Digital scholarship blog

SherlockNet are Brian Do, Karen Wang and Luda Zhao, finalists for the Labs Competition 2016.

We have some exciting updates regarding SherlockNet, our ongoing efforts to using machine learning techniques to radically improve the discoverability of the British Library Flickr Commons image dataset.

Tagging

Over the past two months we’ve been working on expanding and refining the set of tags assigned to each image. Initially, we set out simply to assign the images to one of 11 categories, which worked surprisingly well with less than a 20% error rate. But we realised that people usually search from a much larger set of words, and we spent a lot of time thinking about how we would assign more descriptive tags to each image.

Eventually, we settled on a Google Images style approach, where we parse the text surrounding each image and use it to get a relevant set of tags. Luckily, the British Library digitised the text around all 1 million images back in 2007-8 using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so we were able to grab this data. We explored computational tools such as Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (Tf-idf) and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which try to assign the most “informative” words to each image, but found that images aren’t always associated with the words on the page.

To solve this problem, we decided to use a 'voting' system where we find the 20 images most similar to our image of interest, and have all images vote on the nouns that appear most commonly in their surrounding text. The most commonly appearing words will be the tags we assign to the image. Despite some computational hurdles selecting the 20 most similar images from a set of 1 million, we were able to achieve this goal. Along the way, we encountered several interesting problems.

For all images, similar images are displayed

1. Spelling was a particularly difficult issue. The OCR algorithms that were state of the art back in 2007-2008 are now obsolete, so a sizable portion of our digitised text was misspelled / transcribed incorrectly. We used a pretty complicated decision tree to fix misspelled words. In a nutshell, it amounted to finding the word that a) is most common across British English literature and b) has the smallest edit distance relative to our misspelled word. Edit distance is the fewest number of edits (additions, deletions, substitutions) needed to transform one word into another.
2. Words come in various forms (e.g. ‘interest’, ‘interested’, ‘interestingly’) and these forms have to be resolved into one “stem” (in this case, ‘interest’). Luckily, natural language toolkits have stemmers that do this for us. It doesn’t work all the time (e.g. ‘United States’ becomes ‘United St’ because ‘ates’ is a common suffix) but we can use various modes of spell-check trickery to fix these induced misspellings.
3. About 5% of our books are in French, German, or Spanish. In this first iteration of the project we wanted to stick to English tags, so how do we detect if a word is English or not? We found that checking each misspelled (in English) word against all 3 foreign dictionaries would be extremely computationally intensive, so we decided to throw out all misspelled words for which the edit distance to the closest English word was greater than three. In other words, foreign words are very different from real English words, unlike misspelled words which are much closer.
4. Several words appear very frequently in all 11 categories of images. These words were ‘great’, ‘time’, ‘large’, ‘part’, ‘good’, ‘small’, ‘long’, and ‘present’. We removed these words as they would be uninformative tags.

In the end, we ended up with between 10 and 20 tags for each image. We estimate that between 30% and 50% of the tags convey some information about the image, and the other ones are circumstantial. Even at this stage, it has been immensely helpful in some of the searches we’ve done already (check out “bird”, “dog”, “mine”, “circle”, and “arch” as examples). We are actively looking for suggestions to improve our tagging accuracy. Nevertheless, we’re extremely excited that images now have useful annotations attached to them!

SherlockNet Interface

For the past few weeks we’ve been working on the incorporation of ~20 million tags and related images and uploading them onto our website. Luckily, Amazon Web Services provides comprehensive computing resources to take care of storing and transferring our data into databases to be queried by the front-end.

In order to make searching easier we’ve also added functionality to automatically include synonyms in your search. For example, you can type in “lady”, click on Synonym Search, and it adds “gentlewoman”, “ma'am”, “madam”, “noblewoman”, and “peeress” to your search as well. This is particularly useful in a tag-based indexing approach as we are using.

As our data gets uploaded over the coming days, you should begin to see our generated tags and related images show up on the Flickr website. You can click on each image to view it in more detail, or on each tag to re-query the website for that particular tag. This way users can easily browse relevant images or tags to find what they are interested in.

Each image is currently captioned with a default description containing information on which source the image came from. As Luda finishes up his captioning, we will begin uploading his captions as well.

