, we managed to produce over 60 pages of notes and collect other relevant and helpful information. It was even more abundantly clear at the end of this event that we would definitely need to find a way for some of us to come together to write a book through the Book Sprint methodology previously proposed.

A very kind and generous offer of exploring funding from her institution was made by Milena Dobreva-McPherson Associate Professor Library and Information Studies at University College London Qatar. Abigail Potter from the Library of Congress Labs also kindly suggested that she and her team may be able to hold the next global Labs meeting in Washington between 4-6 May, 2020 in the USA.

Myself and Milena met in Qatar at the first Musuem's and Big Data conference in Qatar organised by her colleague Georgios Papaioannou Associate Professor of Museum Studies, in May 2019. We formulated a proposal to UCL Qatar (funded by the Qatar Foundation) which was successful. Milena also managed to also obtain funding from the University of Qatar. There has also been support from the British Library Labs, the Library of Congress Labs, Book Sprint Ltd, who agreed to donate half of the Book Sprint fee to run the event and finally Qatar National Library.

What was important from the outset was that the digital version of the book should be made FREELY available on the web to reuse, in line with the spirit and ethos of the group.

Milena also managed to secure funding for research assistants Somia Salim and Fidelity Phiri to help create a global directory of organisations which are doing Labs style things or might want to. They have also helped out and are helping at various Labs style events including the Book Sprint.

From the first building library labs event in September 2018 to the present day there have been various events where the work of this community has been mentioned. Here is a small sample:

• Digital Humanities Australasia 2018, Adelaide - Australia (27 September 2018);
• British Library Labs Symposium 2018, London - UK (12 November 2018)
• Libraries as Labs network, Canberra, Australia (28 March 2019)
• Publishing and reusing Linked Open Data in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs): opportunities and challenges, Museum’s for All, Madrid, Spain (4 April, 2019)
• Museum’s and Big Data Conference, Doha, Qatar (1 May 2019)
• Experimenting in the Digital Research Lab: a hands-on introduction to using digital collections for digital humanities research, DATECH Pre-conference, Workshop, May 2019, KBR Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium (8 May 2019)
• Growing an international Cultural Heritage Labs community - Libraries As Research Partner in Digital Humanities, DH 2019 Pre-conference, The Hague, The Netherlands (8 July 2018)
• ONB Labs Symposium 2019, Vienna, Austria (13 July 2019)
• Digital-Cultural-Heritage-Innovation-Labs Workshop, Livingstone-Museum, Livingstone, Zambia (Second blog post) (1 August 2019) 
• Library Labs as experimental incubators for digital humanities research, as part of TDPL, Oslo, Norway (10 September 2019)

In July 2019, we released an open invitation to apply to be part of the Book Sprint and received some fantastic entries. We would like to thank everyone that sent an application and we would like to reassure everyone that they can still contribute to the community even if they were not chosen on this occasion.

We can now finally announce who will be attending the Book Sprint...drum droll...:

