Labs Roadshow at #citylis London, Mon 1 Feb (5pm-7.30pm)
Live in or near North-East London and are available on Monday 1 Feb between 1700 - 1930? Come along to the firstFREE UK Labs Roadshow event of 2016 (we have a few places left and booking is essential for anyone interested) and:
#citylis at the Department for Information Science, City University London, the first BL Labs Roadshow event Mon 1 Feb (1700 - 1930)
Discover the digital collections the British Library has, understand some of the challenges of using them and even take some away with you.
Understand how special games and computer code have been developed to help tag un-described images and make new art.
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 first hosts are the Department for Information Science (#citylis) at City University London. #citylis have kindly organised some refreshments, nibbles and also an exciting student discussion panel about their experiences of working on digital projects at the British Library, who are:
#citylis student panel. Top-left, Ludi Price Top-right, Dimitra Charalampidou Bottom-left, Alison Pope Bottom-right, Daniel van Strien
Daniel van Strien, a #citylis student who also works as an Assistant Librarian at Newcomb Library, Homerton University Hospital. He has recently worked on research around funders who are moving to open access and facilitated a workshop on ‘Library Carpentry’ at City teaching Librarians how to use version control.
For more information, a detailed programme and to book your place (essential), visit the BL Labs Workshop at #citylis event page.
Do you want to learn more about the digital collections the British Library has? Discover how others have used them in creative and surprising ways? Talk to Library staff and understand some of the challenges of how you might use our digital content innovatively. Get advice, pick up tips and consider entering your own ideas and projects into the Labs Competition (deadline 11 April) and Awards (deadline 5 September). You can browse our archive of ideas submitted for competitions and awards here.
Come to one of our 15 UK events as part of the @BL_Labs Roadshow between Feb 1 to April 4 2016. Events will include presentations from the British Library and host institutions, practical hands-on workshops, a chance to explore and discuss what you may do with some of the Library's data through an 'Ideas Lab' and for you to speak and get feedback from experts.
Register for a FREE event and OPEN TO ALL (unless otherwise stated). Further details about locations see below:
Locations in the UK where members of the Digital Scholarship team will be visiting between Feb-April 2016.
Mon 21 (1000 - 1500) - BL Labs Roadshow at GW4, University of Bristol on behalf of GW4 (South West and Wales - University of Bath, University of Cardiff, University of Bristol and the University of Exeter), Bristol
Today the Labs team is launching the fourth annual Competition and Awards for 2016. Please help us spread the word by tweeting, re-blogging, and telling anyone who might be interested!
British Library Labs Competition 2016
The annual Competition is looking for transformative project ideas which use the British Library’s digital collections and data in new and exciting ways. Two Labs Competition finalists will be selected to work 'in residence' with the BL Labs team between May and early November 2016, where they will get expert help, access to the Library’s resources and financial support to realise their projects.
Winners will receive a first prize of £3000 and runners up £1000 courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Labs Symposium on 7th November 2016 at the British Library in London where they will showcase their work.
The deadline for entering is midnight British Summer Time (BST) on 11th April 2016.
Labs Competition winners from previous years have produced an amazing range of creative and innovative projects. For example:
(Top-left) Adam Crymble's Crowdsource Arcade and some specially developed games to help with tagging images (Bottom-left) Katrina Navickas' Political Meetings Mapper and a photo from a Chartist re-enactment (Right) Bob Nicholson's Mechanical Comedian
A further range of inspiring and creative ideas have been submitted in previous years and some have been developed further.
British Library Labs Awards 2016
The annual Awards, introduced in 2015, formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using the British Library’s digital collections and data. This year, they will be 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.
A prize of £500 will be awarded to the winner and £100 for the runner up for each category at the Labs Symposium on 7th November 2016 at the British Library in London, again courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The deadline for entering is midnight BST on 5th September 2016.