We will also be working on adding more advanced search capabilities via wrapper calls to the Flickr API. Proposed functionality will include logical AND and NOT operators, as well as better filtering by machine tags.

Captioning

As mentioned in our previous post, we have been experimenting with techniques to automatically caption images with relevant natural language captions. Since an Artificial Intelligence (AI) is responsible for recognising, understanding, and learning proper language models for captions, we expected the task to be far harder than that of tagging, and although the final results we obtained may not be ready for a production-level archival purposes, we hope our work can help spark further research in this field.

Our last post left off with our usage of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks - Recurrent Neural Networks (CNN-RNN) architecture to caption images. We showed that we were able to produce some interesting captions, albeit at low accuracy. The problem we pinpointed was in the training set of the model, which was derived from the Microsoft COCO dataset, consisting of photographs of modern day scenes, which differs significantly from the BL Flickr dataset.

Through collaboration with BL Labs, we were able to locate a dataset that was potentially better for our purposes: the British Museum prints and drawing online collection, consisting of over 200,000 print drawing, and illustrations, along with handwritten captions describing the image, which the British Museum has generously given us permission to use in this context. However, since the dataset is directly obtained from the public SPARQL endpoints, we needed to run some pre-processing to make it usable. For the images, we cropped them to standard 225 x 225 size and converted them to grayscale. For caption, pre-processing ranged from simple exclusion of dates and author information, to more sophisticated “normalization” procedures, aimed to lessen the size of the total vocabulary of the captions. For words that are exceeding rare (<8 occurrences), we replaced them with <UNK> (unknown) symbols denoting their rarity. We used the same neuraltalk architecture, using the features from a Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Visual Recognition (VGGNet) as intermediate input into the language model. As it turns out, even with aggressive filtering of words, the distribution of vocabulary in this dataset was still too diverse for the model. Despite our best efforts to tune hyperparameters, the model we trained was consistently over-sensitive to key phrases in the dataset, which results in the model converging on local minimums where the captions would stay the same and not show any variation. This seems to be a hard barrier to learning from this dataset. We will be publishing our code in the future, and we welcome anyone with any insight to continue on this research.

Although there were occasion images with delightfully detailed captions (left), our models couldn’t quite capture useful information for the vast majority of the images(right). More work is definitely needed in this area!

The British Museum dataset (Prints and Drawings from the 19th Century) however, does contain valuable contextual data, and due to our difficulty in using it to directly caption the dataset, we decided to use it in other ways. By parsing the caption and performing Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging, we were able to extract nouns and proper nouns from each caption. We then compiled common nouns from all the images and filtered out the most common(>=500 images) as tags, resulting in over 1100 different tags. This essentially converts the British Museum dataset into a rich dataset of diverse tags, which we would be able to apply to our earlier work with tag classification. We trained a few models with some “fun” tags, such as “Napoleon”, “parrots” and “angels”, and we were able to get decent testing accuracies of over 75% on binary labels. We will be uploading a subset of these tags under the “sherlocknet:tags” prefix to the Flickr image set, as well as the previous COCO captions for a small subset of images(~100K).

You can access our interface here: bit.ly/sherlocknet or look for 'sherlocknet:tag=' and 'sherlocknet:category=' tags on the British Library Flickr Commons site, here is an example, and see the image below:

Example Tags on a Flickr Image generated by SherlockNet

Please check it out and let us know if you have any feedback!

We are really excited that we will be there in London in a few days time to present our findings, why don't you come and join us at the British Library Labs Symposium, between 0930 - 1730 on Monday 7th of November, 2016?

Posted by Hannah-Rose Murray, finalist in the BL Labs Competition 2016.

Reflecting back on an incredible and interesting journey over the last few months, it is remarkable at the speed in which five months has flown by! In May, I was chosen as one of the finalists for the British Library Labs Competition 2016, and my project has focused on black abolitionist performances and their presence in Britain during the nineteenth century. Black men and women had an impact in nearly every part of Great Britain, and it is of no surprise to learn their lectures were held in famous meeting halls, taverns, the houses of wealthy patrons, theatres, and churches across the country: we inevitably and unknowably walk past sites with a rich history of Black Britain every day.

I was inspired to apply for this competition by last year’s winner, Katrina Navickas. Her project focused on the Chartist movement, and in particular using the nineteenth century digitised newspaper database to find locations of Chartist meetings around the country. Katrina and the Labs team wrote code to identify these meetings in the Chartist newspaper, and churned out hundreds of results that would have taken her years to search manually.