1. Abigail Potter, Senior Innovation Specialist with the Library of Congress Digital Innovation Lab. She tweets at @opba.
2. Aisha Al Abdulla, Section Head of the Digital Repository and Archives at Qatar University Library.
3. Caleb Derven, Head of Technical and Digital Services at the University of Limerick with overall responsibility for strategy and operations related to collections, electronic resources and library systems. He tweets at @calebderven.
4. Ditte Laursen, Head of Department, The Royal Library Denmark responsible for the acquisition of digitally born cultural heritage materials, long-term preservation of digital heritage collections, and access to digital cultural heritage collections. She tweets at @DitteDla.
5. Gustavo Candela, Associate Professor at the University of Alicante and member of the Research and Development department at The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. He tweets at @gus_candela.
6. Katrine Gasser, Section Head of IT at The Royal Library Denmark managing a team of 40 IT experts in programming, networking and research. She tweets at @blackat_ and kbtechlab
7. Kristy Kokegei, Director of Public Engagement at the History Trust of South Australia who oversees the organisation’s public programming, digital engagement, marketing, learning and education programs across 4 State Government funded museums and supporting and enabling 350 community museums and historical societies across South Australia. She tweets at @KristyKokegei and @SAGLAMLab.
8. Lotte Wilms, Digital Scholarship advisor managing the KB Research Lab and Digital Humanities in libraries advocate, co-chair for the LIBER working group Digital Humanities and a board member of the IMPACT Centre of Competence. She tweets at @Lottewilms.
9. Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs (BL Labs), an Andrew W. Mellon foundation and British Library funded initiative supporting and inspiring the use of its data in innovative ways with scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, educators and innovators through competitions, awards and other engagement activities. He tweets at @BL_Labs and @mahendra_mahey.
10. Milena Dobreva-McPherson, Associate Professor Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar with international experience of working in Bulgaria, Scotland and Malta. She tweets at @Milena_Dobreva.
11. Paula Bray, DX Lab Leader at the State Library of NSW and responsible for developing and promoting an innovation lab utilising emerging and existing web technologies to deliver new ways to explore the Library’s collections and its data. She tweets at @paulabray #dxlab @statelibrarynsw
12. Sally Chambers, Digital Humanities Research Coordinator at Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Ghent University, Belgium and National Coordinator for DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities in Belgium. She tweets at @schambers3, @GhentCDH and @KBRbe
13. Sarah Ames, Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, responsible for developing a Digital Scholarship Service and launching the Data Foundry. She tweets at @semames1.
14. Sophie-Carolin Wagner, Co-Founder of RIAT Research Institute for Art and Technology, Co-Editor of the Journal for Research Cultures and Project Manager of ONB Labs at the Austrian National Library.
15. Stefan Karner, Technical Lead of the ONB Labs at the Austrian National Library, providing access to diverse data and metadata sources within the library, developing a platform for users of the digital library to create and share annotations and other user generated data with each other and the public.
16. Armin Straube, Teaching Fellow in Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar. He is an archivist with work experience in data curation, digital preservation and web archiving and tweets at @ArminStraube.

Laia Ros Gasch will be facilitating the Book Sprint and has 10 years of experience as a cultural producer working all over the world with all kinds of groups. Laia speaks English, French, Spanish and Catalan. 

More detailed biographies are available here.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

We all realise how incredibly lucky and privileged we are to be chosen. However, we want to hear from those of you who are interested in this area. What do you think we should be writing about, who should it be for, what style of writing should we use? Please HELP us by completing this questionnaire by Monday 23 September at 0600 BST! We will consider your thoughts and opinions seriously when we sit down to write the book on Monday morning in Doha in Qatar.

We would also like to get your help when we will be disseminating information about how to get hold of the book on social media, and at various events around the world, especially to coincide with International Open Access week 2019 (21-27 October 2019). Planned activities in 2019-2020 include:

• Open Preservation Foundation Consortium, Webinar (11 October 2019)
• RL UK Digital Scholarship Symposium, British Library, London, UK (14 October 2019),
• From Archives to Arch Lives, Cairo, Africa (13-15 October 2019)
• Hong Kong Baptist University - Digital Scholarship Symposium (18 October 2019),
• Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (23 October 2019)
• History Trust SA, Adelaide, Australia (Public Talk - 28 October 2019
• DX Lab, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (Public Talk - 1 November 2019)
• BL Labs Symposium, British Library, London (11 November 2019)
• 7th Estonian Digital Humanities Conference - Use of Digital Cultural Heritage in Research and Education, Tallin, Estonia (4-6 December, 2019)
• ONB Labs Symposium, Vienna, Austria (tba 2020)
• Transkribus User Conference, Innsbruck, Austria (6-7 February, 2020)
• European Labbers meet in Riga, Latvia, pre or post DHN 2020 (17-20 March, 2020)
• Library of Congress Labs, annual Labs group meeting, Library of Congress, Washington, USA (4-6 May, 2020)
• IIPC Research Working Group is planning a series of webinars to introduce work done by various labs, with focus on web archiving.
• LIBER DH Working Group is also planning a series of webinars, amongst which also one on “How to make a GLAM Workbench for Libraries” (tab 2020)

We plan to run a 'Read Sprint' in the near future to review the Book and perhaps create an improved version. We know what we will produce next week won't be perfect!

