Digital scholarship blog

On Monday 12th November, 2018, the British Library hosted the sixth annual BL Labs Symposium, celebrating all things digital at the BL. This was our biggest ever symposium with the conference centre at full capacity - proof, if any were needed, of the importance of using British Library digital collections and technologies for innovative projects in the heritage sector.

The delegates were welcomed by our Chief Executive, Roly Keating, and there followed a brilliant keynote by Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In his talk, Dan reflected on his 3D modelling projects at the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam, and talked about the importance of experimenting with, re-imagining, and re-mixing cultural heritage digital collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs).

This year’s symposium had quite a focus on 3D, with a series of fascinating talks and demonstrations throughout the day by visual artists, digital curators, and pioneers of 3D photogrammetry and data visualisation technologies. The full programme is still viewable on the Eventbrite page, and videos and slides of the presentations will be uploaded in due course.

Each year, BL Labs recognises excellent work that has used the Library's digital content in five categories. The 2018 winners, runners up and honourable mentions were announced at the symposium and presented with their awards throughout the day. This year’s Award recipients were:

Research Award:

Winner: The Delius Catalogue of Works by Joanna Bullivant, Daniel Grimley, David Lewis and Kevin Page at the University of Oxford

Honourable Mention: Doctoral theses as alternative forms of knowledge: Surfacing ‘Southern’ perspectives on student engagement with internationalisation by Catherine Montgomery and a team of researchers at the University of Bath

Honourable Mention: HerStories: Sites of Suffragette Protest and Sabotage by Krista Cowman at the University of Lincoln and Rachel Williams, Tamsin Silvey, Ben Ellwood and Rosie Ryder of Historic England

Artistic Award:

Winner: Another Intelligence Sings by Amanda Baum, Rose Leahy and Rob Walker

Runner Up: Nomad by independent researcher Abira Hussein, and Sophie Dixon and Edward Silverton of Mnemoscene

Teaching & Learning Award:

Winner: Pocket Miscellanies by Jonah Coman

Runner Up: Pocahontas and After by Michael Walling, Lucy Dunkerley and John Cobb of Border Crossings

Commercial Award:

Winner: The Library Collection: Fashion Presentation at London Fashion Week, SS19 by Nabil Nayal in association with Colette Taylor of Vega Associates

Runner Up: The Seder Oneg Shabbos Bentsher by David Zvi Kalman, Print-O-Craft Press

Staff Award:

Winner: The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700-1200 by Tuija Ainonen, Clarck Drieshen, Cristian Ispir, Alison Ray and Kate Thomas

Runner Up: The Digital Documents Harvesting and Processing Tool by Andrew Jackson, Sally Halper, Jennie Grimshaw and Nicola Bingham

The judging process is always a difficult one as there is such diversity in the kinds of projects that are up for consideration! So we wanted to also thank all the other entrants for their high quality submissions, and to encourage anyone out there who might be considering applying for a 2019 award!

We will be posting guest blogs by the award recipients over the coming months, so tune in to read more about their projects.

And finally, save the date for this year's symposium, which will be held at the British Library on Monday 11th November, 2019.

This post by the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections, Dr Mia Ridge, reports on an experimental format designed to provide more flexible and timely training on fast-moving topics like text and data mining.

This post covers two topics – firstly, an update to the established format of sessions on our Digital Scholarship Training Programme (DSTP) to introduce ‘strands’ of related modules that cumulatively make up a ‘course’, and secondly, an overview of subjects we’ve covered related to content mining for digital scholarship with cultural heritage collections.

Introducing ‘strands’

The Digital Research team have been running the DSTP for some years now. It’s been very successful but we know that it's hard for people to get away for a whole day, so we wanted to break courses that might previously have taken 5 or 6 hours of a day into smaller modules. Shorter sessions (talks or hands-on workshops) only an hour or at most two long seemed to fit more flexibly into busy diaries. We can also reach more people with talks than with hands-on workshops, which are limited by the number of training laptops and the need to offer more individual

A 'strand' is a new, flexible format for learning and maintaining skills, with training delivered through shorter modules that combine to build attendees’ knowledge of a particular topic over time. We can repeat individual modules – for example, a shorter ‘Introduction to’ session might run more often, or target people with some existing knowledge for more advanced sessions. I haven’t formally evaluated it but I suspect that the ability to pick and choose sessions means that attendees for each module are more engaged, which makes for a better session for everyone. We've seen a lot of uptake – in some cases the 40 or so places available go almost immediately - so offering shorter sessions seems to be working.

Designing courses as individual modules makes it easier to update individual sections as technologies and platforms change. This format has several other advantages: staff find it easier to attend hour-long modules, and they can try out methods on their own collections between sessions. It takes time for attendees to collect and prepare their own data for processing with digital methods (not to mention preparation time and complexity for the instructor), so we've stayed away from this in traditional workshops.