I wanted to do the same thing, but with black abolitionist speeches. However, there was an inherent problem: these abolitionists travelled to Britain between 1830-1900 and gave lectures in large cities and small towns: in other words their lectures were covered in numerous city and provincial newspapers. The scale of the project was perhaps one of the most difficult things we have had to deal with.

When searching the newspapers, one of the first things we found was the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is patchy at best. OCR refers to scanned images that have been turned into machine-readable text, and the quality of the OCR depended on many factors – from the quality of the scan itself, to the quality of the paper the newspaper was printed on, to whether it has been damaged or ‘muddied.’ If the OCR is unintelligible, the data will not be ‘read’ properly – hence there could be hundreds of references to Frederick Douglass that are not accessible or ‘readable’ to us through an electronic search (see the image below).

An excerpt from a newspaper article about a public meeting about slavery, from the Leamington Spa Courier, 20 February 1847

In order to 'clean' and sort through the ‘muddied’ OCR and the ‘clean’ OCR, we need to teach the computer what is ‘positive text’ (i.e., language that uses the word ‘abolitionist’, ‘black’, ‘fugitive’, ‘negro’) and ‘negative text’ (language that does not relate to abolition). For example, the image to the left shows an advert for one of Frederick Douglass’s lectures (Leamington Spa Courier, 20 February 1847). The key words in this particular advert that are likely to appear in other adverts, reports and commentaries are ‘Frederick Douglass’, ‘fugitive’, ‘slave’, ‘American’, and ‘slavery.’ I can search for this advert through the digitised database, but there are perhaps hundreds more waiting to be uncovered.
We found examples where the name ‘Frederick’ had been ‘read’ as F!e83hrick or something similar. The image below shows some OCR from the Aberdeen Journal, 5 February 1851, and an article about “three fugitive slaves.” The term ‘Fugitive Slaves’ as a heading is completely illegible, as is William’s name before ‘Crafts.’ If I used a search engine to search for William Craft, it is unlikely this result would be highlighted because of the poor OCR.

OCR from the Aberdeen Journal, 5 February 1851, and an article about “three fugitive slaves.”

I have spent several years transcribing black abolitionist speeches and most of this will act as the ‘positive’ text. ‘Negative’ text can refer to other lectures of a similar structure but do not relate to abolition specifically, for example prison reform meetings or meetings about church finances. This will ensure the abolitionist language becomes easily readable. We can then test the performance of this against some of the data we already have, and once the probability ensures we are on the right track, we can apply it to a larger data set.

All of this data is built into what is called a classifier, created by Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead of BL Labs. This classifier will read the OCR and collect newspaper references, but works differently to a search engine because it measures words by weight and frequency. It also relies on probability, so for example, if there is an article that mentions fugitive and slave in the same section, it ranks a higher probability that article will be discussing someone like Frederick Douglass or William Craft. On the other hand, a search engine might read the word ‘fugitive slave’ in different articles on the same page of a newspaper.

We’re currently processing the results of the classifier, and adjusting accordingly to try and reach a higher accuracy. This involves some degree of human effort while I double check the references to see whether the results actually contains an abolitionist speech. So far, we have had a few references to abolitionist speeches, but the classifier’s biggest difficulty is language. For example, there were hundreds of results from the 1830s and the 1860s – I instantly knew that these would be references around the Chartist movement because the language the Chartists used would include words like ‘slavery’ when describing labour conditions, and frequently compared these conditions to ‘negro slavery’ in the US. The large number of references from the 1860s highlight the renewed interest in American slavery because of the American Civil War, and there are thousands of articles discussing the Union, Confederacy, slavery and the position of black people as fugitives or soldiers. Several times, the results focused on fugitive slaves in America and not in Britain.

Another result we had referred to a West Indian lion tamer in London! This is a fascinating story and part of the hidden history we see as a central part of the project, but is obviously not an abolitionist speech. We are currently working on restricting our date parameters from 1845 to 1860 to start with, to avoid numerous mentions of Chartists and the War. This is one way in which we have had to be flexible with the initial proposal of the project.