We have plans to ensure that the book is published on a interactive platform so that it becomes a 'living' book, so that others can add chapters, make amendments, enhancements and add new case studies. We will be making announcements about this soon after the book has been completed.

On a personal note, I feel incredibly grateful, lucky and privileged to have been involved at the very start of this journey. I also feel daunted to be part of the Book Sprint but excited too!

I really want us to create a useful handbook to help cultural heritage organisations build better innovation labs which are often strapped for resources and need help. I have a strong desire that our ‘Book’ will genuinely help and inspire galleries, libraries, archives, museums, universities and other cultural heritage organisations to learn and benefit from those of us who can talk honestly about and share our experiences. I want to share the risks we have taken, mistakes we have made, provide realistic lessons and give sensible advice about what we have learned over the many years in setting up, maintaining and sustaining innovation labs. I believe this approach could mean it may prevent many institutions from having to re-invent the wheel and save them time, money and resources too.

The people in this community have a passionate desire to create something useful and meaningful that will help all of us be better at our jobs and build better innovation labs for the benefit of all our users. Hopefully, we will be following the principles of kindness, generously sharing and understanding and having empathy for the contexts in which we work. In short we hope it sincerely makes a difference and prove that sharing and kindness really can change things.

Now that I have written this, I realise I have done it again, I have written too much! However, I am glad I have written the story of how we got here. What I realise is what a busy year it’s been for everyone and particularly for people in this community, it’s amazing what we have achieved and I want to thank everyone who has played an active role, no matter how small. Let’s hope it continues to grow.

Monday morning, fifteen of us have got to write a book, gulp!

We have extended our deadline for our BL Labs Awards to 21:00 (BST) on Sunday 29^th September, submit your entry here. If you have already entered, you don't have to resubmit, however, we are happy to receive updated entries too.

The BL Labs Awards formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and data.

Submit your entry, and help us spread the word to all interested parties!

This year, BL Labs is commending work in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity that shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Commercial - An activity that delivers or develops commercial value in the context of new products, tools, or services that build on, incorporate, or enhance the Library's digital content.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour that inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Teaching / Learning - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.

After the submission deadline of 21:00 (BST) on Sunday 29^th September for entering the BL Labs Awards has passed, the entries will be shortlisted. Selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Thursday 10^th October 2019. 

A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up in each Awards category at the BL Labs Symposium on 11^th November 2019 at the British Library, St Pancras, London.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up over the last four years has led to the production of a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. In 2018, the Awards commended work in four main categories – Research, Artistic, Commercial and Teaching & Learning:

• Research category Award (2018) winner: The Delius Catalogue of Works: the production of a comprehensive catalogue of works by the composer Delius, based on research using (and integrated with) the BL’s Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue by Joanna Bullivant, Daniel Grimley, David Lewis and Kevin Page from Oxford University’s Music department.
• Artistic Award (2018) winner: Another Intelligence Sings (AI Sings): an interactive, immersive sound-art installation, which uses AI to transform environmental sound recordings from the BL’s sound archive by Amanda Baum, Rose Leahy and Rob Walker independent artists and experience designers.
• Commercial Award (2018) winner: Fashion presentation for London Fashion Week by Nabil Nayal: the Library collection - a fashion collection inspired by digitised Elizabethan-era manuscripts from the BL, culminating in several fashion shows/events/commissions including one at the BL in London.
  
• Teaching and Learning (2018) winner: Pocket Miscellanies: ten online pocket-book ‘zines’ featuring images taken from the BL digitised medieval manuscripts collection by Jonah Coman, PhD student at Glasgow School of Art.

For further information about BL Labs or our Awards, please contact us at [email protected].

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of of British Library Labs.

This guest blog is by Border Crossing, the 2018 BL Labs Teaching & Learning Award Runners Up, for their project, 'Pocahontas and After'.

