Digital scholarship blog

Nominate a British Library staff member or team who has been instrumental in doing something exciting, innovative and cool with the British Library’s digital collections or data.

The 2016 British Library Labs Staff Award will recognise a team or current member of staff at the British Library that has played a key role in innovative work with the Library’s digital collections or data. This is the first time that the British Library is bestowing this Award and it will highlight some of the work the Library does and the people who do it. 

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

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

The deadline for submission is 12:00 (BST), Monday 24th October 2016.

The winner(s) will be announced on Monday 7th November 2016 at the British Library Labs Annual Symposium where they will be asked to talk about their work.

The Staff Award complements the British Library Labs Awards, introduced in 2015, which recognises outstanding work that has been done in the broader community. Last year’s winners drew attention to artistic, research, and entrepreneurial 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

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Hannah-Rose Murray, 2016 finalist of the BL Labs 2016 Competition.

To celebrate Black History Month in October 2016, you are welcome to attend an evening of performance on the 6th October, 7pm, hosted by the British Library Labs project and the Eccles Centre for American Studies in the Auditorium, Conference Centre, British Library, St Pancras, London, UK.

I am very lucky to be one of the finalists for the Labs Competition for 2016, and together we have organized an event that celebrates our project. Through my work with the Labs team, we are attempting to use machine learning to search through the digitized newspaper collections to access black abolitionist speeches and performances that have never been discovered before (read more here). This stems from my PhD project, which focuses on African Americans in Britain during the nineteenth century and the myriad ways they resisted British racism.

Two of the individuals I study are William and Ellen Craft, and we are really pleased to be working with two performers who will bring this incredible history to light on the evening of the 6th.

Ellen Craft dressed as a man to escape from slavery. Image from "The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom" 2nd ed.,

William and Ellen Craft were born enslaved in Georgia. Ellen worked as a house servant, and when she was 20, married William (although by law in the South slave marriages were not legal.) They were determined to escape as they were fearful their master would sell them separately further South and they did not want to raise children in slavery. In 1848, they devised an ingenious escape plan: Ellen would pose as a gentleman with William as her manservant, and they would catch a series of trains and steamboats to the North. Ellen was fair-skinned, which was a result of her mother’s rape by her master, the plantation owner. Ellen could thus pass for a white person, but she could not read or write. To overcome this, Ellen strapped a bandage to her right hand to give her a reason not to be able to write just in case she was asked. This was an incredibly dangerous mission to accomplish - if caught, both William and Ellen would have been tortured and most certainly separated to different parts of the South, never to see each other again. It is a testimony to their bravery they managed to succeed.

For a short time, the Crafts settled in Boston but legally they were still enslaved in the eyes of the American government. When slave catchers threatened to steal them back into slavery, they set sail for England where they remained for over a decade. The Crafts soon became part of an abolitionist network in which hundreds of African Americans travelled to Britain to lecture against slavery, raise money to purchase enslaved family members or to live in Britain relatively safely from the violence they experienced in America. British audiences were fascinated by their incredible escape attempt, and were shocked that a ‘white’ person like Ellen could ever have been enslaved. Both William and Ellen travelled around Britain to educate Britons about the true nature of slavery and demanded their support in helping Americans abolish it.

During the evening, performer and writer Joe Williams will play William Craft. Joe has an MA from Leeds University’s School of Performance and Cultural industries and is the founder of Heritage Corner, which focuses on African narratives in British history. He has written performed works on leading abolitionists as well as on Victorian circus genius Pablo Fanque.

Martelle Edinborough will play Ellen Craft. Martelle has stage, film and television credits that include commercials and short films. Martelle has recently worked with the Leeds based Geraldine Connor Foundation on Forrest Dreaming and Chicken Shop Shakespeare’s contribution to this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival.

There will be a short welcome and introduction to the Crafts, and after which the performance will commence for an hour, with time for a Q&A afterwards.

Tickets are £8 (with some concessions available), and available here.

Please note a small number of free seats are available for community residents in Camden (London, England). If you think you are eligible, please contact Emma Morgan, Community Engagement Manager at the British Library at [email protected].

Posted by Hana Lewis, BL Labs Project Officer.

