Digital scholarship blog

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

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].