Two images, each showing two young women dressed to show their culture, their pride, their sense of self. The first image dates from 1907, and shows The Misses Simeon, from the Stoney-Nakoda people of Western Canada, photographed by Byron Harmon. The second was taken in 2018 by John Cobb at Marlborough Primary School, West London, and shows a pupil of Iraqi heritage called Rose Al Saria, pictured with her sister. It was Rose who chose the particular archive image as the basis for her self-portrait, and who conceptualised the way it would be configured and posed.

This pair of photos is just one example in Border Crossings' exhibition Pocahontas and After, which was recently honoured in the British Library’s Labs Teaching and Learning category. The exhibition - which was seen by more than 20,000 people at Syon House last summer, and goes to St Andrews in February - represents the culmination of a sustained period of education and community work, beginning with the 2017 ORIGINS Festival. During the Festival, we not only held a ceremony for three indigenous women to commemorate Pocahontas at Syon, where she had stayed in the summer of 1616: we also brought indigenous artists into direct contact with the diverse communities around the House, in the two Primary Schools where they led workshops and study sessions, in the wonderful CARAS refugee group, and through our network of committed and energetic festival volunteers. In the following months, a distilled group from each of these partners worked closely with heritage experts from the archives (including the British Library’s own Dr. Philip Hatfield), Native American cultural consultants, and our own artistic staff to explore the ways in which Native American people have been presented in the past.

Their journeys into the archives were rich and challenging. What we think of as "realistic" photographs of indigenous people often turned out to be nothing of the kind. Edward Curtis, for example, apparently carried a chest of "authentic" costumes and props with him, which he used in his photographs to recreate the life of "the vanishing race" as he imagined it may have been in some pre-contact Romantic idyll. In other words, the archive photos are often about the photographer and the viewer, far more than they are about the subject.

As our volunteers came to realise this, they became more and more assertive of the need for agency in contemporary portraiture. Complex and fascinating decisions started to be made, placing the generation of meaning in the bodies of the people photographed. For example, Sebastian Oliver Wallace-Odi, who has Ghanaian heritage, saw how Ronald Mumford’s archive photo had been contrived to show “British patriotism” from First Nations chiefs, riding a car bedecked in a Union Jack, during the First World War. Philip showed him how other photos demonstrated the presence of Mounties at the shoot, emphasising the lack of agency from the subjects. Sebastian countered it with an image in which the red white and blue flag is the symbol of the London Underground where his father works, and the car, like his shirt, is distinctly African.

What I love about this exhibition is that the meaning generated does not reside in one image or the other within the pair - but is rather in the energising of the space between, the dialogue between past and present, between different cultures, between human beings portrayed in different ways. It seems to me to be at once of way of honouring the indigenous subjects portrayed in the archive photographs, and of reinventing the form that was often too reductive in its attempts to categorise them.

Thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting this project. Photos from the British Library digital collections.

Michael Walling - Artistic Director, Border Crossings. www.bordercrossings.org.uk

Watch the Border Crossing team receiving their Runner Up award and talking about their project on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 3.46 to 10.09):

Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.

This guest blog is by Professor Catherine Montgomery, recipient of one of two Honourable Mentions in the 2018 BL Labs Awards Research category for her work with the British Library's EThOS collection.

 ‘Contemporary universities are powerful institutions, interlinked on a global scale; but they embed a narrow knowledge system that reflects and reproduces social inequalities on a global scale’ (Connell, 2017).

Having worked with doctoral students for many years and learned much in this process my curiosity was sparked by the EThOS collection at the British Library. EThOS houses a large proportion of UK doctoral theses completed in British Universities and comprises a digital repository of around 500,000 theses. Doctoral students use this repository regularly but mostly as a means of exploring examples of doctorates in their chosen area of research. In my experience, doctoral students are often looking at formats or methodologies when they consult EThOS rather than exploring the knowledge provided in the theses.