The BL Labs team are pleased to announce that the fourth annual British Library Labs Symposium will be held on Monday 7th November, from 9:30 - 17:30 in the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras. The event is free, although you must book a ticket in advance. Don't miss out!

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.

Professor Melissa Terras will be giving the keynote at this year's Symposium

This year, Dr Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library, will launch the Symposium. This will be followed by a keynote from Professor Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library, will present awards to the BL Labs Competition (2016) finalists, who will also give presentations on their winning projects. 

After lunch, Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library, will announce the winners of the Shakespeare Off the Map 2016 competition, which challenged budding designers to use British Library digital collections as inspiration in the creation of exciting interactive digital media. Following, the winners will be announced of the BL Labs Awards (2016), which recognises projects that have used the British Library’s digital content in exciting and innovative ways. Presentations will be given by the winners in each of the Awards’ categories: Research, Commercial, Artistic and Teaching / Learning. A British Library Staff Award will also be presented this year, recognising an outstanding individual or team who have played a key role in innovative work with the British Library's digital collections.  

The Symposium's endnote will be followed by a networking reception which will conclude the event, at which delegates and staff can mingle and network over a drink.  

So book your place for the Symposium today!

For any further information please contact [email protected]

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

The closing date for entering the BL Labs Awards (2016) has just been extended and people can take advantage of this opportunity to submit until 0900 BST on Monday 12th September 2016. 

This year, the BL Labs Awards is commending fantastic digital-based projects 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.

After the submission deadline, the entries will be shortlisted. Selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Wednesday 21^st September 2016. A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up of each Awards category at the Labs Symposium on 7^th November 2016 at the British Library, St Pancras, courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners of 2015 has led to the production a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. Last year, the Awards commended work in three main categories – Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship:

• Research category Award (2015) winner: “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in 19^th century newspapers” by the Spatial Humanities’ project. The project examines the London based newspaper The Era (1838–1900, constituting over 377 million words), which
  has been digitised and made available by the British Library, through innovative and varied selections of qualitative and quantitative mechanisms in order to determine how the Victorian era discussed and portrayed disease, both temporally and spatially.
• Creative/Artistic Award (2015) winner: “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann. The project involves the use of semi-automated image classification and machine learning techniques in order to add meaningful tags to the images and create thematic collections of the British Library’s one million Flickr Commons images.

• Entrepreneurial Award (2015) winner: “Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project” by Dina Malkova. The project has produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the incredible illustrations of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll.
• Jury’s Special Mention Award (2015) "Index the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps" by James Heald.  James led and collaborated with others to produce an index of 1 million ‘Mechanical Curator Collection’ images on Wikimedia Commons from the British Library Flickr Commons images. This gave rise to finding over 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon which are now being geo-referenced.

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

Posted by Hana Lewis on behalf of Kris Hofmann and BL Labs

The International Fashion Showcase 2016 asked designers from around the world to imagine Utopia at Somerset House, London. Animation director Kris Hofmann was invited to create an animation exploring the Utopian theme. Kris and curator Claudia Rose Lukas decided to use images from British Library’s Flickr Commons collection in her project. Below, Kris’s guest blog gives us insight into her work and experiences in undertaking this project:  

Utopia is an imagined or unknown place, a no-place said to possess desirable, almost-perfect qualities. In the 500 years since the word ‘Utopia’ was coined by Thomas More, the concept has continued to appeal to writers, authors and artists alike.  

'Fashion Utopias' was the chosen theme of the International Fashion Showcase 2016, a British Council and British Fashion Council-lead initiative that celebrates emerging designers from across the globe and has become an integral part of London Fashion Week since its inception in 2012.

Although the term Utopia refers to an abstract and unknown place, at its core the Utopian ideal is the notion that we can learn from different places, people and cultures. It felt like an incredibly timely and inspiring choice of theme.

Claudia Rosa Lukas, the curator of the Austrian contribution to the show invited me to create an animation around the theme, which would feature works of five different designers. The piece would be played on loop during the exhibition at Somerset House and would be presented as a set of small outtakes, in the form of five vines, used for promotional purposes during and in the run up to the show. 

