Digital scholarship blog

People 'automatically' identified in digital TV news related programme clips.

Guest blog post by Andrew Brown (PhD researcher),  Ernesto Coto (Research Software Engineer) and Andrew Zisserman (Professor) of the Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, and BL Labs Public Award Runner-up for Research, 2019. Posted on their behalf by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

In this work, we automatically identify and label (tag) people in large video archives without the need for any manual annotation or supervision. The project was carried out with the British Library on a sample of 106 videos from their “Television and radio news” archive; a large collection of news programs from the last 10 years. This archive serves as an important and fascinating resource for researchers and the general public alike. However, the sheer scale of the data, coupled with a lack of relevant metadata, makes indexing, analysing and navigating this content an increasingly difficult task. Relying on human annotation is no longer feasible, and without an effective way to navigate these videos, this bank of knowledge is largely inaccessible.

As users, we are typically interested in human-centric queries such as:

• “When did Jeremy Corbyn first appear in a Newsnight episode?” or
• “Show me all of the times when Hugh Grant and Shirley Williams appeared together.

Currently this is nigh on impossible without trawling through hundreds of hours of content. 

We posed the following research question:

Is it possible to enable automatic person-search capabilities such as this in the archive, without the need for any manual supervision or labelling?

The answer is “yes”, and the method is described next.

Video Pre-Processing

The basic unit which enables person labelling in videos is the face-track; a group of consecutive face detections within a shot that correspond to the same identity. Face-tracks are extracted from all of the videos in the archive. The task of labelling the people in the videos is then to assign a label to each one of these extracted face-tracks. The video below gives an example of two face-tracks found in a scene.

Two face-tracks found in British Library digital news footage by Visual Geometry Group - University of Oxford.

Techniques at Our Disposal

The base technology used for this work is a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN), trained for facial recognition [1]. The CNN extracts feature-vectors (a list of numbers) from face images, which indicate the identity of the depicted person. To label a face-track, the distance between the feature-vector for the face-track, and the feature-vector for a face-image with known identity is computed. The face-track is labelled as depicting that identity if the distance is smaller than a certain threshold (i.e. they match). We also use a speaker recognition CNN [2] that works in the same way, except it labels speech segments from unknown identities using speech segments from known identities within the video.

Labelling the Face-Tracks

Our method for automatically labelling the people in the video archive is divided into three main stages:

(1) Our first labelling method uses what we term a “celebrity feature-vector bank”, which consists of names of people that are likely to appear in the videos, and their corresponding feature-vectors. The names are automatically sourced from IMDB cast lists for the programmes (the titles of the programmes are freely available in the meta-data). Face-images for each of the names are automatically downloaded from image-search engines. Incorrect face-images and people with no images of themselves on search engines are automatically removed at this stage. We compute the feature-vectors for each identity and add them to the bank alongside the names. The face-tracks from the video archives are then simply labelled by finding matches in the feature-vector bank.

Face-tracks from the video archives are labelled by finding matches in the feature-vector bank. 

(2) Our second labelling method uses the idea that if a name is spoken, or found displayed in a scene, then that person is likely to be found within that scene. The task is then to automatically determine whether there is a correspondence or not. Text is automatically read from the news videos using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and speech is automatically transcribed using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Names are identified and they are searched for on image search engines. The top ranked images are downloaded and the feature-vectors are computed from the faces. If any are close enough to the feature-vectors from the face-tracks present in the scene, then that face-track is labelled with that name. The video below details this process for a written name.

Using text or spoken word and face recognition to identify a person in a news clip.

(3) For our third labelling method, we use speaker recognition to identify any non-labelled speaking people. We use the labels from the previous two stages to automatically acquire labelled speech segments from the corresponding labelled face-tracks. For each remaining non-labelled speaking person, we extract the speech feature-vector and compute the distance of it to the feature-vectors of the labelled speech segments. If one is close enough, then the non-labelled speech segment and corresponding face-track is assigned that name. This process manages to label speaking face-tracks with visually challenging faces, e.g. deep in shadow or at an extremely non-frontal pose.

Indexing and Searching Identities

The results of our work can be browsed via a web search engine of our own design. A search bar allows for users to specify the person or group of people that they would like to search for. People’s names are efficiently indexed so that the complete list of names can be filtered as the user types in the search bar. The search results are returned instantly with their associated metadata (programme name, data and time) and can be displayed in multiple ways. The video associated with each search result can be played, visualising the location and the name of all identified people in the video. See the video below for more details. This allows for the archive videos to be easily navigated using person-search, thus opening them up for use by the general public.