So when I began to think about the EThOS collection as a whole, I came to the conclusion that it is a vastly under-used but incredibly powerful resource. Doctoral knowledge is not often thought of as a coherent body of knowledge, although individual doctoral theses are sometimes quoted and consulted by academics and other doctoral students. It is also important to remember that of 84,630 Postgraduate Research students studying full time in the UK in 2016/17, half of them, 42,325, were non-UK students, with 29,875 students being from beyond the EU. So in this sense, the knowledge represented in the EThOS collection is an important international body of knowledge.

So I began to explore the EThOS collection with some help from a group of PhD students (Gihan Ismail, Luyao Li and Yanru Xu, all doctoral candidates at the Department of Education at the University of Bath) and the EThOS library team. I wanted to interrogate the collection for a particular field of knowledge and because my research field is internationalisation of higher education, I carried out a search in EThOS for theses written in the decade 2008 to 2018 focusing on student engagement with internationalisation. This generated an initial data set of 380 doctoral theses which we downloaded into the software package NVivo. We then worked on refining the data set, excluding theses irrelevant to the topic (I was focusing on higher education so, for example, internationalisation at school-level topics were excluded) coming up with a final data set of 94 theses around the chosen topic. The EThOS team at the British Library helped at this point and carried out a separate search, coming up with a set of 78 theses using a specific adjacent word search and they downloaded these into a spreadsheet for us. The two data sets were consistent with each other which was really useful triangulation in our exploration of the use of the EThOS repository.

This description makes it sound very straightforward but there were all sorts of challenges, many of them technology related, including the fact that we were working with very large amounts of text as each of the 380 theses was around 100,000 words long or more and this slowed down the NVivo software and sometimes made it crash. There were also challenges in the search process as some earlier theses in the collection were in different formats; some were scanned and therefore not searchable.

The outcomes of the work with the EThOS collection were fascinating. Various patterns emerged from the analysis of the doctoral theses and the most prominent of these were insights into the geographies of student engagement with internationalisation; issues of methodologies and theory; and different constructions of internationalisation in higher education.

The theses were written by students from 38 different countries of the globe and examined internationalisation of higher education in African countries, the Americas and Australia, across the Asian continent and Europe. Despite this diversity amongst the students, most of the theses investigated internationalisation in the UK or international students in the UK. The international students also often carried out research on their own countries’ higher education systems and there was some limited comparative research but all of these compared their own higher education systems with one or (rarely) two others. There was only a minority of students who researched the higher education systems of international contexts different from their own national context.

A similar picture emerged when I considered the sorts of theories and ideas students were using to frame their research. There was a predominance of Western theory used by the international students to cast light on their non-western educational contexts, with many theses relying on concepts commonly associated with Western theory such as social capital, global citizenship or communities of practice. The ways in which the doctoral theses constructed ideas of internationalisation also appeared in many cases to be following a well-worn track and explored familiar concepts of internationalisation including challenges of pedagogy, intercultural interaction and the student experience. Having said this, there were also some innovative, creative and critical insights into students engaging with internationalisation, showing that alternative perspectives and different ways of thinking were generated by the theses of the EThOS collection.

Raewyn Connell, an educationalist I used in the analysis of this project tells us that in an unequal society we need ‘the view-from-below’ to challenge dominant ways of thought. I would argue that we should think about doctoral knowledge as ‘the-view-from-below’, and doctoral theses can offer us alternative perspectives and challenges to the previous narratives of issues such as internationalisation. However, it may be that the academy will need to make space for these alternative or ‘Southern’ perspectives to come in and this will rely on the capacity of the participants, both supervisors and students, to be open to negotiation in theories and ideas, something which another great scholar, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, describes as intercultural translation of knowledge.

I am very grateful indeed to the British Library and the EThOS team for developing this incredible source of digital scholarship and for their support in this project. I was delighted to be given an honourable mention in the British Library Research Lab awards and I am intending to take this work forward and explore the EThOS repository further. I was fascinated and excited to find that a growing number of countries are also developing and improving access to their doctoral research repositories (Australia, Canada, China, South Africa and USA to name but a few). This represents a huge comparative and open access data set which could be used to explore alternative perspectives on ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge. Where better to start than with doctoral theses?

