Digital scholarship blog

Summer may be over, but there is much to look forward to this autumn, including our Late at the Library: Digital Steampunk event on Friday 13^th October 2023, where we invite you to immerse yourself in the Clockwork Watch story world, party with chap hop maestro Professor Elemental and explore 19th-century London in Minecraft. If these kind of shenanigans sound right up your street, then book tickets here and join us!

Clockwork Watch by Yomi Ayeni is currently showcased in the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition, which is open until 15 October 2023. Set in a retro-futurist steampunk Victorian England, Clockwork Watch is a participatory story that includes multiple voices and perspectives on themes relating to empire, colonialism, exploitation and resistance, which is told across a range of formats, including a series of graphic novels (there is an overview of these titles here), immersive theatre, role play, and an online newspaper the London Gazette.

Steampunk Illustration by Brett Walsh

For the evening of Friday 13^th October, the British Library will transform into the story world of the next part of the Clockwork Watch narrative. Featuring an auction of the last few remaining properties on Peak B, and the opening of bids for Peak C, new housing developments situated on floating islands hovering over the British Channel. Leggett and Scarper, the estate agents managing these properties, will also be inviting inventors or anyone with a solution to problems plaguing these floating islands, to submit their plans for a chance to win a Golden Ticket to one of the new homes on Peak C.

© Clockwork Watch / Graham Leggett 2023

Attendees will be able to explore the streets of Sherlock Holmes’ London in Minecraft created by Blockworks and Lancaster University, visit the Night Market, have a photograph taken with authentic Victorian Dark Box photography, or a portrait drawn by artist Dr Geof, and that’s before the auction begins. But be warned, buying your way into this real estate dreamworld is not straightforward – this night is a golden opportunity for the Clockwork Watch underbelly of pickpockets, rogues and vagabonds.

Dressing up and joining in is heartily encouraged. To prepare for this event, we suggest reading the Clockwork Watch graphic novels, you can order these online, or purchase the first two ominbus editions from the British Library’s onsite shop. Also check out the London Gazette website and this special British Library edition of the newspaper. We hope to see you there!

© Clockwork Watch

This year we will be continuing our collaboration with the British Fashion Council running our annual student research competition, which encourages fashion students to use the British Library collections in creating their fashion designs. Once again, we will start the collaboration with a fashion show produced by a leading designer. This year we are delighted to be working with Priya Ahluwalia. Earlier this year Priya worked with the Business and IP centre, contributing to the Inspiring Entrepreneurs’ International Women’s Day event, which discussed how we can best embrace and encourage diversity and inclusion in business.

On 15 September during London Fashion Week Priya will showcase her SS24 collection at the British Library. Following the show, Priya will lead this year’s student competition, focusing on the importance of research in design process. As a part of this competition students across the UK will create fashion portfolios inspired by the Library’s unique collections.

The previous collaborations with the British Fashion Council involved a range of exciting designers such as Nabil El Nayal, Phoebe English, Supriya Lele and Charles Jeffrey.

Phoebe English’s fashion installation at the British Library in 2021

The previous student work utilised the riches of the Library’s digital and physical collections, with the Flickr collection being especially popular with students. However, the inspiration came from many different directions - from art books, photographs and maps to the reading room bags.

This year’s student competition will be launched in October 2023.

From the winning portfolio of Mihai Popesku, Middlesex University student, who used the Library collections to research traditional Romanian dress

Update: there's been some great coverage in the fashion press (and social media), including this Vogue article that begins 'Priya Ahluwalia’s show purposefully took place at the British Library. More than just a venue, it tied into the theme of her work: bringing forgotten or untold stories about talented people to attention'.

The British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged Conference on Monday 30 October, in-person and online, as part of International Open Access Week.

In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open and Engaged 2023: Community over Commercialisation will address approaches and practices to open scholarship that prioritise the best interests of the public and the research community. The programme will focus on community-governance, public-private collaborations, and community building aspects of the topic by keeping the public good in the heart of the talks. It will underline different priorities and approaches for Galleries-Libraries-Archives-Museums (GLAMs) and the cultural sector in the context of open access.

We invite everyone interested in the topic to join us on Monday, 30 October!

This will be a hybrid event taking place at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre in St. Pancras, London, and streamed online for those unable to attend in-person.

You can register for Open and Engaged 2023 by filling this form by Thursday, 26 October 18:00 BST. Please note that the places for in-person attendance are now full and the form is available only for online booking.

Registrants will be contacted with details for either in-person attendance or a link to access the online stream closer to the event.

Programme

Slides and recordings of the talks are available as a collection in the British Library’s Research Repository.

9:30     Registration opens for in-person attendees. Entrance Hall at the Knowledge Centre.