Archive videos easily navigated using person-search.

For examples of more of our Computer Vision research and open-source software, visit the Visual Geometry Group website.

This work was supported by the EPSRC Programme Grant Seebibyte EP/M013774/1. 

[1] Qiong Cao, Li Shen, Weidi Xie, Omkar M. Parkhi, and Andrew Zisserman. VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age. In Proc. International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition, 2018.

[2] Joon Son Chung, Arsha Nagrani and Andrew Zisserman. VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition. INTERSPEECH, 2018

BL Labs Public Awards 2020

Inspired by this work that uses the British Library's digital archived news footage? Have you done something innovative using the British Library's digital collections and data? Why not consider entering your work for a BL Labs Public Award 2020 and win fame, glory and even a bit of money?

This year's public and staff awards 2020 are open for submission, the deadline for entry for both is Monday 30 November 2020.

Whilst we welcome projects on any use of our digital collections and data (especially in research, artistic, educational and community categories), we are particularly interested in entries in our public awards that have focused on anti-racist work, about the pandemic or that are using computational methods such as the use of Jupyter Notebooks.

Looking for entries now!

Nominate an existing British Library staff member or a team that has done something exciting, innovative and cool with the British Library’s digital collections or data.

The 2020 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its fifth year, gives recognition to current British Library staff who have created something brilliant using the Library’s digital collections or data.

Perhaps you know of a project that developed new forms of knowledge, or an activity that delivered commercial value to the library. Did the person or team create an artistic work that inspired, stimulated, amazed and provoked? Do you know of a project developed by the Library where quality learning experiences were generated using the Library’s digital content? 

You may nominate a current member of British Library staff, a team, or yourself (if you are a member of staff), for the Staff Award using this form.

The deadline for submission is NOON (GMT), Monday 30 November 2020.

Nominees will be highlighted on Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects (everyone is welcome to attend, you just need to register).

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff and public for the awards in our online archive.

In 2019, last year's winner focused on the brilliant work of the Imaging Team for the 'Qatar Foundation Partnership Project Hack Days', which were sessions organised for the team to experiment with the Library's digital collections. 

The runner-up for the BL Labs Staff Award in 2019 was the Heritage Made Digital team and their social media campaign to promote the British Library's digital collections one language a week from letters 'A' to 'U' #AToUnknown).

In the public Awards, last year's winners (2019) drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and community activities that used our data and / or digital collections.

British Library Labs is a project within the Digital Scholarship department at the British Library that supports and inspires the use of the Library's digital collections and data in exciting and innovative ways. It was previously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is now solely funded by the British Library.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

The sixth BL Labs Public Awards 2020 formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using the British Library’s data and / or digital collections by researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, students and the general public.

The closing date for entering the Public Awards is NOON GMT on Monday 30 November 2020 and you can submit your entry any time up to then.

Please help us spread the word! We want to encourage any one interested to submit over the next few months, who knows, you could even win fame and glory, priceless! We really hope to have another year of fantastic projects to showcase at our annual online awards symposium on the 15 December 2020 (which is open for registration too), inspired by our digital collections and data!

This year, BL Labs is commending work in four key areas that have used or been inspired by our digital collections and data:

• Research - A project or activity that shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour that inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Educational - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.
• Community - Work that has been created by an individual or group in a community.

What kind of projects are we looking for this year?

Whilst we are really happy for you to submit your work on any subject that uses our digital collections, in this significant year, we are particularly interested in entries that may have a focus on anti-racist work or projects about lock down / global pandemic. We are also curious and keen to have submissions that have used Jupyter Notebooks to carry out computational work on our digital collections and data.

After the submission deadline has passed, entries will be shortlisted and selected entrants will be notified via email by midnight on Friday 4th December 2020. 