More information on the project can be found in this published article:

Montgomery, C. (2018). Surfacing ‘Southern’ perspectives on student engagement with internationalisation: doctoral theses as alternative forms of knowledge. Journal of Studies in International Education. (23) 1 123-138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315318803743

Watch Professor Montgomery receiving her award and talking about her project on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 6.57 to 10.39):

Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.

As part of our Digital Conversations series, we invite you to join us for an evening discussing how Indigenous communities are using new technologies to preserve and promote their culture; this takes place on Tuesday 22 May, 18:30 - 20:30, in the British Library Knowledge Centre, to book a ticket go here.

Various topics and examples of how digital platforms are used by communities across the world will be covered. Including crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, apps, Etsy, videogames and social media.  Chaired by Niamh Moore our panel includes the following speakers:

• Robin Llwyd ab Owain, Wikimedia UK Wales Manager, will speak about the work done by the Wikipedia community supporting Celtic and Indigenous Languages, including the Celtic Knot Wikipedia language conferences 

• Gloria O’Neill, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cook Inlet Tribal Council and Upper One Games, the first indigenous-owned video game developer and publisher in the United States, is here in person to discuss BAFTA winning game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), which shares Alaska Native culture and values with the world at large

• Felicity Wright who has over twenty years experience in working with non-profit Aboriginal-owned social enterprises. Currently she works for Injalak Arts in Gunbalanya, Australia, who sell their art and craft work to global audiences from their Etsy store. This will be a recorded presentation introduced by Jo Pilcher, University of Brighton, whose PhD research is about Aboriginal Australian textile production in the Northern Terrority

• Michael Wynne, Digital Applications Librarian, will give an overview of Mukurtu, a free, mobile, and open source content management system platform, which is built with indigenous communities

We are looking forward to a fascinating and lively discussion, so please prepare your questions for the panel! If you can't attend in person, please follow #BLdigital for the twitter stream during the event.

Game play scene from Never Alone featuring the owl man

This event is sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. It will include a combination of in-person, Skype and pre-recorded presentations. This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Matt Finch.

I’m currently a BL Labs Creative/Researcher alongside my role as Creative in Residence for the State Library of Queensland. SLQ is an Australian institution which serves a population of over four and a half million people…spread over an area three times the size of France.

Matt Finch Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland

Our footprint stretches from our headquarters in Brisbane’s cultural precinct to the Indigenous communities of the Torres Strait Islands in the north, the Great Barrier Reef to the east and the edge of the Simpson Desert to the west.

Such a demanding geography means we blend physical and digital activities, embracing our collections but also creating opportunities for local communities to surprise us with their own plans, schemes, dreams, and innovations. We seek to imagine a digital future for Queensland which acknowledges Traditional Owners of the land and pays respect to Indigenous elders past, present, and future, as well as embracing all the many and diverse communities who live, work, and play here.

So what does a Creative in Residence do? You’re equally likely to find someone in my role unearthing new material for our collections, reimagining panel discussions for a writers’ festival, helping teens fight zombies in an abandoned showground , or working in digital spaces.

Given the huge distances involved when you work in a state like ours, we’re especially interested in geolinked collections and mobile digital access. Partnering with BL Labs, we’re currently working on ways to celebrate and share Queensland-related material from the BL collections.

We also make stuff which is brand spanking new. This month, the State Library has released an online comic maker for the global Fun Palaces event which takes place every October.

Online Comic Maker

The Fun Palaces manifesto is “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist” which chimes well with libraries’ mission to ensure everyone has freedom to explore human knowledge and culture on their own terms. (In my mind, the secret manifesto is “hit the library get a drink start a riot”).

The comic maker was piloted in 2015 and this year has been fully integrated into the Fun Palaces site – but we’ve also released the code behind the comic maker on Github.

Online Comic Maker in action!

In 2015, users around the world surprised us by using the simple comic maker to create non-narrative comics, cheeky horror stories, and even comics in Te Reo Māori – this year we look forward to people reimagining, repurposing, and reworking the code behind the comic maker into weird and wonderful new forms. We’d also love to see friends of the BL Labs, sister institutions, and communities worldwide put their own image sets into the drag-and-drop image inventory.