10:00   Welcome

10:10   Keynote from Monica Westin, Senior Product Manager at the Internet Archive

Commercial Break: Imagining new ownership models for cultural heritage institutions.

10:40   Session on public-private collaborations for public good chaired by Liz White, Director of Library Partnerships at the British Library.

• Balancing public-private partnerships with responsibilities to our communities. Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, The British Library
• Where do I stand? Deconstructing Digital Collections [Research] Infrastructures: A perspective from Towards a National Collection. Javier Pereda, Senior Researcher of the Towards a National Collection (TaNC)
• "This is not IP I'm familiar with." The strange afterlife and untapped potential of public domain content in GLAM institutions. Douglas McCarthy, Head of Library Learning Centre, Delft University of Technology.

11:40   Break

12:10   Lightning talks on community projects chaired by Graham Jevon, Digital Service Specialist at the British Library.

• The Turing Way: Community-led Resources for Open Research and Data Science. Emma Karoune, Senior Research Community Manager, The Alan Turing Institute.
• Open Online Tools for Creating Interactive Narratives. Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator for Digital Publications and Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections, The British Library

12:45   Lunch

13:30   Session on the community-centred infrastructure in practice chaired by Jenny Basford, Repository Services Lead at the British Library.

• AHRC, Digital Research Infrastructure and where we want to go with it. Tao Chang, Associate Director, Infrastructure & Major Programmes, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• The critical role of repositories in advancing open scholarship. Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). (Remote talk)
• Investing in the Future of Open Infrastructure. Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI). (Remote talk)

14:30   Break

15:00   Session on the role of research libraries in prioritizing the community chaired by Ian Cooke, Head of Contemporary British Publications at the British Library.

• Networks of libraries supporting open access book publishing. Rupert Gatti, Co-founder and the Director of Open Book Publishers, Director of Studies in Economics at the Trinity College Cambridge
• Collective action for driving open science agenda in Africa and Europe. Iryna Kuchma, Open Access Programme Manager at EIFL. (Remote talk)
• The Not So Quiet Rights Retention Revolution: Research Libraries, Rights and Supporting our Communities. William Nixon, Deputy Executive Director at RLUK-Research Libraries UK

16:00   Closing remarks

Social media hashtag for the event is #OpenEngaged. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

Digitised archives and library collections are rich resources for creative practitioners, including video game makers, who can bring history to life in new ways with immersive storytelling. A wonderful example of this is Astrologaster by Nyamyam, an interactive comedy set in Elizabethan London, based on the manuscripts of medical astrologer Simon Forman, which is currently showcased in the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition.

On Friday 15^th September we are delighted to host an event to celebrate the making and the music of Astrologaster. Featuring game designer Jennifer Schneidereit in conversation with historian Lauren Kassell discussing how they created the game. Followed by a vocal quartet who will sing madrigal songs from the soundtrack composed by Andrea Boccadoro. Each character in the game has their own Renaissance style theme song with witty lyrics written by Katharine Neil. This set has never before been performed live, so we can’t wait to hear these songs at the Library and we would love for you to join us, click here to book. We've had the title song, which you can play below, as an earworm for the last few months!

Simon Forman was a self-taught doctor and astrologer who claimed to have cured himself of the plague in 1592. Despite being unlicensed and scorned by the Royal College of Physicians he established a practice in London where he analysed the stars to diagnose and solve his querents’ personal, professional and medical problems. Forman documented his life and work in detail, leaving a vast quantity of papers to his protégé Richard Napier, whose archive was subsequently acquired by Elias Ashmole for the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. In the nineteenth century this collection transferred to the Bodleian Library, where Forman’s manuscripts can still be consulted today.

Screen capture image of the Casebooks digital edition showing ‘CASE5148’.

Lauren Kassell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji (eds.), ‘CASE5148’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/cases/CASE5148, accessed 1 September 2023.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Casebooks Project led by Professor Lauren Kassell at the University of Cambridge, spent over a decade researching, digitising, documenting and transcribing these records. Producing The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition published by Cambridge Digital Library in May 2019. Transforming the archive into a rich searchable online resource, with transcriptions and editorial insights about the astrologers’ records, alongside digitised images of the manuscripts.

In 2014 Nyamyam’s co-founder and creative director Jennifer Schneidereit saw Lauren present her research on Simon Forman’s casebooks, and became fascinated by this ambitious astrologer. Convinced that Forman and his patients’ stories would make an engaging game with astrology as a gameplay device, she reached out to Lauren to invite her to be a consultant on the project. Fortunately Lauren responded positively and arranged for the Casebooks Project to formally collaborate with Nyamyam to mine Forman’s patient records for information and inspiration to create the characters and narrative in the Astrologaster game.  

Still image of a playthrough video demonstrating how to play Astrologaster made by Florence Smith Nicholls for the Digital Storytelling exhibition

At the British Library we are interested in collecting and curating interactive digital narratives as part of our ongoing emerging formats research. One method we are investigating is the acquisition and creation of contextual information, such as recording playthrough videos. In the Digital Storytelling exhibition you can watch three gameplay recordings, including one demonstrating how to play Astrologaster. These were made by Florence Smith Nicholls, a game AI PhD researcher based at Queen Mary University of London, using facilities at the City Interaction Lab within the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London. Beyond the exhibition, these recordings will hopefully benefit researchers in the future, providing valuable documentation on the original ‘look and feel’ of an interactive digital narrative, in addition to instructions on use whenever a format has become obsolete.

The Digital Storytelling exhibition is open until the 15th October 2023 at the British Library, displaying 11 narratives that demonstrate the evolving field of interactive writing. We hope you can join us for upcoming related events, including the Astrologaster performance on Friday 15^th September, and an epic Steampunk Late on Friday 13th October. We are planning this Late with Clockwork Watch, Blockworks and Lancaster University's Litcraft initiative, so watch this blog for more information on this event soon.

Three of us from the British Library Digital Research Team will be attending Digital Humanities 2023 in Graz, Austria next week. The last DH Conference we attended was in Utrecht in 2019 and we can’t wait to participate again in person this year. 

We are looking forward to meeting new and old DH-ers and to having exciting in-person conversations in between the conference sessions throughout the week. 

In particular we want to invite you to come and visit us during the conference poster session on Wednesday 12 July from 18:00. There will be drinks and nibbles on offer and ample time for discussions.

Here is a list of our posters and we look forward to talking to you about our collaborations and projects:

Rossitza will present a poster about collaborations as part of her AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship project Datafication and reuse of the descriptions of the incunabula collection at the British Library (pp.505-506)

As part of the Living with Machines project Mia contributed to the poster about Metadata Enrichment in the Living with Machines Project: User-focused Collaborative Database Development in a Digital Humanities Context (pp.553-555)

Stella will present the UK Digital Comics: Challenges and Opportunities of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. A Co-designed Comic Poster (pp.596-597)

We will also be at some of the pre-conference workshops on Tuesday. Rossitza will attend the all-day OCR4all - Open-Source OCR and HTR Across the Centuries, and Stella will participate in a couple of half-day workshops: the AudiAnnotate Workshop with Radio Venceremos, Rebel Radio Station and SpokenWeb: Using IIIF with AV to Build Editions and Exhibits and Creating, storing, and sharing your own web archives with open source Webrecorder tools

The pre-conference communications have been great and you can find out more about the conference programme in the impressive Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts | Zenodo We are thrilled to be joining this exciting event held in this stunning Austrian city.

Wir kommen, Graz. Bis bald!

This Friday we are looking forward to hosting MIX 2023 at the Library. Presented in partnership with Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, The Writing Platform and MyWorld, this conference explores the intersection of writing and technology, creating an opportunity for scholars and practitioners to share and discuss research and practice in the rapidly evolving field of storytelling in immersive environments.

Our opening keynote speaker is Adrian Hon, co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of the world’s best selling smartphone fitness game, Zombies, Run!, which is currently showcased in the Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition (2 June – 15 October 2023). Following Adrian’s talk is a jam packed programme of presentations and panel discussions examining where and how creative writing and emerging technologies meet. MIX 2023 sessions will cover a range of themes and topics including interactive and locative works, text in immersive media, digital and film poetry, narrative games, digital preservation, archiving and curation, and storytelling with AI. There will also be an area at this event for attendees to experience VR works of poetry and literature, including The Abandoned Library by Dreaming Methods, led by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston.

If this event sounds up your street, there is still time to book a place for MIX 2023 on Friday 7^th July, 09:00 - 17:00. It will take place in person, in the Library’s Knowledge Centre and will not be live-streamed. The ticket price covers a sandwich lunch, refreshments during the day, and includes access to an evening performance of An Island of Sound by award winning poet J.R. Carpenter and audiovisual composer Jules Rawlinson. 

If you would like to develop your interactive writing skills, then you may also be interested in signing up for our Fiction as Dialogue Interactive Fiction Summer School, which will run from Monday 21^st to Friday 25th August 2023. Led by Dr. Florencia Minuzzi, veteran games writer and narrative designer, this course will teach participants how to create interactive narratives using ink, a writer-friendly open-source scripting language that does not require programming knowledge.

This summer school will also feature expert guest speakers, including Corey Brotherson, the writer for in-development interactive narrative Windrush Tales, and the adapting writer/editor of Yomi Ayeni’s acclaimed steampunk transmedia series, Clockwork Watch. Meghna Jayanth, a video game writer and narrative designer, known for her writing on inkle's 80 Days, for which she won the UK Writers’ Guild Award for Best Writing in a Video Game. Dan Hett, a prolific digital artist and writer from Manchester, whose work c-ya-laterrrr won the 2020 New Media Writing Prize, and game designer Destina Connor, Co-director of Tea-Powered Games, an independent game company dedicated to telling interesting stories in innovative ways.

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the British Library and also 10 years since the introduction of non-print (electronic) legal deposit, providing a perfect moment to reflect on our achievements and also to look forwards to the future. Our Digital Storytelling exhibition events, including MIX 2023, create opportunities to celebrate pioneering and experimental writing, and also to consider what new forms of digital storytelling may arise in the coming years. We hope you can join us.

On the 22^nd June in 1948 the HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, bringing people from the Caribbean who had been invited to help rebuild "the motherland" after the devastation of the Second World War.

Seventy-five years later, stories from the Windrush generation are shared in a ground breaking illustrated text-based interactive narrative from 3-Fold Games. Windrush Tales is still in development, but a preview can be read exclusively in the British Library’s current Digital Storytelling exhibition, which is open until 15 October 2023.

Windrush Tales art by Naima Ramanan © 3-Fold Games

Windrush Tales tells the stories of characters Rose, an aspiring nurse, and her older brother Vernon, through a beautiful illustrated interactive photo album and branching narrative, allowing choices within the game to lead to one of many endings. Apprehensive but tenacious, Rose joins her brother in England with the intention to start work as a nurse in the newly formed NHS. Vernon has been in Britain for several years but, unknown to his sister, has struggled to find and stay in employment. Through his photography, he documents how they adapt to their new life, from grassroots arts and activism, to church and social clubs.

Windrush Tales art by Naima Ramanan © 3-Fold Games

As part of their extensive research process to develop the game's story lines, creative director Chella Ramanan and writer Corey Brotherson, both descendants of the Windrush generation, have drawn upon their families' experiences, news coverage, books, and exhibitions. They also consulted with people who emigrated from the Caribbean to Britain during the Windrush period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, and their families, via a workshop organised in collaboration with Jennifer Allsopp, from the University of Birmingham.

Windrush Tales is one of eleven showcased narratives in Digital Storytelling, the first exhibition of its kind at the Library. Curators worked closely with writers, artists and creators to display a range of innovative publications, which reflect the rapidly evolving field of interactive writing, stories that are dynamic, responsive, personalised and immersive.

To accompany this exhibition there is a season of in-person events at the Library. Writer Corey Brotherson from the Windrush Tales team will be speaking about another of his projects, the Clockwork Watch story world at MIX 2023 Storytelling in Immersive Media, a one-day conference exploring the intersection of writing and technology on Friday 7 July 2023. Corey is also a guest tutor at the Fiction as Dialogue, Interactive Fiction Summer School, which runs from 21^st to the 25th August 2023.

If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, then join us on 18th May, Thursday for an online repository training session for cultural heritage professionals.

This event is part of the Library’s Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals. It is designed based on the input received from previous repository training events (this, this and this) to explore some areas of the open scholarship further. They include but are not limited to, research activities in GLAM, benefits of research repositories, scholarly publishing, research data management and digital preservation in scholarly communications.

Who is it for?

It is intended for those who are working in cultural heritage or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting the research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics is welcome to attend!

Programme

13.00                  Welcome and introductions

      Susan Miles, Scholarly Communications Specialist, British Library

Session 1          Open scholarship in GLAM research  

13.15                  Repositories to facilitate open scholarship

     Jenny Basford, Repository Services Lead, British Library

13.40                 Scholarly publishing dynamics in the GLAM environment

     Ilkay Holt, Scholarly Communications Lead, British Library

14.05                  Q&A

14.20                 Break time

Session 2          Building openness in GLAM research  

14.40                  Research data management

      Jez Cope, Data Services Lead, British Library

15.05                  Digital preservation and scholarly communications

      Neil Jefferies, Head of Innovation, Bodleian Libraries

15.30                  Q&A

15.45                  Closing

Register!

The event will take place from 13.00 to 15.45 on 18 May, Thursday. Please register at this link to receive your access link for the online session.

What is next?

The last training event of the Library’s Repository Training Programme will be held on 31 May in Cardiff, hosted by the National Museums Cardiff. It will be an update and re-run of the previous face-to-face events. More information about the programme and registration link can be found in this blog post.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or comments about the events.

Previous Events

31 January, in-person, Edinburgh, hosted by the National Museums Scotland

8 March, online, hosted by the British Library

31 March, in-person, York, hosted by Archeology Data Service at the University of York

About British Library’s Repository Training Programme

The Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support cultural heritage organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the scoping report and the development of this training programme in this blog post.