A prize of £150 in British Library online vouchers will be awarded to the winner and £50 in the same format to the runner up in each Awards category at the Symposium. Of course if you enter, it will be at least a chance to showcase your work to a wide audience and in the past this has often resulted in major collaborations.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up over the last five years has led to the production of remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects described in our 'Digital Projects Archive'. In 2019, the Awards commended work in four main categories – Research, Artistic, Community and Educational:

BL  Labs Award Winners for 2019

• Research (2019) Winner: Full-Text search of Early Music Prints Online (F-TEMPO) by Tim Crawford, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Artistic (2019) Winner: Emerging Formats: Discovering and Collecting Contemporary British Interactive Fiction by Lynda Clark
• Community Commendation (2019): John Faucit Saville and the theatres of the East Midlands Circuit - by Lesley Phillips
• Teaching and Learning / Educational (2019) Winner: The Other Voice - RCA - Innovations in sound and art by Masters' students from the Royal College of Art, submitted by Dr Matt Lewis, Tutor of Digital Direction and Dr Eleanor Dare, Reader of Digital Media both at the School of Communication, at the Royal College of Art and Mary Stewart Curator, Oral History and Deputy Director of National Library

For further detailed information, please visit BL Labs Public Awards 2020, or contact us at [email protected] if you have a specific query.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

Innovations in sound and art

Dr Matt Lewis, Tutor of Digital Direction and Dr Eleanor Dare, Reader of Digital Media both at the School of Communication, at the Royal College of Art and Mary Stewart Curator, Oral History and Deputy Director of National Life Stories at the British Library reflect on an ongoing and award-winning collaboration (posted on behalf of them by Mahendra Mahey, BL Labs Manager).

In spring 2019, based in both the British Library and the Royal College of Art School of Communication, seven students from the MA Digital Direction course participated in an elective module entitled The Other Voice. After listening in-depth to a selection of oral history interviews, the students learnt how to edit and creatively interpret oral histories, gaining insight into the complex and nuanced ethical and practical implications of working with other people’s life stories. The culmination of this collaboration was a two-day student-curated showcase at the British Library, where the students displayed their own creative and very personal responses to the oral history testimonies.

The culmination of this collaboration was a two-day student-curated showcase at the British Library, where the students displayed their own creative and very personal responses to the oral history testimonies. The module was led by Eleanor Dare (Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction, RCA), Matt Lewis (Sound Artist and Musician and RCA Tutor) and Mary Stewart (British Library Oral History Curator). We were really pleased that over 100 British Library staff took the time to come to the showcase, engage with the artwork and discuss their responses with the students.

Eleanor reflects:

“The students have benefited enormously from this collaboration, gaining a deeper understanding of the ethics of editing, the particular power of oral history and of course, the feedback and stimulation of having a show in the British Library.”

We were all absolutely delighted that the Other Voice group were the winners of the BL Labs Teaching and Learning Award 2019, presented in November 2019 at a ceremony at the British Library Knowledge Centre.  Two students, Karthika Sakthivel and Giulia Brancati, also showcased their work at the 2019 annual Oral History Society Regional Network Event at the British Library - and contributed to a wide ranging discussion reflecting on their practice and the power of oral history with a group of 35 oral historians from all over the UK.  The collaboration has continued as Mary and Matt ran ‘The Other Voice’ elective in spring 2020, where the students adapted to the Covid-19 Pandemic, producing work under lockdown, from different locations around the world. 

Here is just a taster of the amazing works the students created in 2019, which made them worthy winners of the BL Labs Teaching and Learning Award 2019.

Karthika Sakthivel and Giulia Brancati were both inspired by the testimony of Irene Elliot, who was interviewed by Dvora Liberman in 2014 for an innovative project on Crown Court Clerks. They were both moved by Irene’s rich description of her mother’s hard work bringing up five children in 1950s Preston.

On the way back by Guilia Brancati

Giulia created On the way back an installation featuring two audio points – one with excerpts of Irene’s testimony and another an audio collage inspired by Irene’s description. Two old fashioned telephones played the audio, which the listener absorbed while curled up in an arm chair in a fictional front room. It was a wonderfully immersive experience.

Irene Elliot's testimony interwoven with the audio collage (C1674/05)
Audio collage and photography © Giulia Brancati.
Listen here

Giulia commented:

“In a world full of noise and overwhelming information, to sit and really pay attention to someone’s personal story is an act of mindful presence. This module has been continuous learning experience in which ‘the other voice’ became a trigger for creativity and personal reflection.”

Memory Foam by Karthika Sakthivel

Inspired by Irene’s testimony Karthika created a wonderful sonic quilt, entitled Memory Foam.

Karthika explains,

“There was power in Irene’s voice, enough to make me want to sew - something I’d never really done on my own before. But in her story there was comfort, there was warmth and that kept me going.”

