Digital scholarship blog

Posted by Ruby Dixon, currently a student at Graveney School and on work-experience at BL Labs.

Background

The ‘Microsoft’ books are 65,000 digitised volumes - about 22.5 million pages - which were published between 1789 and 1914; they were digitised in partnership with Microsoft. They cover a wide range of subject areas including philosophy, poetry, history and literature and they include Optically Character Recognised (OCR) text from the millions of pages.

In discussion with Mahendra Mahey, Project Manager of BL Labs, we explored making a ‘sub collection’ from this larger set which will hopefully help researchers in the future. After thinking about making a collection of ‘works of fiction’, ‘bibles’ or titles about ‘slavery’ I decided that identifying a collection of books about Finland would be the most interesting and realistic thing to do as part of my mini-project at the Library.

The collection I am creating will hopefully help a project that the Library might be working on which celebrates the 100th year of independence of Finland in 2017.

Facts about Finland

When starting this mini-project, I thought it would be wise to do some background research about Finland. I thought this would be a great way to put my GSCEs in Geography and History to use. Knowing more about the history and geography of Finland would help me in my ‘detective’ hunt through the collection of books. I would learn about important keywords I might need to use to help me identify relevant books in the digitised collection.

Here are some useful facts that you may not know about Finland:

• Finland had autonomy with Russia on 29 March 1809.
• Finland received independence on 6 December 1917.
• Finland joined the European Union on 1 January 1995.

These and more facts can be accessed online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland

A map showing Finland, taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland

This gave me a clue in understanding that there may in fact be several books in the collection in the Russian Language that could cover Finland, given that Finland was given autonomy in 1809 from Russia. Looking at the map of Finland, I also realised that bordering countries would most likely have books about Finland as well.

Approach

Analysing the collection spreadsheet 

A screen shot of a section of the spreadsheet containing 65,000 records of digitised books in the ‘Microsoft Books’ collection.

My first task was to examine the huge spreadsheet containing information about the 65,000 books in the collection.

There were several lines of ‘attack’ we could take in finding information about Finland in this collection, some which involve using the ‘Filter’ function in Excel.

Screen shot from Microsoft Books Spreadsheet: 1. The 'Filter' function in Excel. 2. Filter has been applied on the language code for Finland ‘fin’

We came up with the following strategy:

1. Find words relating to 'Finland' in the Title field in the spreadsheet for the books.
2. This task would have to be done in several languages as there are 28 languages listed in the language code field (column C). I decided I would prioritise English and languages of bordering nations around Finland and if I had time would look at the other languages too.
3. I knew I would have to use Google translate (https://translate.google.co.uk/) to find equivalent words in that language relating to Finland to help me with filtering.

In terms of thinking of what words I might use for the filtering, Mahendra suggested that it might be useful to create a word cloud about all things 'Finnish'; this might help me decide which words were the most important and to use first in filtering.

I used https://tagul.com/ and here is the word cloud I made using the Wikipedia page about Finland:

Wordcloud created using Tagul, based on the Wikipedia page in English about Finland.

From this, we decided to use the following words (the amount of words was limited due to time): Finland, Finnish, Helsinki and Finn. 

We also filtered using Danish, Swedish, German, English, Finnish and Russian languages and using related words about Finland in those languages.

Below is a summary table showing the number of books we found by applying a filter to the 'Title' field in the spreadsheet about words related to 'Finland'.

The table above shows the number of books I found using various filters in the digitised collection.

Please note, that I didn’t have time to look further into the collections we found in some of the non-English language collections, as I am not a native speaker in any of them. More time would be needed to filter this collection. The spreadsheet is available here.

What is interesting, however, is that we know there are 582 books in the collection in the Russian language, details of which I sent to Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of East European Collections. 

Images in the books about Finland

I learned how the images from the 'Microsoft' books were extracted and placed on The British Library’s Flickr page. This slide from a BL Labs presentation nicely summarises how it all happened: 

Taken from the BL Labs Slideshare account, http://www.slideshare.net/labsbl

More information is available from a blog post written by Ben O’Steen, Technical Lead of BL Labs, which explains this process in much more detail.