Claudia noted a conceptual link between the British Council's vision for the show and the British Library's initiative to open up their image archive for public use, notably the Flickr Commons collection of more than 1 million images digitised from out-of-copyright books. 

For one, it is an idea of openness and creative exchange that lies at the heart of both.

On another level we gather information and inspiration not unlike we explore unchartered terrain or a city we haven't visited.

An explorer, setting out to discover the world, who may happen upon Utopia and learn from this unfamiliar, yet wondrous place, has much in common with an explorer of books, knowledge and art.

Together, Claudia and I decided upon a juxtaposition of stop frame animated items of fashion and a collage of images from the British Library’s Flickr Commons 1 million collection. Whilst the collection might still prove challenging to use if you are searching for something specific, delving into the incredible wealth of image material with a completely open mind was an inspiration like no other.

Each image holds a mystery of its own, making you question it's origin and purpose within the context of a book, ponder what collection it may come from and who may have used it before.

The laboriousness of the exercise proved to be a hugely enjoyable creative journey, through which I browsed thousands of Flickr pages and eventually downloaded about 500 images, which would become the building blocks of our animated Utopia.

Inspired by the images I had chosen, I drafted a first map. There would be an intricate crystal cave, river lands with colourful and overgrown banks, a savannah and a mechanical city; there would be a planet with an Orwellian eye on the world, un-manned bicycles travelling from planet to planet and an imagined window into space giving you a glimpse into the infinite.

In the second stage, all elements had to be neatly cut out and split across a seemingly endless number of layers. For example, in order to animate an illustration of a plant, each leaf needs to be able to move independently. Finally, shoes, bags, dresses, tops and coats were animated and placed into the setting.

5th/12 vines by Kris Hofmann for Roshi Porkar Spring Summer 2016 Collection  

As with all creative work, the reactions of the audience to an artwork can cover the spectrum of emotional responses. But there was nothing to worry about… We found that just as much as the unique quality and richness of the images had provided a joyous adventure for me, those on the outside were appreciative of the voyages' final fruits. Mirroring the excitement of my own discovery into the treasure trove of images, I witnessed people’s attention glide from one corner of our animated Utopia to the next – seeing something new at every step of the way.

Note: The piece was brought to life with a soundscape by Marian Mentrup and beautifully shot by Joe Giacomet.

Featured designers: Pia Bauernberger, Dimitije Gojkovic, Isabel Helf, Flora Miranda and Roshi Porkar.

You can find out more about Kris Hofman and her work through her webpage http://www.krishofmann.co.uk/; Twitter @MissKrisHofmann ; or email [email protected]. 

Finalists of the BL Labs Competition 2016, Karen Wang, Luda Zhao and Brian Do, inform us on the progress of their SherlockNet project:

This is an update on SherlockNet, our project to use machine learning and other computational techniques to dramatically increase the discoverability of the British Library’s Flickr images dataset. Below is some of our progress on tagging, captioning, and the web interface.

Tags

When we started this project, our goal was to classify every single image in the British Library's Flickr collection into one of 12 tags -- animals, people, decorations, miniatures, landscapes, nature, architecture, objects, diagrams, text, seals, and maps. Over the course of our work, we realised the following:

1. We were achieving incredible accuracy (>80%) in our classification using our computational methods.
2. If our algorithm assigned two tags to an image with approximately equal probability, there was a high chance the image had elements associated with both tags.
3. However, these tags were in no way enough to expose all the information in the images.
4. Luckily, each image is associated with text on the corresponding page.

We thus wondered whether we could use the surrounding text of each image to help expand the “universe” of possible tags. While the text around an image may or may not be directly related to the image, this strategy isn’t without precedent: Google Images uses text as its main method of annotating images! So we decided to dig in and see how this would go.

As a first step, we took all digitised text from the three pages surrounding each image (the page before, the page of, and the page after) and extracted all noun phrases. We figured that although important information may be captured in verbs and adjectives, the main things people will be searching for are nouns. Besides, at this point this is a proof of principle that we can easily extend later to a larger set of words. We then constructed a composite set of all words from all images, and only kept words present in between 5% and 80% of documents. This was to get rid of words that were too rare (often misspellings) or too common (words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘me’ -- called “stop words” in the natural language processing field).