Illustrated with objects drawn from Irene's memories, each square of the patchwork quilt encased conductive fabric that triggered audio clips. Upon touching each square, the corresponding story would play.

Karthika further commented,

“The initial visitor interactions with the piece gave me useful insights that enabled me to improve the experience in real time by testing alternate ways of hanging and displaying the quilt. After engaging with the quilt guests walked up to me with recollections of their own mothers and grandmothers – and these emotional connections were deeply rewarding.”

Karthika, Giulia and the whole group were honoured that Irene and her daughter Jayne travelled from Preston to come to the exhibition, Karthika:

"It was the greatest honour to have her experience my patchwork of her memories. This project for me unfurled yards of possibilities, the common thread being - the power of a voice.”

Irene and her daughter Jayne experiencing Memory Foam © Karthika Sakthivel.
Irene's words activated by touching the lime green patch with lace and a zip (top left of the quilt) (C1674/05)
Listen here

Meditations in Clay by James Roadnight and David Sappa

Listening to ceramicist Walter Keeler's memories of making a pot inspired James Roadnight and David Sappa to travel to Cornwall and record new oral histories to create Meditations in Clay. This was an immersive documentary that explores what we, as members of this modern society, can learn from the craft of pottery - a technology as old as time itself. The film combines interviews conducted at the Bernard Leach pottery with audio-visual documentation of the St Ives studio and its rugged Cornish surroundings.

Meditations in Clay, video montage © James Roadnight and David Sappa.

Those attending the showcase were bewitched as they watched the landscape documentary on the large screen and engaged with the selection of listening pots, which when held to the ear played excerpts of the oral history interviews.

James and David commented,

“This project has taught us a great deal about the deep interview techniques involved in Oral History. Seeing visitors at the showcase engage deeply with our work, watching the film and listening to our guided meditation for 15, 20 minutes at a time was more than we could have ever imagined.”

Beyond Form

Raf Martins responded innovatively to Jonathan Blake’s interview describing his experiences as one of the first people in the UK to be diagnosed with HIV. In Beyond Form Raf created an audio soundscape of environmental sounds and excerpts from the interview which played alongside a projected 3D hologram based on the cellular structure of the HIV virus. The hologram changed form and shape when activated by the audio – an intriguing visual artefact that translated the vibrant individual story into a futuristic media.

Jonathan Blake's testimony interwoven with environmental soundscape (C456/104) Soundscape and image © Raf Martins.
Listen here

Stiff Upper Lip

Also inspired by Jonathan Blake’s interview was the short film Stiff Upper Lip by Kinglsey Tao which used clips of the interview as part of a short film exploring sexuality, identity and reactions to health and sickness.

Donald in Wonderland

Donald Palmer’s interview with Paul Merchant contained a wonderful and warm description of the front room that his Jamaican-born parents ‘kept for best’ in 1970s London. Alex Remoleux created a virtual reality tour of the reimagined space, entitled Donald in Wonderland, where the viewer could point to various objects in the virtual space and launch the corresponding snippet of audio.

Alex commented,

“I am really happy that I provided a Virtual Reality experience, and that Donald Palmer himself came to see my work. In the picture below you can see Donald using the remote in order to point and touch the objects represented in the virtual world.”

Donald Palmer describes his parents' front room (C1379/102)
Interviewee Donald Palmer wearing the virtual reality headset, exploring the virtual reality space (pictured) created by Alex Remoleux.
Listen here

Showcase at the British Library

The reaction to the showcase from the visitors and British Library staff was overwhelmingly positive, as shown by this small selection of comments. We were incredibly grateful to interviewees Irene and Donald for attending the showcase too. This was an excellent collaboration: RCA students and staff alike gained new insights into the significance and breadth of the British Library Oral History collection and the British Library staff were bowled over by the creative responses to the archival collection.

Examples of feedback from British Library showcase of 'The Other Voice' by Royal College of Art

With thanks to the MA Other Voice cohort Giulia Brancati, Raf Martins, Alexia Remoleux, James Roadnight, Karthika Sakthivel, David Sappa and Kingsley Tao, RCA staff Eleanor Dare and Matt Lewis & BL Oral History Curator Mary Stewart, plus all the interviewees who recorded their stories and the visitors who took the time to attend the showcase.