What I realised was that there must be images identified in these books which relate to Finland. Mahendra suggested that I first look at some work done by the Wikimedia community on trying to find maps within these images.

Wikimedia commons synoptic index

The Wikimedia Commons Synoptic Index for the Mechanical Curator images, contains a really handy breakdown of the images by geographical place.

Image taken from British Library/Mechanical Curator collection/Synoptic index, Europe.

From this, I was able to find that there were 12 books that had been identified as having images which had something to do with Finland in them.

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons page.

This was a great way to start, but now I thought I would try the British Library’s Flickr Commons site to see if there were more images about Finland that had been tagged with Finland-related words.

British Library Flickr Commons

As of 07/07/16 there are 1,023,705 images on the British Library’s Flickr Commons page; a large proportion of these come from images snipped out of the digitised books that I have been working on.

The site has had an incredible 400,000,000 plus views and users have tagged over 100,000 images with around 500,000 tags. I am really looking forward to see what the winners of the Labs Competition 2016 will do on their SherlockNet project as they are hoping to tag all the images using computers code!

For now, I wanted to use the tags already there to see if I could find images relating to Finland.

Here is an example image which has several tags added, some of which relate to Finland:

   
Tags added to an example image on the British Library Flickr Commons page.

Here you can see tags such as ‘Finland’, ‘Suomi’ (Finnish for ‘Finnish’), ‘Helsinki’, ‘Helsingfors’ (Swedish for ‘Helsinki’) etc. which have been added by Flickr users (grey tags). Please note that tags in white are those added automatically by Flickr itself.

I have summarised the images I have found on the British Library’s Flickr Commons collection below:

 Table showing links and number of British Library Flickr Commons images about Finland

What is clear from this initial research is that there are definitely more books with images about Finland than the 12 identified through Wikimedia Commons. Much more work will be needed on this. Also, I would recommend that all the images that I have found be downloaded so that they may be used for the Finnish 100 year independence project.

In conclusion, I have enjoyed being able to participate in this project and have loved getting involved in some work on it. Although it has been relatively challenging, this new experience has been very interesting and I have definitely enjoyed spending my time on it. On the other hand, I would say that more time is certainly needed on this project to find more books in the 65,000 collection as I have only had a limited amount of time to spend on it. Furthermore, I would recommend that more words relating to Finland should be found and used in several languages to filter the master spreadsheet, in order to add more books to the Finnish collection. Lastly, one other thing that could be done to develop this project even further is to work with the curators of other languages to help identify Finland-related books.

If you would like to find more sub collections in the Microsoft books collection, please email [email protected], they would love to hear from you!

Tomorrow I will blog about my work experience at the library.

BL Labs are pleased to announce the two finalists of the BL Labs Competition (2016)!

The judging panel, consisting of the BL Labs Advisory Board and members of the British Library's Digital Scholarship team, definitely had their work cut out for them as the Competition had so many strong entries this year. 

After much deliberation, BL Labs is excited to introduce the BL Labs Competition (2016) finalists and their two projects:  

Black Abolitionist Performances and their Presence in Britain 

Hannah-Rose Murray, PhD student at the University of Nottingham  

Hannah-Rose describes her winning project for us: 

My project will create an original and exciting window into Victorian society by analysing the African American presence in Britain and how their performances and lectures reached nearly every corner of the country. It asks, how can we uncover hidden black voices in the archive?

I have searched through the British Library’s online Newspaper Database to collect as much data as possible referring to formerly enslaved African American Frederick Douglass’ lectures in Britain and, for the first time, I have collated this information to provide a systematic and detailed analysis of his experiences. I have created a map showing some of Douglass’ lectures (image below with the red pins) and a second map listing lectures given by other black abolitionists (image below with multi-coloured pins). This is displayed on my website, www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com

Map: locations of Frederick Douglass’ lectures in the United Kingdom and Ireland

 Map: location of lectures given by other black abolitionists in the United Kingdom and Ireland

Searching the online newspaper database can only provide partial information, and there are thousands of lectures just waiting to be uncovered, and then plotted onto a map. But how can we achieve this? I want to build on the work of the previous BL Labs Competition winner, Katrina Navickas’ Political Meetings Mapper, and develop a process that searches for the individual rather than a record of the lecture in question. This will allow us to analyse the impact of black abolitionists on British society and how far they travelled to lecture against
American slavery. Mapping their movements has never been done before and we can use this visual representation to gather an estimate of how many lectures they gave and, most importantly, allow their hidden voices to be heard. We can explore their performances through their own words and follow how they interacted with British audiences to win support for abolition and combat the deeply entrenched racism of the period.