With this data we were able to use a tool called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to find “clusters” of images in an automatic way. We chose the original 12 tags after manually going through 1,000 images on our own and deciding which categories made the most sense based on what we saw; but what if there are categories we overlooked or were unable to discern by hand? LDA solves this by trying to find a minimal set of tags where each document is represented by a set of tags, and each tag is represented by a set of words. Obviously the algorithm can’t provide meaning to each tag, so we provide meaning to the tag by looking at the words that are present or absent in each tag. We ran LDA on a sample of 10,000 images and found tags clusters for men, women, nature, and animals. Not coincidentally, these are similar to our original tags and represent a majority of our images.

This doesn’t solve our quest for expanding our tag universe though. One strategy we thought about was to just use the set of words from each page as the tags for each image. We quickly found, however, that most of the words around each image are irrelevant to the image, and in fact sometimes there was no relation at all. To solve this problem, we used a voting system [1]. From our computational algorithm, we found the 20 images most similar to the image in question. We then looked for the words that were found most often in the pages around these 20 images. We then use these words to describe the image in question. This actually works quite well in practice! We’re now trying to combine this strategy (finding generalised tags for images) with the simpler strategy (unique words that describe images) to come up with tags that describe images at different “levels”.

Image Captioning

We started with a very ambitious goal: given only the image input, can we give a machine -generated, natural-language description of the image with a reasonably high degree of accuracy and usefulness? Given the difficulty of the task and of our timeframe, we didn’t expect to get perfect results, but we’ve hoped to come up with a first prototype to demonstrate some of the recent advances and techniques that we hope will be promising for research and application in the future.

We planned to look at two approaches to this problem:

• Similarity-based captioning. Images that are very similar to each other using a distance metric often share common objects, traits, and attributes that shows up in the distribution of words in their captions. By pooling words together from a bag of captions of similar images, one can come up with a reasonable caption for the target image.

• Learning-based captioning. By utilising a CNN similar to what we used for tagging, we can capture higher-level features in images. We then attempt to learn the mappings between the higher-level features and their representations in words, using either another neural network or other methods.

We have made some promising forays into the second technique. As a first step, we used a pre-trained CNN-RNN architecture called NeuralTalk to caption our images. As the models are trained on the Microsoft COCO dataset, which consists of pictures and photograph that differs significantly from the British Library's  Flickr dataset, we expect the transfer of knowledge to be difficult. Indeed, the resulting captions of some ~1000 test images show that weakness, with the black-and-white exclusivity of the British Library illustration and the more abstract nature of some illustrations being major roadblocks in the qualities of the captioning. Many of the caption would comment on the “black and white” quality of the photo or “hallucinate” objects that did not exist in the images. However, there were some promising results that came back from the model. Below are some hand-pick examples. Note that this was generated with no other metadata; only the raw image was given.

From a rough manual pass, we estimate that around 1 in 4 captions are of useable quality: accurate, contains interesting and useful data that would aid in search discovery, catalogisation etc., with occasional gems (like the elephant caption!). More work will be directed to help us increase this metric.

Web Interface

We have been working on building the web interface to expose this novel tag data to users around the world.

One thing that’s awesome about making the British Library dataset available via Flickr, is that Flickr provide an amazing API for developers. The API exposes, among other functions, the image website’s search logic via tags as well as free text search using the image title and description, and the capability to sort by a number of factors including relevance and “interestingness”. We’ve been working on using the Flickr API, along with AngularJS and Node.js to build a wireframe site. You can check it out here.

If you look at the demo or the British Library's Flickr album, you’ll see that each image has a relatively sparse set of tags to query from. Thus, our next steps will be adding our own tags and captions to each image on Flickr. We will pre-pend these with a custom namespace to distinguish them from existing user-contributed and machine tags, and utilise them in queries to find better results.

Finally, we are interested in what users will use the site for. For example, we could track user’s queries and which images they click on or save. These images are presumably more relevant to these queries, and we rank them higher in future queries. We also want to be able to track general analytics like the most popular queries over time. Thus incorporating user analytics will be the final step in building the web interface.