You can contact Matt on Twitter @DrMattFinch

Please don't forget to book for our latest events:

Black Abolitionists in 19th Century Britain. 

Thu 6 Oct, 19:00 – 21:00

British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB

Cost: £8 (Concessions available)

An informative and entertaining evening of talks, performances and discussion about the antislavery movement with scholar Hannah-Rose Murray, actor and writer Joe Williams and actress Martelle Edinborough. 

For more information, please visit: https://goo.gl/WxigUQ

Fourth annual British Library Labs Symposium.

Mon 7 Nov, 9:30 – 17:30

British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB

Cost: FREE

The Symposium showcases innovative projects which use the British Library's digital content and provides a platform for development, networking and debate in the digital scholarship field.  This year’s keynote will be given by Melissa Terras , Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, entitled 'Unexpected repurposing: the British Library's Digital Collections and UCL teaching, research and infrastructure'.

For more information, please visit:  https://goo.gl/2twnr5

We Are Amused! A Night of Victorian Humour.

Mon 7 Nov, 19:00 – 21:00

British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB

Cost: £12 (Concessions available)

Following the BL Labs Symposium, join Dr Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University) and comedians Zoe Lyons, Bob Mills and Iszi Lawrence for the evening as they unearth thousands of old puns, sketches, one-liners, mother-in-law jokes, saucy songs and other comic clippings from the 19th century.

For more information, please visit: https://goo.gl/QASR6K

The Way Ahead? Map Making and Digital Skills for Geography Teaching.

Sat 12 Nov, 9:45 – 13:30

British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB

Cost: £12 - £24

This half-day conference for Geography teachers at Key Stages 2–5 uncovers the British Library’s forthcoming major exhibition Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line and explores a range of approaches to interpreting and creating maps, with a focus on digital resources, to support and enrich Geography in the Primary and Secondary classroom. 

For more information, please visit: https://goo.gl/f014YR

Black Abolitionist Walking Tour.

Sat 26 Nov, 13:30 – 17:00

Starting at the Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street, London WC2B 5AZ

Cost: FREE (places limited)

An afternoon walking tour around central London which will visit six sites where African American abolitionists made an indelible mark on the British landscape. The walking tour will be followed by food, drinks and a short re-enactment of an antislavery meeting at the Old Crown Public House.

For more information, please visit: https://goo.gl/N4acXE

Do you live in or near Nottingham and are you available on Wednesday 3 Feb between 1230 - 1600? Come along to the FREE UK @BL_Labs Roadshow event at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham (we have some places left and booking is essential for anyone interested).

BL Labs Roadshow at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham, hosted by the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project based at the University of Nottingham, Wed 3 Feb (1230 - 1600)

• Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
• Learn how researchers found and revived forgotten Victorian jokes and Political meetings from our digital archives.
• Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
• Find out about a tool that links digitised handwritten manuscripts to transcribed texts and one that creates statistically representative samples from the British Library’s book collections.
• Consider how the intuitions of a DJ could be used to mix and perform the Library's digital collections.
• Talk to Library staff about how you might use some of the Library's digital content innovatively.
• Get advice, pick up tips and feedback on your ideas and projects for the 2016 BL Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September). 

Our hosts are the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project at the University of Nottingham who are kindly providing food and refreshments and will be talking about two amazing projects they have been involved in:

ArtMaps: Putting the Tate Collection on the map

Dr Laura Carletti will be talking about the ArtMaps project which is getting the public to accurately tag the locations of the Tate's 70,000 artworks.

The 'Wander Anywhere' free mobile app developed by Dr Benjamin Bedwell.

Dr Benjamin Bedwell, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham will talk about the free mobile app he developed called 'Wander Anywhere'.  The mobile software offers users new ways to experience art, culture and history by guiding them to locations where it downloads stories intersecting art, local history, architecture and anecdotes on their mobile device relevant to where they are.

For more information, a detailed programme and to book your place, visit the Labs and Digital Humanities and Arts Praxis Workshop event page.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

The BL Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.