The Awards winners for 2015 produced a remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects in Research, Creative/Artistic, Entrepreneurship categories and a special Jury's prize:
(Top-left) Spatial Humanities research group at the University Lancaster plotting mentions of disease in newspapers on a map in Victorian times, (Top-right) A computer generated work of art, part of 'The Order of Things' by Mario Klingemann, (Bottom-left) A bow tie made by Dina Malkova inspired by a digitised original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland (Bottom-right) Work on Geo-referencing maps discovered from a collection of digitised books at the British Library that James Heald is still involved in.
Research: “Representation of disease in 19th century newspapers”by the Spatial Humanities research group at Lancaster University analysed the British Library's digitised London based newspaper, The Era through innovative and varied selections of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to determine how, when and where the Victorian era discussed disease.
Creative / Artistic: “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann involved the use of semi-automated image classification and machine learning techniques in order to add meaningful tags to the British Library’s one million Flickr Commons images, creating thematic collections as well as new works of art.
Entrepreneurship: “Redesigning Alice” by Dina Malkova produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the incredible illustrations from a digitised British Library original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll and sold them through the Etsy platform and in the Alice Pop up shop at the British Library in London.
Jury's Special Mention: Indexing the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps by volunteer James Heald describes both the work he has led and his collaboration 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 50,000 maps within this collection partially through a map-tag-a-thon which are now being geo-referenced.
A further range of inspiring work has been carried out with the British Library's digital content and collections.
If you are thinking of entering, please make sure you visit our Competition and Awardsarchive pages for further details.
Finally, if you have a specific question that can't be answered through these pages, feel free to contact us at [email protected], or why not come to one of the 'BL Labs Roadshow 2016' UK events we have scheduled between February and April 2016 to learn more about our digital collections and discuss your ideas?
We really look forward to reading your entries!
Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.
The winners of the British Library LabsAwards were announced at the British Library Labs Symposium, held on Monday 2nd November 2015, at the British Library. The Awards were launched in 2015 by the British Library Labs team in order to formally recognise outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and content.
This year, the Awards honoured projects within three key categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship. The winner of the Research Award (2015) was “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in nineteenth-century newspapers”, submitted by the Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University: Paul Atkinson, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain-Jay, Daniel Kershaw, Catherine Porter and Paul Rayson, a video presentation from Ian about the entry is available here.
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.
Ian Gregory, University of Lancaster
The Award was accepted at the Symposium by Ian Gregory, Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University, on behalf of the rest of the Spatial Humanities project team.
Below, Ian’s guest blog discusses the award winning project for us:
Lancaster University’s Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places is a European Research Council funded project concerned with understanding how we can analyse the geographies in large corpora while remaining sensitive to the subtleties and nuances within the texts. It does this by combining techniques from Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and corpus linguistics to create a set of techniques we call Geographical Text Analysis (GTA). GIS is effectively a mapping and database technology that is typically used with quantitative sources. Corpus linguistics is concerned with analysing large textual collections using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The project has been developing these techniques and applying them to studies concerned with Lake District literature and nineteenth century social history. Doing this requires a large and highly interdisciplinary team, currently Paul Atkinson (an historian), Ian Gregory (digital humanities), Andrew Hardie (linguistics), Daniel Kershaw (computer science), Amelia Joulain-Jay (linguistics), Catherine Porter (geography) and Paul Rayson (computer science).
One of the major challenges facing the team has been incorporating the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspapers collection. This consists of two million newspaper pages from 49 series of papers, most of which run continuously for the whole of the nineteenth century. Our best estimate is that it contains over 30 billion words. The sheer volume of material presents significant challenges, not least that to even strip out the unnecessary mark-up to make the texts suitable for analysis requires computing power that was only practical using parallel processing on a Hadoop cluster. A second challenge is that, as with many other historical sources, they were digitised using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in which the computer attempts to convert a scanned image into digital letters and words. Being newsprint, the quality of the original text is frequently poor thus this is an error prone process. We have evaluated a range of post-OCR correction methods and found one to be promising. We have also explored the extent to which OCR error affects analytic results. We are particularly interested in a technique called collocation, which effectively asks what words are found near to a search-term, allowing us to understand what themes are associated with other themes. We have been able to show that, with certain caveats, the OCR quality of the newspapers collection does not undermine the effectiveness of collocation analysis.