Hannah-Rose Murray is a second year PhD student with the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Her AHRC/M3C-funded PhD focuses on the legacy of formerly enslaved African Americans on British society and the different ways they fought British racism. Hannah-Rose received a first class Masters degree in Public History from Royal Holloway University and has a BA History degree from University College London (UCL). In Nottingham, Hannah-Rose works closely with the Centre for Research in Race and Rights and is one of the postgraduate directors of the Rights and Justice Research Priority Area, which includes the largest number of scholars (700) in the world working on rights and justice. 

SherlockNet: Using Convolutional Neural Networks to automatically tag and caption the British Library Flickr collection

Luda Zhao, Brian Do and Karen Wang, students from Stanford University, California

The SherlockNet team tell us about their winning project:

Book illustrations, such as those in the British Library’s Flickr Commons 1 million collection, provide valuable insights into the cultural fabric of their time. However, large image collections are only useful and discoverable by researchers if they can be deeply explored, and the process can often be time-consuming, requires expertise and relies on humans to recognise patterns. Thus, a computationally guided approach providing automatic pattern recognition would allow art historians to study them in a more unbiased and efficient manner.

Machine learning can extract information and insights from data on a massive scale. In particular, deep learning methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), inspired by biological neural networks in the brain, are particularly suited for understanding the content of images, due to the hierarchical nature of the “neurons” that make up the network. CNNs are composed of layers of neurons, where each neuron is a “mini-calculator” of sorts that takes in information from the layer above and outputs more information. Progressing deeper into the network means that neurons will be working on increasingly complex information, progressing from detect features like lines or curves in the shallower layers to detect objects like cars and planes in the deeper layers. The CNN could then combine these “high-level” features to make very accurate predictions on the contents of the image.

Team photo: SherlockNet presenting their initial work at Stanford University, California

In this project, we plan to develop and optimize CNN algorithms to accomplish two important tasks: tagging and captioning. In the first step, we will classify all images with general categorical tags (e.g. decorations, architecture, animals etc.). This will serve as the basis for us to develop new ways to facilitate rapid online tagging with user-defined sets of tags, including a tag suggestions interface that would continuously reward user input by doing on-the-fly online learning to improve model accuracy. In the second, we will build off recent results in Deep Learning research and automatically generate descriptive natural-language captions for all images (e.g. “A man in a meadow on a horse”). These natural-language captions will expand the richness of the images and provide more intuitive ways for researchers to discover and use these images.

We intend to make our tags and captions accessible and searchable by the public through a web-based interface. We also plan to provide supplementary visualisation tools to give researchers greater insight and access into the technical assumptions behind our work. Finally, we will use our text annotations to globally analyse trends in the British Library Flickr collection over time. Together, we hope our project will establish CNNs as a novel tool for image annotation and analysis, as well as encourage widespread adoption of neural networks in bibliology.

Luda Zhao is currently a Masters student studying Computer Science at Stanford University, living in Palo Alto, California. He is interested in using machine learning and data mining to tackle tough problems in a variety of real-life contexts, and he's excited to work with the British Library to make art more discoverable for people everywhere. In his spare time, Luda enjoys beaches, swimming, all-you-can-eat BBQs, reading, and collecting subway maps.

Brian Do grew up in sunny California and is a first-year MD/PhD student at Harvard Medical School. Previously he studied Computer Science and biology at Stanford. Brian loves using data visualisation and cutting edge tools to reveal unexpected things about sports, finance and even his own text message history. In his free time he enjoys cooking, running in the hot sun, and playing frisbee on the beach.