Aside from the work on the classifier, we have also been working on numerous ways to improve the OCR – is it better to apply OCR correction software or is it more beneficial to completely re-OCR the collection, or perhaps a combination of both? We have sent some small samples to a company based in Canberra, Australia called Overproof, who specialise in OCR correction and have provided promising results. Obviously the results are on a small scale but it’s been really interesting so far to see the improvements in today’s software compared to when some of these newspapers were originally scanned ten years before. We have also sent the same sample to the IMPACT centre for competence of Competence in Digitisation whose mission is to make the digitisation of historical printed text “better, faster, cheaper” and provides tools, services and facilities to further advance the state-of-the-art in the field of document imaging, language technology and the processing of historical text. Preliminary results will be presented at the Labs Symposium.

Updated website

Before I started working with the Library, I had designed a website at http://www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com. The structure was rudimentary and slightly awkward, dwarfed by the numerous pages I kept adding to it. As the project progressed, I wanted to improve the website at the same time, and with the invaluable help of Dr Mike Gardner from the University of Nottingham, I re-launched my website at the end of October. Initially, I had two maps, one showing the speaking locations of Frederick Douglass, and another map showing speaking locations by other black abolitionists such as William and Ellen Craft, William Wells Brown and Moses Roper (shown below).

Left map showing the speaking locations of Frederick Douglass. Right map showing speaking locations by other black abolitionists such as William and Ellen Craft, William Wells Brown and Moses Roper.

After working with Mike, we not only improved the aesthetics of the website and the maps (making them more professional) but we also used clustering to highlight the areas where these men and women spoke the most. This avoided the ‘busy’ appearance of the first maps and allowed visitors to explore individual places and lectures more efficiently, as the old maps had one pin per location. Furthermore, on the black abolitionist speaking locations map (below right), a user can choose an individual and see only their lectures, or choose two or three in order to correlate patterns between who gave these lectures and where they travelled. 

The new map interface for my website.

Events

I am very passionate about public engagement and regard it as an essential part of being an academic, since it is so important to engage and share with, and learn from, the public. We have created two events: as part of Black History Month on the 6^th October, we had a performance here at the Library celebrating the life of two formerly enslaved individuals named William and Ellen Craft. Joe Williams of Heritage Corner in Leeds – an actor and researcher who has performed as numerous people such as Frederick Douglass and the black circus entertainer Pablo Fanque – had been writing a play about the Crafts, and because it fitted so well with the project, we invited Joe and actress Martelle Edinborough, who played Ellen, to London for a performance. Both Joe and Martelle were incredible and it really brought the Craft’s story and the project to life. We had a Q&A afterwards where everyone was very responsive and positive to the performance and the Craft’s story of heroism and bravery.

(Left to Right) Martelle Edinborough, Hannah-Rose Murray and Joe Williams

The next event is a walking tour, taking place on Saturday 26 November. I’ve devised this tour around central London, highlighting six sites where black activists made an indelible mark on British society during the nineteenth century. It is a way of showing how we walk past these sites on a daily basis, and how we need to recognise the contributions of these individuals to British history.

Hopefully this project will inspire others to research and use digital scholarship to find more ‘hidden voices’ in the archive. In terms of black history specifically, people of colour were actors, sailors, boxers, students, authors as well as lecturers, and there is so much more to uncover about their contribution to British history. My personal journey with the Library and the Labs team has also been a rewarding experience. It has further convinced me that we need stronger networks of collaboration between scholars and computer scientists, and the value of digital humanities in general. Academics could harness the power of technology to bring their research to life, an important and necessary tool for public engagement. I hope to continue working with the Labs team fine-tuning some of the results, as well as writing some pages about black abolitionists for the new website. I’m very grateful to the Library and the Labs team for their support, patience, and this amazing opportunity as I’ve learned so much about digital humanities, and this project – with its combination of manual and technological methods – as a larger model for how we should move forward in the future. The project will shape my career in new and exciting ways, and the opportunity to work with one of the best libraries in the world is a really gratifying experience.

I am really excited that I will be there in London in a few days time to present my findings, why don't you come and join us at the British Library Labs Symposium, between 0930 - 1730 on Monday 7th of November, 2016?

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Nick Cave, entrant in the BL Labs Awards 2016 under the 'Artistic Category'. 