Graph: frequencies of mentions of France and Russia in The Era newspaper, 1838–1898
The diagram above shows the frequency of mentions of two countries, France and Russia, in one newspaper, TheEra. The spikes in the graph may suggest that much of the interest in these countries was driven by wars and crises such as the Crimean War in the 1850s, and the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Turkish wars of the 1870s.
Graph: collocations between ‘France’, the word ‘war’, and words associated with war (semantic class G3) in The Era newspaper, 1838–1900
Graph: collocations between ‘Russia, the word ‘war’, and words associated with war (semantic class G3) in The Era newspaper, 1838–1900
Combining collocation with semantic tagging, in which words are classed according to their meaning, allows us to test this idea. The graphs above show the collocations between the two country names and the word ‘war’, and all words in semantic class ‘G3’, words associated with war. They show that although ‘war’ does co-occur with these countries, it does so no more than 10% of the time. Further collocation analyses can be used to show what other themes are associated with the countries in these periods.
Map: place names that collocate with a range of 19th century diseases in The Era
We are interested in the representation of local places in The Era, as well as countries. A technique known as geoparsing allows us to identify place-names in the text and allocate them with coordinates. The map above shows the places – mainly towns and cities – associated with a range of common nineteenth century diseases. Being able to link between the map and the underlying text allows us to understand how patterns vary from place to place. For example, the mentions of disease in India tend to be associated with newspaper reports on the deaths of individual colonial officials and soldiers. Egypt, by contrast, is driven by personal testaments in medical advertisements by people who claim to have used a particular medicine whilst living in there.
Map: place names in England & Wales that collocate with a range of 19th century diseases in The Era
This global geography is, however, dominated by references to places in England and the map above shows this in greater detail. This spatial depiction of disease mentions not only allows us to explore the temporal geography of newspaper interest in different diseases, it also allows for a comparison with other patterns and information such as those found in official reports and statistics.
A key point of this work is that research with digital sources in the humanities is not a simple two stage process in which a source is digitised and then findings appear. Digitisation has been criticised as being expensive and producing problematic results. Both are true, however the response should not be either to give up in despair or to carry on regardless ignoring the problems. Instead, issues such as OCR quality and its impacts will present significant research challenges for many years to come. It is important that the humanities play a key role in responding to these challenges. Beyond this, effectively exploiting the content within large digital sources requires much more than simple browsing and keyword searching. Research into developing new methodologies or adaption of existing ones to make them more appropriate to the humanities is essential. These need to allow and encourage the combination of the computer’s ability to summarise patterns in large volumes of data, with the more traditional humanities skills of understanding subtly and nuance in documents written by humans. Finally, while these stages present many possibilities, they are of little use unless applied research follows at the end. Getting to the applied stage can be a long journey requiring significant investment, interdisciplinary expertise and changing working practices. If followed, however, this journey will lead to both new knowledge about how to make full use of the digital sources that are ever more pervasive, and to major new contributions to our understanding of the past.
British Library Labs launched a new annual competition in 2015 – The British Library Labs Awards. The Awards formally recognise outstanding and innovative work that has been created using the British Library’s digital collections and content.
This year, the Awards honoured projects within three key categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurship. The winners and runners up were announced at the British Library Labs Symposium, held on Monday 2nd November 2015, at the British Library.
Prizes were awarded to the winners of each category, followed by special presentations given by the winners discussing their projects.
Research category Award runner up: “Palimpsest: Telling Edinburgh’s Stories with Maps”.