 Karen Wang is currently a senior studying Computer Science at Stanford University, California. She also has an Art Practice minor. Karen is very interested in the intersection of computer science and humanities research, so this project is near and dear to her heart! She will be continuing her studies next year at Stanford in CS, Artificial Intelligence track.

BL Labs and the finalists are looking forward to working together on these exciting projects and we will be posting regular updates as these works progress.

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

We are currently looking for entries – so please help us spread the word by tweeting, re-blogging and telling anyone who might be interested about the Awards.

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.

The deadline for entering the Labs Awards (2016) is midnight BST on 5^th September 2016. Shortlisted entrants will be notified via email by midnight BST on Wednesday 21st 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].

The BL Labs Roadshow has been successfully completed for another year. Labs and members of the Digital Scholarship team visited 18 host institutions in the UK and Gothenburg, Sweden from February–April 2016, presenting to and collaborating with over 730 people in the process.

Map: Roadshow (2016) visited locations in the UK

Through the Roadshows, we imparted knowledge and facilitated access to the British Library’s digital world, providing a platform of support and inspiration for the use of the British Library’s digital collections and data in exciting and original ways.

We also promoted our annual BL Labs Competition and Awards, which encourage and recognise the outstanding and innovative use of the Library’s digital content. The Competition closed for entries on 11^th April and we received 22 entries, many of them of a very high standard. There is an equal number of Digital Humanities and Arts based entries as well as several Computer Science projects and a few community based and entrepreneurial proposals. The two Competition finalists will be decided on 25th May. The Awards remain open for entries until midnight BST on 5^th September 2016. 

The feedback we have received about the Roadshow events shows that over 92% of respondents rated their overall enjoyment of the events as 4.5 out of 5.

The Roadshow provided us with fantastic opportunities to meet and connect with a great many people with a variety of research backgrounds and an interest in the potential of digital collections to develop their work. Such research interests range from mapping, linguistics, history, education and publishing to health, commerce, law, videogames, data visualisation and digital archiving – and everything in between!

Overall, we received more than 250 expressions of interest about our digital collections at the Roadshows. These interactions have shown us that there is a great and varied appetite for the use, access and knowledge of the British Library’s digital content in the public and academic arenas, as well as beyond. BL Labs looks forward to building upon the success of the Roadshows and our other projects throughout the year – watch this space!     

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs on behalf of Dr. Melodee Beals, Lecturer in Digital History, Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University.

In the wild west of the World Wide Web, if you compose a hilarious joke, provide a simple solution to a complex problem or break a major new story, it is almost certain that your work will be copied. Although intellectual property laws exist, they are inconsistently enforced because of the sheer number of sites where reposting occurs - a number that increases with each passing second. If you are lucky, and your re-poster is honest, you may discover how far your ideas have spread through a pingback, an automatically generated comment on your original blog post with a link to its reprint.

In the nineteenth century, reprinting—especially unauthorised reprinting—was the backbone of Atlantic journalism but, unlike modern bloggers, these authors had no effective means of discovering the fate of their quips or queries, except through chance encounters with competing papers or their readers. Although concerns of commercial losses are long past, this lack of attribution continues to plague researchers working with newspapers. Without a precise date of composition or of original publication, and without a specific or even a corporate author, the provenance of these texts remain frustratingly uncertain. One solution to this problem is to track reprinting through text-matching. Using plagiarism detection software, we can carefully reconnect different versions appearing in a wide range of publications. Yet, however efficient our text-matching processes become, two major problems remain. First, text-matching requires machine-readable versions of the articles—electronic texts rather than images. While the sheer number of historical newspapers that have been digitised is impressive, the number that have high-quality, searchable text is deceptively limited. Many community sites have uploaded images of their physical or microfilm archives but do not have the resources to create fully searchable transcriptions. Others, created by state or commercial providers, have relied upon optical-character recognition, the accuracy of which is subject to wild variations. Even when OCR texts are excellent, these represent a considerable investment to providers and often remain locked behind subscription fees.