Nick Cave - Animator

Today’s blockbuster films sees long forgotten dinosaurs, futuristic warping spaceships and metallic looking beings the size of our tallest buildings, transforming from a car to a giant robot in the blink of an eye. There are even whole planets of giant alien creatures walking amongst people and trees and all of these incredible visual showcases are invading our cinema screens week in, week out.

However, back before the advent of sophisticated computer generated graphics technology, artists were using simpler photographic techniques to create short animations with zany characters, new landscapes and everyday objects to bring laughter to the masses on the small screen. One such artist was Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame who used a technique known as stop motion animation to bring a variety of household magazine pictures to life. By cutting out different pictures, photographing and filming them individually moving over time, they became very funny animated cartoon like sketches.

Terry Gilliam - Monty Python animations

I’ve always been fascinated by this amazing technique, even if it is a very time consuming one, but modern computer animation software makes this process easier. Stop motion animations simply have a quirky charm. More often than not they’re animations which are not polished, or even necessarily slick looking. It’s a style of animation which creates imaginary worlds and characters, often moving in a jagged, staccato fashion, but still somehow one that looks and feels as engaging and interesting as modern visual effects which have cost millions to create. So, with the Terry Gilliam magazine picture ideas in mind where to start, social media of course! 

An example of working on stop motion animation

Social media is dominated by celebrity gossip and tittle tattle, breaking news, but major events also continue to play a key part in posts. This could be when celebrating sporting achievements, raving about a new film, TV show, or even an anniversary event and significantly, nostalgia.

People always like to look back and remember, which is where my 6SecondHistory idea spawned from. I chose Instagram as my social media delivery platform, partly because mini web episodes, such as crime thriller, Shield5, had been very successful on it and partly because it’s a social media platform created specifically to showcase photographs and short videos.

As copyright can be a contentious legal minefield, where to source the modern equivalent of historical magazine photos from? Well, easy, the British Library has a massive collection of freely available copyright free Flickr archive photographs and illustrations to choose from. Animals, places, people, fancy illustrations from old manuscripts, basically a wealth of interesting material. The interesting and sometimes vexing challenge in bringing these pictures to life are many, because they’re often hand drawn with no clear differentiation between foreground and background objects, plus searching for specific pictures can sometimes bring up an interesting results set. Six second animations seemed a good starting point because of the success of internet vines, also six second gifs, or videos etc.

Images taken from the British Library Flickr Commons Site

Left - British Library Flickr Shakespeare Character (https://flic.kr/p/i2ba1M): Image taken from page 252 of 'The Oxford Thackeray. With illustrations. [Edited with introductions by George Saintsbury.]’

Top Right - British Library Flickr Skull (https://flic.kr/p/hVgqkH): Image taken from page 246 of 'Modern Science in Bible Lands ... With maps and illustrations’ - 1888

Bottom Right - British Library Flickr Shakespeare Theatre (https://flic.kr/p/i6ymLe): Image taken from page 76 of 'The Works of Shakspeare; from the text of Johnson, Steevens, and Reed. With a biographical memoir, and a variety of interesting matter, illustrative of his life and writings. By W. Harvey’ - 1825

As an example, 2016 saw the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  Whenever the focus is on Shakespeare famous speeches are cited and one such speech is Hamlet’s Act 5 Scene 1 lament to a disembodied skull. Perfect material for a funny 6SecondHistory animation and one that could truly show off the merging of a variety of British Library archive pics, repurposed and coloured to create a comical short Hamlet animation with an element of 3D perspective in it. This was a labour of love, but I hope you agree that my short animation has brought the speech to life.

Here is a link to my animation: https://www.instagram.com/p/BDA8BhWju0D/

Enjoy!

See more of my work at: https://www.instagram.com/6secondhistory and http://www.anitatoes.com/

You can meet me, Nick Cave at the British Library Labs Symposium on Monday 7th of November 2016 at the British Library in London (we still have a few tickets left so book now).

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Jennifer Batt, second runner up in the British Library Labs Competition 2016.

Jennifer will be working with the BL Labs team between November 2016 and March 2017 on her project 'Datamining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers' which is described below:

Datamining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers
by Jennifer Batt, Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol

This project is designed to interrogate the digitised eighteenth-century newspapers in the British Library’s Burney Collection and British Newspaper Archive databases in order to recover a complex, expansive, ephemeral poetic culture that has been lost to us for well over 250 years.