By the Palimpsest team: Beatrice Alex, Miranda Anderson, Ian Fieldhouse, Claire Grover, David Harris-Birtill, Uta Hinrichs, James Loxley, Jon Oberlander, Nicola Osborne, Lisa Otty, Aaron Quigley, James Reid and Tara Thomson.
Palimpsest Project
Palimpsest is an AHRC funded collaboration between the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures and School of Informatics, EDINA, and the University of St Andrews’ SACHI lab. The project enables the interactive exploration of Edinburgh’s rich literary history via the LitLong web interface and mobile app. The LitLong tools link to more than 1,600 locations within Edinburgh mentioned in over 47,000 literary excerpts from around 550 books.
Research category Award winner: “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in nineteenth-century newspapers”.
By the Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University: Paul Atkinson, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain-Jay, Daniel Kershaw, Catherine Porter and Paul Rayson.
The Spatial Humanities Project at the University of Lancaster and Ian Gregory one of the team.
The award was accepted by Ian Gregory, Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University, on behalf of the rest of the Spatial Humanities project team. Ian’s research interests are in using geographical technologies to understand the past. His early research focussed on quantitative sources such as census and health data, including work on the GB Historical GIS and the AHRC-funded Troubled Geographies project that explored Ireland’s changing religious geographies. Recently, he has concentrated on exploring the geographies within texts, working on projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, Leverhulme Trust, Newby Trust and Heritage Lottery Fund. He has published four books and over 60 journal articles and book chapters. Learn more about Spatial Humanities’ winning project here: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/spatialhum.wordpress/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.
A video of the presentation of this award is available below:
Creative/Artistic category Award runner up: “Nix”.
By the Gothulus Rift team: Jackson Rolls-Gray, Sebastian Filby and Faye Allen.
Gothulus Rift by team Nix
Nix is an award winning virtual reality game made for the Oculus Rift wherein players explore a warped underwater environment with Beckford's Fonthill Abbey as the centerpiece. Nix was created as a response to a brief provided by Gamecity as part of their Off the Map competition in collaboration with Crytek and The British Library. The competition challenged students to use the materials featured in the British Library’s upcoming Gothic exhibition as inspiration for a game made using Crytek’s Cryengine.
Creative/Artistic category Award winner: “The Order of Things”.
By Mario Klingemann, New Media Artist.
An art work by Mario Klingemann
Mario Klingemann has a been using code and data as mediums for exploring the possibilities of computational and artistic creativity within the cultural heritage sector. He has experience in using image classification and data mining to support institutions including the British Library, Cardiff University and the New York Public Library, in the digitisation and classification of their archives. Mario’s works have been shown at the Residenzschloß Dresden, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the MoMA New York, as well as on the internet, including "Like This", "Mona Tweeta" and "Lowpolybot". 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.
A video of the presentation of this award is available below:
Entrepreneurial category Award runner up: “The British Library ‘Library Wall’: The nineteenth- century ‘British Classics’ collection”.
By the Artefacto team: Sara Wingate Gray and Kate Lomax.
Library Wall by Artefacto
The British Library ‘Library Wall’ is a curated collection of digitised texts from the British Library's nineteenth-century book collection, which people are able to freely obtain, read and share through the use of smartphones or other “smart” mobile devices, such as iPads and tablets, by pointing their device at the installation. The physical installation currently exists in a designed and printed large-scale poster-type format, which is easily fixed to any blank space, such as above a desk or in a shop.
Entrepreneurial category Award winner: “Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project”.
By Dina Malkova, designer and entrepreneur.
Dina Malkova and her Bow Tie
Dina Malkova runs a design studio in Lewes, East Sussex. She was awarded a Chevening scholarship to attend The University of Arts, at the London College of Communication by The British Council in 2005. As part of her MA in Enterprise Management in Creative Arts, Dina completed a Creative Ventures course at the London Business School, winning the top award. Over the last 10 years, Dina has garnered experience in creating and supplying collections for a number of companies, including the V&A gift shop and the Glyndebourne Opera shop.The project has produced a range of bow ties and other gift products inspired by the fantastic illustrations of Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll.
A video of the presentation of this award is available below:
Jury’s Special Mention Award: “Indexing the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps”.
By James Heald, Wikimedia contributor.
Wikimedia Commons and James Heald
The project improves the availability of the British Library Flickr Commons images through metadata, making different parts of the content more discoverable and well-grouped, so the content can be made available via the structured schemes at Wikimedia Commons.
James Heald has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2004. In the last couple of years, his volunteer interests have turned towards Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. As well as focusing on the map images from the Mechanical Curator set, James become the first user in the wild of Wikimedia’s new GlamWiki Toolset upload tool, with a set of 400 highlight images from the British Library.
The third annual BL Labs Symposium took place on Monday 2nd November 2015 and the event was a great success!
The Labs Symposiums showcase innovative projects which use the British Library's digital content and provide a platform for development, networking and debate in the Digital Scholarship field.
This year’s Symposium commenced with a keynote from Professor David De Roure, entitled “Intersection, Scale and Social Machines: The Humanities in the digital world”, which addressed current activity in digital scholarship within multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks.
Professor David De Roure giving the Symposium keynote speech
Caroline Brazier, the Chief Librarian of the British Library, then presented awards to the two winners of the British Library Labs Competition (2015) – Dr Adam Crymble and Dr Katrina Navickas, both lecturers of Digital History at the University of Hertfordshire.
(L-R): Caroline Brazier, Chief Librarian; Competition winners Katrina Navickas and Adam Crymble; Dr Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Scholarship
After receiving their awards, it was time for Adam and Katrina to showcase their winning projects.
Adam’s project, entitled “Crowdsourcing Arcade: Repurposing the 1980s arcade console for scholarly image classification”, takes the crowdsourcing experience off the web and establishes it in a 1980s-style arcade game.
Presentation by Dr Adam Crymble, BL Labs Competition (2015) winner
Katrina’s project, “Political Meetings Mapper: Bringing the British Library maps to life with the history of popular protest”, has developed a tool which extracts notices of meetings from historical newspapers and plots them on layers of historical maps from the British Library's collections.
Presentation by Dr Katrina Navickas, BL Labs Competition (2015) winner
After lunch, the Symposium continued with Alice's Adventures Off the Map 2015 competition, produced and presented by Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library. Each year, Off the Map challenges budding designers to use British Library digital collections as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media.
The winning entry was "The Wondering Lands of Alice", created by Off Our Rockers, a team of six students from De Montfort University in Leicester: Dan Bullock, Freddy Canton, Luke Day, Denzil Forde, Amber Jamieson and Braden May.
Video: Alice's Adventures Off the Map 2015 competition winner 'The Wondering Lands of Alice'
This was followed by the presentations of the British Library Labs Awards (2015), a session celebrating BL Labs’ collaborations with researchers, artists and entrepreneurs from around the world in the innovative use of the British Library's digital collections.
The winners were:
BL Labs Research Award (2015) – “Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in nineteenth-century newspapers”, by The Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University: Paul Atkinson, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain-Jay, Daniel Kershaw, Cat Porter and Paul Rayson.
The award was presented to one of the project collaborators, Ian Gregory, Professor of Digital Humanities at Lancaster University.
Professor Ian Gregory receiving the BL Labs Research Award (2015), on behalf of the Spatial Humanties project, from Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
BL Labs Creative/Artistic Award (2015) – “The Order of Things” by Mario Klingemann, New Media Artist.
Mario Klingemann receiving the BL Labs Creative/Artistic Award (2015) from Nora McGregor
BL Labs Entrepreneurial Award (2015) –“Redesigning Alice: Etsy and the British Library joint project” by Dina Malkova, designer and entrepreneur.
Dina Malkova receiving the BL Labs Entrepreneurial Award (2015) from Dr Rossitza Atanassova
Jury’s Special Mention Award – “Indexing the BL 1 million and Mapping the Maps” by James Heald, Wikipedia contributor.
James Heald receiving the Jury's Special Mention Award (2015) from Dr Mia Ridge
The Symposium concluded with a thought provoking panel session, “The Ups and Downs of Open”, chaired by George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd. George was joined by panelists Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator at the British Library, Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Web Manager at the Wellcome Library, and Paul Downey, Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service (GDS). The session discussed the issues, challenges and value of memory organisations opening up their digital content for use by others.
Panel session (L-R): George Oates; Jenn Phillips-Bacher; Paul Downey; Mia Ridge
The BL Labs team would like to thank everyone who attended and participated in this year’s Symposium, making the event the most successful one to date – and we look forward to seeing you all at next year’s BL Labs Symposium on Monday 7th of November 2016!
Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.
British Library Labs Competition (2015) winner Dr Katrina Navickas showcased some of the results from her winning project at the ‘Following the Chartists around London’ event, held at the British Library on Monday 21st September.
Katrina’s project, the Political Meetings Mapper, has uncovered over 125 venues in London used for Chartist meetings in the 1840s. Katrina and the British Library Labs team took over 30 academics and members of the public on a tour of some of the sites investigated by Katrina that are still standing today.
Katrina updates us on the successful event:
We were pleased so many people turned up in costume, and everyone got to wear a traditional red, cream and green rosette! We began with some talks in the Foyle Centre for Conservation conference suite. Mahendra Mahey introduced the work of British Library Labs. Katrina then discussed the Political Meetings Mapper and gave a background to Chartism, the largest movement for democracy in 19th century Britain. Dr Matthew Sangster of the University of Birmingham explored his digital mapping project, Romantic London, which uses Richard Horwood’s 1799 map of London. Professor Ian Haywood of the University of Roehampton talked about the Chartist ‘monster meetings’ of the 1840s, particularly Kennington Common in 1848, and revealed some exciting new evidence about the Birmingham Bull Ring riots of 1839.
A re-enactment of one of the Chartist meetings
We then set off on our tour of London venues. The group braved the pouring rain, and succeeded in getting round all the points on the tour map, including the Prince of Wales Feathers pub on Warren Street, the King and Queen on Foley Street and the Crown and Two Chairmen on Dean Street.
The Chartist walking tour map
We ended up at the Red Lion on Kingly Street, Soho, which had been not only a Chartist and tailors’ trade union venue in the 1840s but also a meeting place of the radical London Corresponding Society in the 1790s. In the upstairs bar, volunteers in costume re-enacted one of the Chartist meetings using reports found in the digitised newspapers. The lively audience participated by passing resolutions in favour of universal suffrage (the vote for all men), and the People’s Charter. A video of the event will be available soon.
Find out more about Political Meetings Mapper on Katrina’s blog.
Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.
The BL Labs team are excited to announce that the third annual British Library Labs Symposium (2015) is taking place on Monday 2nd November 2015, from 09:30 –17:00 in the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras. The event is free, although you must book a ticket. Don’t delay, as last year’s event was a sell 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.
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 David De Roure, Professor of e-Research at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. The British Library’s Chief Librarian, Caroline Brazier, will then present awards to the two British Library Labs Competition (2015) winners, who will follow with presentations on their winning projects.
After lunch, Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library, will announce the winners of the Alice’s Adventures Off the Map 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 British Library Labs Awards (2015), 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’ three categories: Research, Creative/Artistic and Entrepreneurial.
The afternoon will end with a thought provoking panel session discussing the issues of opening up digital content for memory organisations, chaired by George Oates, Director of Good, Form & Spectacle Ltd.
The Symposium will conclude with a networking reception in the Chaucer and Foyer area.