Reprints within the British Library's 19th Century Newspaper Database, 1818-1819, based on analysis with Copyfind

Thanks to the efforts of public institutions—including the British Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Australia and the Library of Congress—machine-readable transcriptions for a large number of nineteenth-century newspapers are now available to researchers. But within these collections, a second, more sinister problem arises. No matter how diligently archivists have worked to provide a representative or diverse selection, these digital holdings remain only a slice of the sprawling news network that once existed. Even if we find every single digital copy of a text, how can we know for sure that the original is among them? It is here that the humble pingback returns to the fore. Whether prompted by the innate honesty of editors or by their desire to establish the authenticity of their materials, a significant minority of newspapers articles contained an attribution. Whether appearing as an introductory dateline or a concluding tagline, these Georgian pingbacks offer tantalising clues as to the true origins of these anonymised texts. Yet, because only a minority of articles contain these attributions, because they can appear in many different forms or locations within the article text and because OCR is frustratingly inconsistent in transcribing italic and gothic typefaces, searching for datelines algorithmically is exceedingly difficult.

A Snippet from the Ipswich Journal, 13 January 1821. Courtesy of the British Library.

That is where the crowd come in. Although computers can process data very quickly, the human brain is still more adept at finding patterns when the parameters for those patterns are particularly fuzzy. Because of this, it was easier for astronomers to train volunteers to identify dusty debris disks in nebulae than to train computers to do the same thing. And what is true for nebulae is equally true of these Georgian pingbacks. Using thousands of images from the British Library's 19th-Century Newspapers collection, we have created a new site where you can help spot these attributions and provide researchers with what Georgian authors could only dream of, a in-depth understanding of just who was stealing from whom! The site includes an in-depth tutorial on the structure of nineteenth-century newspapers articles as well as three different ways you can help us tag the database. So, whether you have a smart phone and 5 minutes waiting for your train or want to explore the collection in more depth at your home PC, please visit Georgian Pingabcks and try your hand uncovering a 200-year-old case of plagiarism.

Dr M. H. Beals is a historian of migration and media a Loughborough University. She would like to thank the following undergraduate students at Loughborough University's Department of Politics, History and International Relations for their work on this project. Will Dickinson, Alice Gilbert, Ollie Luhrs, Alex Mackinder, Pooja Makwana, Matthew McCulloch, Jonny Ord, Emily Stanyard and Rebecca Thompson.

This is a guest post by Sarah Cole, the British Library’s current Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Sarah is working on a project called Poetic Places, which explores relationships between literary geographies, cultural heritage collections, and real world environments, via the creation of a smartphone geolocation user experience that shares British Library digital content in relevant real-world locations; enabling participants to experience meaningful “poetic” connections between location, history and literature. 

As the app nears completion, it’ll soon be time to release Poetic Places into the wild and let you good folk experience the result of the project.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to hold a free half-day event at the British Library Conference Centre in London on Friday 18th March 2016, starting at 13:30. We thought this would be a great opportunity to bring together and hear about a variety of projects that deal with literature, cultural heritage and place, to explore different methods and share our findings.

Image taken from page 345 of 'L'Espagne ... Illustrée de 309 gravures dessinées sur bois par Gustave Doré', https://flic.kr/p/hVkQ46

Five excellent speakers and myself will be taking attendees through our work, we'll also have tea (& coffee) and a short walk where I’ll invite you to install the app and come exploring the poetic places around the British Library.

We’ll be hearing from:

Sarah Cole, Poetic Places

Andy Ryan, CityRead London

Dr Giasemi Vavoula, Affective Digital Histories

Maya Chowdhry, Tales from Towpath

Dr David Cooper, Manchester Metropolitan University, on literary geographies

Jocelyn Dodd, Talking Statues

There are limited places available for this free event, so go to https://poeticplaces.eventbrite.co.uk to secure yours.

For those that can’t make it on the day, we’ll hopefully be recording the event to make it available online.

We look forward to seeing some of you then!