In the eighteenth century, thousands of poems appeared in the newspapers that were printed the length and breadth of the country. Poems in newspapers were extraordinarily varied: some were light and inconsequential pieces designed to provide momentary diversion and elicit a smile or a raised eyebrow; others were topically-engaged works commenting on contemporary cultural or political events; and still others were literary verses in a range of different genres.

Jonathan Swift, 'On his own Deafness', in the London Evening Post, 7-9 November 1734, issue 1088.

Some of these poems were the work of established and professional writers; some were composed by amateur contributors; and others still were by countless anonymous individuals. Though much of this verse disappeared into obscurity after appearing in a single newspaper issue, a number of poems that began their printed lives in newspapers achieved a far wider dissemination, being copied from one paper into another and another (going viral, we might say) before making their way into magazines, miscellanies, songbooks, and manuscripts.

The rich, dynamic, ephemeral and responsive poetic culture that found a home in eighteenth-century newspapers has long been overlooked by literary scholars and cultural, not least because attempting to recover and map its extent – whether by flipping through the pages of physical copies of newspapers, scrolling through reproductions on microfilm, or pushing keyword searches into the Burney Collection or the British Newspaper Archive – is a time-consuming and often inefficient process.

Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin, 'An Epistle to Mr. Pope', in The Old Whig or the Consistent Protestant, 16 December 1736, issue 93.

This project is an experiment designed to discover whether digital techniques – particularly data-mining and visualization – can be used to effectively and efficiently uncover the contours of this lost literary culture.

The BL Labs team have unrivalled experience in developing strategies to retrieve information of varying sorts – including Victorian jokes, information about political meetings, and patterns of reuse and plagiarism – from databases of historical newspapers. This project turns their expertise towards poetry, and asks, how far is it possible to use digital tools to effectively uncover and map the poetic culture that existed in eighteenth-century newspapers? By looking at both national and regional newspapers, is it possible to discover if there is a single, nationwide newspaper-based poetic culture, or whether there are regional variations? And how might the verse we can recover from newspapers enhance – or even challenge – our understanding of how people in the eighteenth century wrote, read, and thought about verse?

If you would like to meet Jennifer, she will be at the FREE British Library Labs Symposium (there are just a few tickets still available so book now to avoid disappointment) on Monday 7th of November 2016, at the British Library in London to talk about her work.

About the researcher:

Jennifer Batt, Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol.

Jennifer Batt is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol; her research focuses on eighteenth-century poetry, with a particular interest in the ways that verse is printed and reprinted across a range of different media. From 2010 to 2013, she was project manager and editor of the Digital Miscellanies Index (digitalmiscellaniesindex.org) based at the University of Oxford. 

Last night was the awards event at The National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham for the 2016 Off the Map competition, which had a Shakespeare theme. Now in its fourth year, Off the Map challenges full time UK students in higher or further education to make videogames, digital explorable environments, or interactive fiction based on digitised British Library collection items.

For 2016 the competition has been part of the British Library's commemoration of 400 years since the death of Shakespeare and has been running in conjunction with the Library’s recent exhibition “Shakespeare in Ten Acts”. Curators selected text, images, maps and sounds based on three sub themes:

• Castles: Scene of Ghosts and Murder
• The Tempest
• Forests, Woodlands and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This year's fantastic first place winning entry used the The Tempest sub theme and was created by Team Quattro from De Montfort University in Leicester. The team consisted of six students: Chris Anka, Perrie Green, Tara Naz, Jade Silver, Jasdev Singh and Joel Wilkins.

The Tempest game logo

Team Quattro

 

Flythrough of Team Quattro’s ‘The Tempest’ game

Dr Erin Sullivan described the winning game as ‘an evocative, immersive world that powerfully channels the drama of The Tempest. It introduces players to the story of the play in a deep, thoughtful way.’

Dr Abigail Parry said ‘I was head-over-heels for the metatextual element of this submission – you had me at the stage door. It was good, too, to see source text daubed on the caves walls – for me, the greatest strength of the submission was that it succeeded in synthesising text, assets and game environment in a way that was both engaging and beautiful.  Also to be commended was the attention to detail – the prop storm clouds were a delight.  The individual domains were characterful, and the story welcome without being obtrusive.  Most of all, it displayed a real interest in – and affection for - the play. I would want to play this game, and would be equally proud to teach with it.’ 