New topics can be introduced on a 'just in time' basis as new tools and techniques emerge. This seemed to address lots of issues I was having in putting together a new course on content mining. It also makes it easier to tackle a new subject than the established 5-6 hour format, as I can pilot short sessions and use the lessons learnt in planning the next module.

The modular format also means we can invite international experts and collaborators to give talks on their specialisms with relatively low organisational overhead, as we regularly run ‘21^st Century Curatorship’ talks for staff. We can link relevant staff talks, or our monthly ‘Hack and Yack’ and Digital Scholarship Reading Groups sessions to specific strands.

We originally planned to start each strand with an introductory module outlining key concepts and terms, but in reality we dived into the first one as we already had talks that'd fit lined up.

Content mining for digital scholarship with cultural heritage collections

From the course blurb: ‘Content mining (sometimes ‘text and data mining’) is a form of computational processing that uses automated analytical techniques to analyse text, images, audio-visual material, metadata and other forms of data for patterns, trends and other useful information. Content mining methods have been applied to digitised and digital historic, cultural and scientific collections to help scholars answer new research questions at scale, analysing hundreds or hundreds of thousands of items. In addition to supporting new forms of digital scholarship that apply content mining methods, methods like Named Entity Recognition or Topic Modelling can make collection items more discoverable. Content mining in cultural heritage draws on data science, 'distant reading' and other techniques to categorise items; identify concepts and entities such as people, places and events; apply sentiment analysis and analyse items at scale.’

An easily updatable mixture of introductory talks, tutorial sessions, hands-on workshops and case studies from external experts fit perfectly into the modular format, and it's worked out well, with a range of topics and formats offered so far. Sessions have included: an Introduction to Machine Learning; Computational models for detecting semantic change in historical texts (Dr Barbara McGillivray, Alan Turing Institute); Computer vision tools with Dr Giles Bergel, from the University of Oxford's Visual Geometry Group; Jupyter Notebooks/Python for simple processing and visualisations of data from In the Spotlight; Listening to the Crowd: Data Science to Understand the British Museum's Visitors (Taha Yasseri, Turing/OII); Visualising cultural heritage collections (Olivia Fletcher Vane, Royal College of Art); An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics for the Humanities (Ruth Byrne, BL and Lancaster PhD student); Corpus Analysis with AntConc.

What’s next?

My colleagues Nora McGregor, Stella Wisdom and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert have some great ‘strands’ planned for the future, including Stella’s on ‘Emerging Formats’ and Adi’s on ‘Place’, so watch this space for updates!

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, BL Labs Manager.

Building Library Labs

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

The BL Labs team are pleased to announce that the sixth annual British Library Labs Symposium will be held on Monday 12 November 2018, from 9:30 - 17:30 in the British Library Knowledge Centre, St Pancras. The event is free, and you must book a ticket in advance. Last year's event was a sell out, so don't miss out!

The Symposium showcases innovative and inspiring projects which use the British Library’s digital content, providing a platform for development, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field as well as being a focus on the creative reuse of digital collections and data in the cultural heritage sector.

We are very proud to announce that this year's keynote will be delivered by Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Dan's keynote will reflect on his years of experience in assessing the value, impact and importance of experimenting with, re-imagining and re-mixing cultural heritage digital collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Dan will follow in the footsteps of previous prestigious BL Labs keynote speakers: Josie Fraser (2017); Melissa Terras (2016); David De Roure and George Oates (2015); Tim Hitchcock (2014); and Bill Thompson and Andrew Prescott in 2013.

Stella Wisdom (Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections at the British Library) will give an update on some exciting and innovative projects she and other colleagues have been working on within Digital Scholarship. Mia Ridge (Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections at the British Library) will talk about a major and ambitious data science/digital humanities project 'Living with Machines' the British Library is about to embark upon, in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute for data science and artificial intelligence.Throughout the day, there will be several announcements and presentations from nominated and winning projects for the BL Labs Awards 2018, which recognise work that have used the British Library’s digital content in four areas: Research, Artistic, Commercial, and Educational. The closing date for the BL Labs Awards is 11 October, 2018, so it's not too late to nominate someone/a team, or enter your own project! There will also be a chance to find out who has been nominated and recognised for the British Library Staff Award 2018 which showcases 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 12 October 2018).

Adam Farquhar (Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library) will give an update about the future of BL Labs and report on a special event held in September 2018 for invited attendees from National, State, University and Public Libraries and Institutions around the world, where they were able to share best practices in building 'labs style environments' for their institutions' digital collections and data.