We welcome any feedback and questions you may have! Contact us at [email protected]

References

[1] Johnson J, Ballan L, Fei-Fei L. Love Thy Neighbors: Image Annotation by Exploiting Image Metadata. arXiv (2016)

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

The closing date for entering the BL Labs Awards (2016) is midnight BST on 5^th September. So please submit your entry and/or help us spread the word to all interested and relevant parties over these final weeks. This will ensure we have another year of fantastic digital-based projects highlighted by the Awards competition!

This year, the BL Labs Awards is commending 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.

After the submission deadline of midnight BST on 5^th September for entering the BL Labs Awards has past, the entries will be shortlisted. Selected shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Wednesday 21^st September 2016. A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 to the runner up of each Awards category at the Labs Symposium on 7^th November 2016 at the British Library, St Pancras, courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners of 2015 has led to the production a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects. Last year, the Awards commended work in three main categories – Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship:

• Research category Award (2015) winner: “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in 19^th century newspapers” by the Spatial Humanities’ project. The project examines the London based newspaper The Era (1838–1900, constituting over 377 million words), which
  has been digitised and made available by the British Library, through innovative and varied selections of qualitative and quantitative mechanisms in order to determine how the Victorian era discussed and portrayed disease, both temporally and spatially.
• Creative/Artistic Award (2015) winner: “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann. The project involves the use of semi-automated image classification and machine learning techniques in order to add meaningful tags to the images and create thematic collections of the British Library’s one million Flickr Commons images.

• Entrepreneurial Award (2015) winner: “Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project” by Dina Malkova. The project has produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the incredible illustrations of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll.
• Jury’s Special Mention Award (2015) "Index the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps" by James Heald.  James led and collaborated with others to produce an index of 1 million ‘Mechanical Curator Collection’ images on Wikimedia Commons from the British Library Flickr Commons images. This gave rise to finding over 50,000 maps within the collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon which are now being geo-referenced.

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

Posted by Mahendra Mahey on behalf of Hannah-Rose Murray, finalist of the BL Labs Competition 2016

Overview of the project

The Black Abolitionist project focuses on African American lives, experiences and lectures in Britain between 1830-1895. It builds on my PhD project, which I am currently studying for at the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Working with the British Library has already proved a fortunate and enriching opportunity, and by harnessing the power of technology, we want to work together to search through thousands of newspapers to find abolitionist speeches, a process that would take years by hand. By reading black abolitionist speeches in the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Collection (and using the Flickr collection to illustrate), we can get a sense of their performances and how their lectures reached nearly every corner of Britain. Newspapers can also provide us with the locations of these meetings, and for the first time, I have mapped these locations to gather an estimate of how many lectures black abolitionists gave in Britain and to allow their hidden voices to be heard. I am updating my website to reflect this project, which can be found at www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com.

These are the maps I have so far: the map (below left) chronicles the lectures of Frederick Douglass, and the second one (on the right) represents the lectures given by other black abolitionists such as Josiah Henson, Sarah Remond, Moses Roper, William Wells Brown, Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Ida B. Wells, James Watkins and William and Ellen Craft (to name a few):

African Americans visited Britain for a variety of reasons. Many came to publish slave narratives, teach Britons about slavery and look for their support in the abolitionist cause. Others came to live in Britain safely, away from the ever-watchful eyes of slave-catchers, while several wanted to raise money to purchase family members from the jaws of slavery. 

Black abolitionists made their mark in nearly every part of Great Britain, and it is of no surprise to learn they had a strong impact on London too. Lectures were held in famous meeting halls, taverns, the houses of wealthy patrons, theatres, and churches across London: we inevitably and unknowably walk past sites with a rich history of Black Britain every day.

When searching the newspapers, what we have found so far is that 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 can depend 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).

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 digitized database, but there are perhaps hundreds more waiting to be uncovered.

I have spent several years transcribing many of Frederick Douglass’ 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.

The prospect of uncovering hidden speeches by African Americans is incredibly exciting, and hopefully this will add to our knowledge of the black presence in Britain: we can use these extensive sources to build a more complete picture of Victorian London in particular.