The @BL_Labs roadshow moves onto Cambridge and we still have a few places available for our FREE and open to all afternoon showcase event on Monday 15 February between 1.30pm - 4.30pm (booking essential). The event is kindly hosted by the Digital Humanities Network of researchers at the University Cambridge who are interested in how the use of digital tools is transforming scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

 
@BL_Labs Roadshow in Cambridge - Mon 15 Feb (0930 - 1230 and 1330 - 1630), hosted by the Digital Humanities Network at the University of Cambridge.

Building a search engine that works for you (9.30am - 12.30pm).

Building a search engine that works for you, Cambridge - Mon 15 Feb (9.30am - 12.30pm).

Led by British Library Labs Technical Lead Ben O'Steen, a special workshop will be held in the morning (9.30am - 12.30pm) which gets under the 'hood' of search engines. Attendees will load some texts from the largely 19th Century British Library digitised Book collection into a search engine to explore the problems, opportunities and assumptions made when creating such a service. The session will be using Elasticsearch, Python, Git and Notepad++.

The aim is to step people through the challenges and compromises required to have something as simple as a Google search service and to explore a few ways to tailor it to specific needs. It involves dealing with XML and the quality of real world data and use python code to put data into and query Elasticsearch. This 3-hour workshop will give participants an understanding of how search engines work from the inside. No technical knowledge is required as a prerequisite but spaces are strictly limited and the focus of this workshop will be on practical application of the ideas. University of Cambridge researchers and students have priority for bookings however you can now book here. However, please contact Anne Alexander to see if there have been any last minute cancelations, especially if you are from outside the University and would like to attend.

Labs and Digital Research Showcase with an 'Ideas Lab' (1.30pm-4.30pm).

The showcase in the afternoon (1.30pm-4.30pm) will provide participants an opportunity to:

• Understand what Digital Research activity is being carried out at the British Library.
• Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
• Learn how researchers found and revived forgotten Victorian jokes and Political meetings from our digital archives.
• Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
• Find out about a tool that links digitised handwritten manuscripts to transcribed texts and one that creates statistically representative samples from the British Library’s book collections.
• Consider how the intuitions of a DJ could be used to mix and perform the Library's digital collections.
• Talk to Library staff about how you might use some of the Library's digital content innovatively.
• Get advice, pick up tips and feedback on your ideas and projects for the 2016 BL Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September).

For more information about the afternoon session, a detailed programme and to book your place, visit the Labs & Digital Research Showcase with an 'Ideas Lab' event page.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

The BL Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Do you live in or near Nottingham and are you available on Wednesday 3 Feb between 1230 - 1600? Come along to the FREE UK @BL_Labs Roadshow event at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham (we have some places left and booking is essential for anyone interested).

BL Labs Roadshow at GameCity and The National Video Game Arcade, Nottingham, hosted by the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project based at the University of Nottingham, Wed 3 Feb (1230 - 1600)

• Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
• Learn how researchers found and revived forgotten Victorian jokes and Political meetings from our digital archives.
• Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
• Find out about a tool that links digitised handwritten manuscripts to transcribed texts and one that creates statistically representative samples from the British Library’s book collections.
• Consider how the intuitions of a DJ could be used to mix and perform the Library's digital collections.
• Talk to Library staff about how you might use some of the Library's digital content innovatively.
• Get advice, pick up tips and feedback on your ideas and projects for the 2016 BL Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September). 

Our hosts are the Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) Praxis project at the University of Nottingham who are kindly providing food and refreshments and will be talking about two amazing projects they have been involved in:

ArtMaps: Putting the Tate Collection on the map

Dr Laura Carletti will be talking about the ArtMaps project which is getting the public to accurately tag the locations of the Tate's 70,000 artworks.

The 'Wander Anywhere' free mobile app developed by Dr Benjamin Bedwell.

Dr Benjamin Bedwell, Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham will talk about the free mobile app he developed called 'Wander Anywhere'.  The mobile software offers users new ways to experience art, culture and history by guiding them to locations where it downloads stories intersecting art, local history, architecture and anecdotes on their mobile device relevant to where they are.

For more information, a detailed programme and to book your place, visit the Labs and Digital Humanities and Arts Praxis Workshop event page.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

The BL Labs project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.