There will be a 'sneak peek' of an art exhibition in development entitled 'Imaginary Cities' by the visual artist and researcher Michael Takeo Magruder. His practice  draws upon working with information systems such as live and algorithmically generated data, 3D printing and virtual reality and combining modern / traditional techniques such as gold / silver gilding and etching. Michael's exhibition will build on the work he has been doing with BL Labs over the last few years using digitised 18th and 19th century urban maps bringing analog and digital outputs together. The exhibition will be staged in the British Library's entrance hall in April and May 2019 and will be free to visit.

Finally, we have an inspiring talk lined up to round the day off (more information about this will be announced soon), and - as is our tradition - the symposium will conclude with a reception at which delegates and staff can mingle and network over a drink and nibbles.

So book your place for the Symposium today and 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 and Eleanor Cooper (BL Labs Team)

With three months to go before the submission deadline, we would like to remind you about the 2018 British Library Labs Awards!

The BL Labs Awards are a way of formally recognising outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and data.

Have you been working on a project that uses digitised material from the British Library's collections? If so, we'd like to encourage you to enter that project for an award in one of our categories.

This year, BL Labs will be giving awards for work in four key areas:

• Research - A project or activity which 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 which 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.

BL Labs Awards 2017 Winners (Top-Left- Research Award Winner – A large-scale comparison of world music corpora with computational tools , Top-Right (Commercial Award Winner – Movable Type: The Card Game), Bottom-Left(Artistic Award Winner – Imaginary Cities) and Bottom-Right (Teaching / Learning Award Winner – Vittoria’s World of Stories)

There is also a Staff Award which recognises a project completed by a staff member or team, with the winner and runner up being announced at the Symposium along with the other award winners.

The closing date for entering your work for the 2018 round of BL Labs Awards is midnight BST on Thursday 11^th October (2018). Please submit your entry and/or help us spread the word to all interested and relevant parties over the next few months. This will ensure we have another year of fantastic digital-based projects highlighted by the Awards!

Read more about the Awards (FAQs, Terms & Conditions etc), practice your application with this text version, and then submit your entry online!

The entries will be shortlisted after the submission deadline (11/10/2018) has passed, and selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Friday 26th October 2018. 

A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up in each of the Awards categories at the BL Labs Symposium on 12^th November 2018 at the British Library, St Pancras, London.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up from the last three years has resulted in a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. You can read about some of last year's Awards winners and runners up in our other blogs, links below:

• Research Award (2017) winner: 'A large-scale comparison of world music corpora with computational tools', by Maria Panteli, Emmanouil Benetos and Simon Dixon. Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
• Research Award (2017) runner up: 'Samtla' by Dr Martyn Harris, Prof Dan Levene, Prof Mark Levene and Dr Dell Zhang
• Commercial Award (2017) winner: 'Movable Type: The Card Game' by Robin O'Keeffe
• Artistic Award (2017) winner: 'Imaginary Cities' by Michael Takeo Magruder
• Artistic Award (2017) runner up: 'Face Swap', by Tristan Roddis and Cogapp
• Teaching and Learning (2017) winner: 'Vittoria's World of Stories' by the pupils and staff of Vittoria Primary School, Islington
• Teaching and Learning (2017) runner up: 'Git Lit' by Jonathan Reeve
• Staff Award (2017) winner: 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' by Layli Uddin, Priyanka Basu, Tom Derrick, Megan O’Looney, Alia Carter, Nur Sobers Khan, Laurence Roger and Nora McGregor
• Staff Award (2017) runner up: 'Putting Collection metadata on the map: Picturing Canada', by Philip Hatfield and Joan Francis

To act as a source of inspiration for future awards entrants, all entries submitted for awards in previous years can be browsed in our online Awards archive.

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

Nominate a 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 2018 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its third 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, for the Staff Award using this form.

The deadline for submission is 12:00 (BST), Friday 12 October 2018.

Nominees will be highlighted on Monday 12 November 2018 at the British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects.

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff for the last two years' awards in our online archive, as well as blogs for last year's winners and runners-up.

The Staff Award complements the British Library Labs Awards, introduced in 2015, which recognise outstanding work that has been done in the broader community. Last year’s winners in the public competition drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our 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 is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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

@bl_labs #bldigital @bl_digischol

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes: in this guest post, Dr Giles Bergel describes some experiments with the Library's digitised images...

The University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group has been working with a number of British Library curators to apply computer vision technology to their collections. On April 5 of this year I was invited by BL Digital Curator Dr. Mia Ridge to St. Pancras to showcase some of this work and to give curators the opportunity to try the tools out for themselves.  

Visual Geometry’s VISE tool matching two identical images from separate books digitised for the British Library’s Two Centuries of Indian Print project.