In second place came Tom Battey from the London College of Communication with a game called ‘Midsummer’ based on the characters in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Dr Erin Sullivan describing 'Midsummer' said that ‘the visual world and the engagement with the play were extremely impressive. I loved the historical flourishes and the imaginative exploration of the characters’ emotions.’

Midsummer by Tom Battey

In third place was an interactive fiction story again using The Tempest sub theme called This Most Desolate Isle by Alan Stewart from Brunel University who effectively used illustrations by Arthur Rackham to accompany his creative writing.

This Most Desolate Isle by Alan Stewart

Huge congratulations to this year's winning entries, and I'd also like to offer sincere thanks to the 2016 Off the Map jury members:

• Sarah Ellis, Head of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company
• Dr Abigail Parry, Poet in Residence at the National Videogame Arcade
• Dr Erin Sullivan, Shakespeare Institute Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham
• Cheryl Tipp, Wildlife and Environmental Sounds Curator at the British Library
• Zoë Wilcox, Lead Curator of the Shakespeare Exhibition at the British Library

The 2017 competition is called There Will be Fun Off The Map and this is associated with the British Library’s current exhibition Victorian Entertainments: There Will Be Fun, which is open until Sunday 12 February 2017. Keep your eyes peeled for further information about this; I will be blogging here over the next few weeks, when the new  There Will be Fun Off The Map competition website is available.

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator, @miss_wisdom

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Michael Takeo Magruder, first runner up in the British Library Labs Competition 2016.

Michael will be working with the BL Labs team between November 2016 and March 2017 on his project 'Imaginary Cities' which is described below: 

Imaginary Cities
by Michael Takeo Magruder, visual artist and researcher

Exploring the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age

About the project:

Imaginary Cities (study i), Michael Takeo Magruder, 2016 – aesthetic rendering that has been procedurally generated from a 19^th century map of London

Imaginary Cities is an arts-humanities research project that considers how large digital repositories of historic cultural materials can be used to create new born-digital artworks and real-time experiences which are relevant and exciting to 21^st century audiences. The project will take images and associated metadata of pre-20th century urban maps drawn from the British Library’s online “1 Million Images from Scanned Books” digital collection on Flickr Commons and transform this material into provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age.

Imaginary Cities (study i), Michael Takeo Magruder, 2016 – source digitised map and associated metadata parsed from British Library Flickr Commons

The project will exemplify collaborative and interdisciplinary research as it will bring together contemporary arts practice, digital humanities scholarship and advanced visualisation technology. The project’s outcomes will encompass both artistic and scholarly outputs, most important of which will be a set of prototype digital artworks that will exist as physical installations constructed with leading-edge processes including generative systems, real-time virtual environments and 3D printing. Blending the historical and the contemporary, the informative and the aesthetic, these artworks will not only draw from and feed into the British Library’s digital scholarship and curatorial programmes, but more significantly, will engender new ways for members of the general public to discover and access the Library’s important digital collections and research initiatives.

Imaginary Cities (study i), Michael Takeo Magruder, 2016 – detail of the aesthetic rendering

If you would like to meet Michael, he will be at the British Library Labs Symposium on Monday 7th of November 2016, at the British Library in London to talk about his work.

About the artist:

Michael Takeo Magruder

Michael Takeo Magruder (b.1974, US/UK, www.takeo.org) is a visual artist and researcher who works with new media including real-time data, digital archives, immersive environments, mobile devices and virtual worlds. His practice explores concepts ranging from media criticism and aesthetic journalism to digital formalism and computational aesthetics, deploying Information Age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world.

In the last 15 years, Michael’s projects have been showcased in over 250 exhibitions in 34 countries, and his art has been supported by numerous funding bodies and public galleries within the UK, US and EU. In 2010, Michael represented the UK at Manifesta 8: the European Biennial of Contemporary Art and several of his most well-known digital artworks were added to the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. More recently, he was a Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence (2013-14) collaborating with Prof Ben Quash (Theology, King’s College London) and Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, Mostyn) to create a new solo exhibition - entitled De/coding the Apocalypse - exploring contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. In 2014, Michael was commissioned by the UK-based theatre company Headlong to create two new artworks - PRISM (a new media installation reflecting on Headlong’s production of George Orwell’s 1984) and The Nether Realm (a living virtual world inspired by Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether). Last year, he was awarded the 2015 Immersive Environments Lumen Prize for his virtual reality installation A New Jerusalem.

I am a retired pharmacist who has been involved in the British Library's (BL) georeferencing work from its inception in February 2012. I have always had an interest in maps and mapping, and was alerted to this project through social media.

Maurice Nicholson, Volunteer BL Flickr Maps Tagger & Georeferencer

I made my first attempt at georeferencing one of the maps from the BL collection of Ordnance Survey original manuscripts. This map of my local area of Bedfordshire from 1815 had me 'hooked' on georeferencing and by the end of that week I had georeferenced more than a hundred maps, meaning that I was the main contributor to that first batch of maps.

Subsequent batches of maps were released at intervals from November 2012 through to July 2014, with each set of up to 3200 maps all being georeferenced by volunteers in less than a month per issue, with myself making a major contribution.

Bedford OS 1815, Screenshot of a detail of the first map I georeferenced (Bedfordshire Ordinance Survey manuscript map 1815).

The July 2014 release consisted of images that had been identified as maps and plans from the BL Flickr commons collection. This collection has just over a million digital images, and it was recognised that there was probably a considerable number of maps and plans suitable for georeferencing within this digital archive. Starting with a map Tag-a-thon held at the BL (through British Library Labs) on Hallowe’en 2014, myself and other volunteers went systematically though the Flickr collection, tagging all these suitable images.

Just over 50,000 maps and plans were found and these images were released as the latest batch needing to be georeferenced in March 2015.

As of October 2016, just over 18,000 of these have been successfully georeferenced, meaning that there are still around 32,000 waiting to be done. Considering how quickly previous releases had been completed the progress has been comparatively disappointing, however there are several reasons for this. Firstly, the sheer number of images needing to be processed, and secondly the variation in the mapping quality.  Previous batches had comprised specific map collections or specially chosen maps, whereas the Flickr collection contained a much wider range of images with many that are going to prove very tricky to georeference.

My own personal contribution to this current batch is 47,000 reference points (76,000 in total since the project started), which at around 10 to 20 points per map equates to several thousand maps georeferenced. This places me a considerable way ahead of any other contributor.
http://www.bl.uk/maps/georeferencingdata.html

Screenshot of a detail of one of my favourite maps that I've georeferenced (no man's land south of Ypres 1916)

This year I have been promoting georeferencing in my local area by giving presentations to local history groups, highlighting the uses that georeferenced maps can be put to for research in their area.

In November, the British Library (through its Learning Team and Emma Bull, Schools Programme Manager) is holding a half day conference (details below) aimed at geography teachers, exploring digital resources and their uses in an educational setting. Working with Mahendra Mahey Manager of British Library Labs and Digital Mapping Curator at the British Library, Philip Hatfield my contribution to this is running workshops using my experience and expertise to demonstrate the art of georeferencing and allowing the participants to try georeferencing themselves.

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

Sat 12 Nov, 9:45 – 13:30

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

Cost: £12 - £24

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

Link: https://goo.gl/f014YR

I will of course be attending the British Library's Maps Exhibition which starts on the 4th of November 2016 and you can also meet me on Monday 7th of November 2016 at the British Library Labs Symposium.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Matt Finch.

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

Matt Finch Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland

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

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

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

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

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

Online Comic Maker

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

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

Online Comic Maker in action!

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

You can contact Matt on Twitter @DrMattFinch

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

Black Abolitionists in 19th Century Britain. 

Thu 6 Oct, 19:00 – 21:00

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

Cost: £8 (Concessions available)

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

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

Fourth annual British Library Labs Symposium.

Mon 7 Nov, 9:30 – 17:30

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

Cost: FREE

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

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

We Are Amused! A Night of Victorian Humour.

Mon 7 Nov, 19:00 – 21:00

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

Cost: £12 (Concessions available)

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

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

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

Sat 12 Nov, 9:45 – 13:30

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

Cost: £12 - £24

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

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

Black Abolitionist Walking Tour.

Sat 26 Nov, 13:30 – 17:00

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

Cost: FREE (places limited)

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

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