Posted on behalf of Tim Crawford, Professorial Research Fellow in Computational Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London and BL Labs Research Award winner for 2019 by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Introducing F-TEMPO

Early music printing

Music printing, introduced in the later 15th century, enabled the dissemination of the greatest music of the age, which until that time was the exclusive preserve of royal and aristocratic courts or the Church. A vast repertory of all kinds of music is preserved in these prints, and they became the main conduit for the spread of the reputation and influence of the great composers of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, such as Josquin, Lassus, Palestrina, Marenzio and Monteverdi. As this music became accessible to the increasingly well-heeled merchant classes, entirely new cultural networks of taste and transmission became established and can be traced in the patterns of survival of these printed sources.

Music historians have tended to neglect the analysis of these patterns in favour of a focus on a canon of ‘great works’ by ‘great composers’, with the consequence that there is a large sub-repertory of music that has not been seriously investigated or published in modern editions. By including this ‘hidden’ musical corpus, we could explore for the first time, for example, the networks of influence, distribution and fashion, and the effects on these of political, religious and social change over time.

Online resources of music and how to read them

Vast amounts of music, mostly audio tracks, are now available using services such as Spotify, iTunes or YouTube. Music is also available online in great quantity in the form of PDF files rendering page-images of either original musical documents or modern, computer-generated music notation. These are a surrogate for paper-based books used in traditional musicology, but offer few advantages beyond convenience. What they don’t allow is full-text search, unlike the text-based online materials which are increasingly the subject of ‘distant reading’ in the digital humanities.

With good score images, Optical Music Recognition (OMR) programs can sometimes produce useful scores from printed music of simple texture; however, in general, OMR output contains errors due to misrecognised symbols. The results often amount to musical gibberish, severely limiting the usefulness of OMR for creating large digital score collections. Our OMR program is Aruspix, which is highly reliable on good images, even when they have been digitised from microfilm.

Here is a screen-shot from Aruspix, showing part of the original page-image at the top, and the program’s best effort at recognising the 16th-century music notation below. It is not hard to see that, although the program does a pretty good job on the whole, there are not a few recognition errors. The program includes a graphical interface for correcting these, but we don’t make use of that for F-TEMPO for reasons of time – even a few seconds of correction per image would slow the whole process catastrophically.

The Aruspix user-interface

Finding what we want – error-tolerant encoding

Although OMR is far from perfect, online users are generally happy to use computer methods on large collections containing noise; this is the principle behind the searches in Google Books, which are based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

For F-TEMPO, from the output of the Aruspix OMR program, for each page of music, we extract a ‘string’ representing the pitch-name and octave for the sequence of notes. Since certain errors (especially wrong or missing clefs or accidentals) affect all subsequent notes, we encode the intervals between notes rather than the notes themselves, so that we can match transposed versions of the sequences or parts of them. We then use a simple alphabetic code to represent the intervals in the computer.

Here is an example of a few notes from a popular French chanson, showing our encoding method.

A few notes from a Crequillon chanson, and our encoding of the intervals

F-TEMPO in action

F-TEMPO uses state-of-the-art, scalable retrieval methods, providing rapid searches of almost 60,000 page-images for those similar to a query-page in less than a second. It successfully recovers matches when the query page is not complete, e.g. when page-breaks are different. Also, close non-identical matches, as between voice-parts of a polyphonic work in imitative style, are highly ranked in results; similarly, different works based on the same musical content are usually well-matched.

Here is a screen-shot from the demo interface to F-TEMPO. The ‘query’ image is on the left, and searches are done by hitting the ‘Enter’ or ‘Return’ key in the normal way. The list of results appears in the middle column, with the best match (usually the query page itself) highlighted and displayed on the right. As other results are selected, their images are displayed on the right. Users can upload their own images of 16th-century music that might be in the collection to serve as queries; we have found that even photos taken with a mobile phone work well. However, don’t expect coherent results if you upload other kinds of image!

F-Tempo-User Interface

The F-TEMPO web-site can be found at: http://f-tempo.org

Click on the ‘Demo’ button to try out the program for yourself.

What more can we do with F-TEMPO?

Using the full-text search methods enabled by F-TEMPO’s API we might begin to ask intriguing questions, such as:

• ‘How did certain pieces of music spread and become established favourites throughout Europe during the 16th century?’
• ‘How well is the relative popularity of such early-modern favourites reflected in modern recordings since the 1950s?’
• ‘How many unrecognised arrangements are there in the 16th-century repertory?’

In early testing we identified an instrumental ricercar as a wordless transcription of a Latin motet, hitherto unknown to musicology. As the collection grows, we are finding more such unexpected concordances, and can sometimes identify the composers of works labelled in some printed sources as by ‘Incertus’ (Uncertain). We have also uncovered some interesting conflicting attributions which could provoke interesting scholarly discussion.

Early Music Online and F-TEMPO

From the outset, this project has been based on the Early Music Online (EMO) collection, the result of a 2011 JISC-funded Rapid Digitisation project between the British Library and Royal Holloway, University of London. This digitised about 300 books of early printed music at the BL from archival microfilms, producing black-and-white images which have served as an excellent proof of concept for the development of F-TEMPO. The c.200 books judged suitable for our early methods in EMO contain about 32,000 pages of music, and form the basis for our resource.

The current version of F-TEMPO includes just under 30,000 more pages of early printed music from the Polish National Library, Warsaw, as well as a few thousand from the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. We will soon be incorporating no fewer than a further half-a-million pages from the Bavarian State Library collection in Munich, as soon as we have run them through our automatic indexing system.

 (This work was funded for the past year by the JISC / British Academy Digital Humanities Research in the Humanities scheme. Thanks are due to David Lewis, Golnaz Badkobeh and Ryaan Ahmed for technical help and their many suggestions.)

EXPLORING THEATRE HISTORY WITH BRITISH LIBRARY PLAYBILLS AND NEWSPAPERS

Posted on behalf of Lesley Phillips, a former Derbyshire local studies librarian in the UK and BL Labs Community Commendation Award winner for 2019 by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Lesley explains how the British Library's digital collections of playbills and digtised newspapers enabled her to compile a detailed account of the career of the actor-manager John Faucit Saville in the East Midlands 1843-1855.

John Faucit Saville was born in Norwich in 1807, the son of two actors then performing with the Norwich Company as Mr and Mrs Faucit. His parents separated when he was 14 years old and just entering on his stage career. His mother, then a leading actress at Drury Lane, moved in with the celebrated actor William Farren, and continued to perform as Mrs Faucit, while his father became a manager and changed his surname to Saville (his real name).

Oxberry's Dramatic Biography (1825) records his father's grief:

On the evening that the fatal news [of his wife's desertion] reached him [Mr John Faucit] left the theatre and walked over the beach. His lips trembled and he was severely agitated. Many persons addressed him, but he broke from them and went to the house of a particular friend. The facts were then known only to himself. Though a man of temperate habits, he drank upwards of two bottles of wine without being visibly affected. He paced the room and seemed unconscious of the presence of anyone. To his friend's inquiries he made no reply. He once said “My heart is almost broke, but you will soon know why”.

(C.E. Oxberry (ed.) Oxberry's Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes. Vol. III (1825) pp. 33-34, Memoir of William Farren)

Despite the rift between his parents, John Faucit Saville had all the advantages that famous friends and relatives could bring in the theatrical world, but during his time as an aspiring actor it soon became clear that he would never be a great star. In 1841 he began to put his energies into becoming a manager, like his father before him. He took a lease of Brighton Theatre in his wife's home town, but struggled to make a success of it.

Like the other managers of his day he was faced with a decline in the fashion for rational amusements and the rise of 'beer and circuses'. This did not deter him from making a further attempt at establishing a theatrical circuit. For this he came to the East Midlands and South Yorkshire, where the decline of the old circuit and the retirement of Thomas Manly had laid the field bare for a new man. Saville must surely have had great confidence in his own ability to be successful here, given that the old, experienced manager had begun to struggle.

Saville took on the ailing circuit, and soon discovered that he was forced to make compromises. He was careful to please the local authorities as to the respectability of his productions, and yet managed to provide more lowbrow entertainments to bring in the audiences. Even so, after a few years he was forced to reign in his ambitions and eventually reduce his circuit, and he even went back on tour as an itinerant actor from time to time to supplement his income. Saville's career had significant implications for the survival of some of the theatres of the East Midlands, as he lived through the final disintegration of the circuit.

Over the years, John Faucit Saville's acting career had taken him to Paris, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as many parts of England. Without the use of digital online resources it would be almost impossible to trace a career such as his, to explore his background, and bring together the details of his life and work.

Newspaper article from 29 January 1829 detailing the benefit performance for Mr Faucit entitled 'Clandestine Marriage' at the Theatre Royal Brighton

The digitised newspapers of the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk enabled me to uncover the Saville family origins in Bedford, and to follow John Faucit Saville's career from the heights of the London stage, to management at Brighton and then to the Midlands.

Newspaper article detailing benefit performance for Mr JF Saville at Theatre Royal Derby on Friday May 23, 1845, play entitled 'Don Caesar de Bazan' or 'Martina the Gypsy'

The dataset of playbills available to download from the British Library web site https://data.bl.uk/playbills/pb1.html enabled me to build up a detailed picture of Saville's work, the performers and plays he used, and the way he used them. It was still necessary to visit some libraries and archives for additional information, but I could never have put together such a rich collection of information without these digital resources.

My research has been put into a self-published book, filled with newspaper reviews of Saville's productions, and stories about his company. This is not just a narrow look at regional theatre; there are also some references to figures of national importance in theatre history. John Faucit Saville's sister, Helen Faucit, was a great star of her day, and his half-brother Henry Farren made his stage debut in Derbyshire with Saville's company. John Faucit Saville's wife Marianne performed with Macready on his farewell tour and also played at Windsor for Queen Victoria. The main interest for me, however, was the way theatre history reveals how national and local events impacted on society and public behaviour, and how the theatre connected with the life of the ordinary working man and woman.

Front cover of my self-published book about John Faucit Saville

If you are interested in playbills generally, you might want to help British Library provide more information about individual ones through a crowdsourcing project, entitled 'In the Spotlight'.

Posted on behalf of Lynda Clark, BL Labs Artistic Award Winner 2019 by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

My research, writing and broader critical practice are inextricably linked. For example, the short story “Ghillie’s Mum”, recently nominated for the BBC Short Story Award, was an exploration of fraught parent / child relationships, which fed into my interactive novella Writers Are Not Strangers, which was in turn the culmination of research into the way readers and players respond to writers and creators both directly and indirectly. 

“The Memory Archivist” BL Labs Artistic award winner 2019, offers a similar blending of creative work, research and reflection. The basis for the project was the creation of a collection of works of interactive fiction for the UK Web Archive (UKWA) as part of an investigation into whether it was possible to capture interactive works with existing web archiving tools. The project used WebRecorder and Web ACT to add almost 200 items to the UKWA. An analysis of these items was then undertaken, which indicated various recurring themes, tools and techniques used across the works. These were then incorporated into “The Memory Archivist” in various ways.

Opening screen for the Memory Archivist

The interactive fiction tool Twine was the most widely used by UK creators across the creative works, and was therefore used to create “The Memory Archivist”. Key themes such as pets, public transport and ghosts were used as the basis for the memories the player character may record. Elements of the experience of, and challenges relating to, capturing interactive works (and archival objects more generally) were also incorporated into the narrative and interactivity. When the player-character attempts to replay some of the memories they have recorded, they will find them captured only partially, or with changes to their appearance.

There were other, more direct, ways in which the Library’s digital content was included too, in the form of  repurposing code. ‘Link select’ functionality was adapted from Jonathan Laury’s Ostrich and CSS style sheets from Brevity Quest by Chris Longhurst were edited to give certain sections their distinctive look. An image from the Library’s Flickr collection was used as the central motif for the piece not only because it comes from an online digital archive, but because it is itself a motif from an archive – a French 19th Century genealogical record. Sepia tones were used for the colour palette to reflect the nostalgic nature of the piece.

Example screen shots from the Memory Archivist

Together, these elements aim to emphasise the fact that archives are a way to connect memories, people and experiences across time and space and in spite of technological challenges, while also acknowledging that they can only ever be partial and decontextualised. 

The research into web archiving was presented at the International Internet Preservation Consortium in Zagreb and the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Web Archiving & Preservation Working Group event in Edinburgh. 

Other blog posts from Lynda's related work are available here:

• Innovation Fellow for Interactive Fiction in the Emerging Formats Project
• Interactive Fiction in the UK
• Collecting Interactive Fiction

Posted on behalf of Sara Lucas Agutoli, artist, associate professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, BL Labs Artist in residence and runner up in the BL Labs Artistic Award 2019.

Artist: Sara Lucas Agutoli
(Copyright: Ilenia Arosio)

Sara Lucas Agutoli lives and works between London and Bologna.  Her academic research focuses on the concepts of true and false in art, in particular in photography. In her art S. L. Agutoli merges popular themes with a learned and symbolic system of citations. Working with different media, she reflects on the idea of ongoing transformation – of the spaces, of the body, as well as of aesthetics – and creates personal architectures drawing on her inner experiences, knowledge and visions.

When occupied with my full time job, I often spend the time wandering on the net, looking for pictures that trigger my interest, either because they are odd and curious or aesthetically pleasant and elegant.

Since 2011 I’ve enjoyed calling myself a cyber-flâneur¹:^. unlike the Parisian strollers described by Baudelaire, I walked through cyber avenues, getting lost amid different digital archives. I glimpsed through collections of images instead of windows, stared at close-ups of manuscripts instead of sunsets on rivers. The net was my city and I just followed my nose walking through it. I wanted to make my curiosity an aesthetic operation. In doing so I’ve come to believe that online archives are my personal church of Saint-Julien-le-Puvre, the chosen venue for my cyber-dadaist performances,
see: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/184056

For years my working activity followed a pattern: a few months of research – during which I spend hours and hours on Flickr Commons browsing online archives of museums and institutions saving selected images on my hard disk–, followed by months in the studio working creatively with the pictures accumulated.

I did accumulate images and emotions, from advertising to family album pictures. I wanted to explore how photography was used in different parts of the world, eras and in different economical contexts.

In 2011, while in Montreal for my first art residence, I analysed the different uses of vernacular photography in the 50s in North America and Italy. To do so, I used the open archives of most of the North American Libraries (New York Public library, Congregation of Sister of St. Joseph in Canada, California Historical Society and many others) and a private physical archive located in a tin box in my grandmother house.

This lead to a series of pictures inspired by this contrast. The series was exhibited in a solo show called Fermez les yeux.

Sara Mickey: Fermez les yeux

The vastness and the richness of topics of the images I accumulated triggered constantly my creativity and my sense of humour. They often made me ask myself  “why do those pictures exist”?

The images – especially those more vernacular, random and unforeseen – became the objects trouvés I could rework using my imagination and reality.

During this dadaist-inspired net-surfing, the most fertile encounter of the last years has been the one with the collections of two of the major London institutions: the British Library and the Wellcome Collection digital archives.  

I was about to move from Italy to London and so my artistic research was about to change, inspired by this encounter.

I started to become interested in the aesthetics of the Victorian era and in the concept of the museum as an extension of a wunderkammer.

I started collecting  images of naturalia ² and decided to transform them into artificialia in my studio.  And so I did, merging and morphing creatively these images. In 2013 I produced a digital collage of a butterfly scientific illustration and a medical vulva lithography and it was exhibited in public space in Bologna during CHEAP poster Festival.

Posters as part of the CHEAP poster festival

This collage of images from the British Library and the Wellcome Collection became the first piece of the larger project Il muro delle meraviglie – the wall of wonders – for which I chose to use the wall of my living room in my home/atelier in NW London.

Il muro delle meraviglie started like a joke to mock the colonialist aesthetic of Victorian museum collections and it became a work of art. Among the wonders I added subsequently, you can find that first collage of the butterfly and the vulva, which I decided to call  “Do you want to see my butterfly collection?” to make my queer/ feminist perspective encounter the delicacy of the naturalistic illustration of butterfly.

The title, in Italian, refers to an apparently naïve question which has an explicit sexual allusion.

The person who asks “come see my butterflies’ collection” might be suggesting it to obtain something more, as the butterfly is used as a metaphor for the female sex.

Intallazione a DEEP THRASH

This work criticises the male chauvinist obsession for cataloguing, intended as an activity aimed more at showing off, than simply showing. 

It represents a feminist critique and re-appropriation of such images.

Here the butterflies become proper “c*nts” and give visibility to the female genitalia.

It has been exhibited for the first time in 2013 on the streets of Bologna (IT) during CHEAP festival and at Queer demonstration thanks to C*ntemporary. 

If I didn’t have access to the BL and the Wellcome digital archives, all of this wouldn’t have been possible.

Finally, I would like to thank the support I have received from BL Labs and am excited about the new experiments and projects waiting for me around the corner.

Footnotes

1. Flâneur: Flâneur is a French term meaning ‘stroller’ or ‘loafer’ used by nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire to identify an observer of modern urban life. Dada raised the tradition of Flânerie to the level of an aesthetic operation. The Parisian walk described by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s id utilized as an art form that inscribes itself directly in the real space and time, rather than on a medium.
2. Naturalia : Naturalia, which includes creatures and natural objects, with a particular interest in monsters