Computer vision - the extraction of meaning from images - has made considerable strides in recent years, particularly through the application of so-called ‘deep learning’ to large datasets. Cultural collections provide some of the most interesting test-cases for computer vision researchers, due to their complexity; the intensity of interest that researchers bring to them; and to their importance for human well-being. Can computers see collections as humans do? Computer vision is perhaps better regarded as a powerful lens rather than as a substitute for human curation. A computer can search a large collection of images far more quickly than can a single picture researcher: while it will not bring the same contextual understanding to bear on an image, it has the advantage of speed and comprehensiveness. Sometimes, a computer vision system can surprise the researcher by suggesting similarities that weren’t readily apparent.

As a relatively new technology, computer vision attracts legitimate concerns about privacy, ethics and fairness. By making its state of the art tools freely available, Visual Geometry hope to encourage experimentation and responsible use, and to enlist users to help determine what they can and cannot do. Cultural collections provide a searching test-case for the state of the art, due to their diversity as media (prints, paintings, stamped images, photographs, film and more) each of which invite different responses. One BL curator made a telling point by searching the BBC News collection with the term 'football': the system was presented with images previously tagged with that word that related to American, Gaelic, Rugby and Association football. Although inconclusive due to lack of sufficiently specific training data, the test asked whether a computer could (or should) pick the most popular instances; attempt to generalise across multiple meanings; or discern separate usages. Despite increases in processing power and in software methods, computers' ability to generalise; to extract semantic meaning from images or texts; and to cope with overlapping or ambiguous concepts remains very basic.  

Other tests with BL images have been more immediately successful. Visual Geometry's Traherne tool, developed originally to detect differences in typesetting in early printed books, worked well with many materials that exhibit small differences, such as postage stamps or doctored photographs. Visual Geometry's Image Search Engine (VISE) has shown itself capable of retrieving matching illustrations in books digitised for the Library's Indian Print project, as well as certain bookbinding features, or popular printed ballads. Some years ago Visual Geometry produced a search interface for the Library's 1 Million Images release. A collaboration between the Library's Endangered Archives programme and Oxford researcher David Zeitlyn on the archive of Cameroonian studio photographer Jacques Toussele employed facial recognition as well as pattern detection. VGG's facial recognition software works on video (BBC News, for example) as well as still photographs and art, and is soon to be freely released to join other tools under the banner of the Seebibyte Project.    

I'll be returning to the Library in June to help curators explore using the tools with their own images. For more information on the work of Visual Geometry on cultural collections, subscribe to the project's Google Group or contact Giles Bergel.      

Dr. Giles Bergel is a digital humanist based in the Visual Geometry Group in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.  

The event was supported by the Seebibyte project under an EPSRC Programme Grant EP/M013774/1

They're all topics we've discussed in the British Library's Digital Scholarship Reading Group. Digital Curator Mia Ridge explains...

A few months after I submitted my PhD and joined the Library's Digital Scholarship team, I realised that it'd be hard to keep up with trends in digital scholarship unless I made a special effort. I also figured I couldn't be the only person in that situation. I've always loved a reading group, so a Digital Scholarship Reading Group seemed a good way to read and discuss at least one topical article a month and meet other people in the Library at the same time.

It'd be boring if it was just members of the Digital Scholarship team violently agreeing with each other, so after a few pilot sessions, I organised posters for staff notice boards to help make it clear that all were welcome, regardless of job title or seniority. After a year or so, we changed the time to allow for more people who work set shifts to attend.

There's a bit of admin each month  - whoever's coordinating the group for that month will update the standing calendar entry, post upcoming topics on our internal staff network, and sometimes ask the Internal Communications team to include them in newsletters.

We usually have eight to ten people turn up, but our last session had over 20 people! This may have been because we had a special guest speaker (thank you, Jane Winters!), because it was about digital humanities rather than digital scholarship, or the result of working with the Internal Comms team to send an all-staff email invitation to attend. The discussion is richest when we have people from a range of different departments and disciplines. A nice side-effect of encouraging attendance from across the Library is learning a little more about people's roles in other departments.

I've experimented with different ways of selecting articles - an internal poll seemed to work well - and I love it when an attendee suggests a topic from their field, especially as quite a few Library staff are working towards formal degrees outside work. Other discussions are inspired by topics in the news or questions we've been asked as digital curators. I've experimented with length and tone, from academic, peer-reviewed articles to news or magazine articles and videos. Providing a few options for a particular topic seems to work well, as when we had a TED talk, scholarly article or peer-reviewed technical article on the same topic of bias in algorithms.

We usually meet on the first Tuesday of each month.Thanks to everyone who's added to the conversation, suggested a topic or article, or coordinated the discussion - I hope you've all enjoyed it as much as I have! Get in touch (@mia_out or via bl.uk/digital) if you'd like to know more or to suggest a topic or article.

Here's what we've met to discuss so far: