Digital scholarship blog

Posted on behalf of Bob Nicholson.

The Victorian Meme Machine is a collaboration between the British Library Labs and Dr Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University). The project will create an extensive database of Victorian jokes and then experiment with ways to recirculate them out over social media. For an introduction to the project, take a look at this blog post or this video presentation.

Stage One: Finding Jokes

Whenever I tell people that I’m working with the British Library to develop an archive of nineteenth-century jokes, they often look a bit confused. “I didn’t think the Victorians had a sense of humour”, somebody told me recently. This is a common misconception. We’re all used to thinking of the Victorians as dour and humourless; as a people who were, famously, ‘not amused’. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, jokes circulated at all levels of Victorian culture. While most of them have now been lost to history, a significant number have survived in the pages of books, periodicals, newspapers, playbills, adverts, diaries, songbooks, and other pieces of printed ephemera. There are probably millions of Victorian jokes sitting in libraries and archives just waiting to be rediscovered – the challenge lies in finding them.   

In truth, we don’t know how many Victorian gags have been preserved in the British Library’s digital collections. Type the word ‘jokes’ into the British Newspaper Archive or the JISC Historical Texts collection and you’ll find a handful of them fairly quickly. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more jests hidden deeper in these archives. Unfortunately, they aren’t easy to uncover. Some appear under peculiar titles, others are scattered around as unmarked column fillers, and many have aged so poorly that they no longer look like jokes at all. Figuring out an effective way to find and isolate these scattered fragments of Victorian humour is one of the main aims of our project. Here’s how we’re approaching it.

Firstly, we’ve decided to focus our attention on two main sources: books and newspapers. While it’s certainly possible to find jokes elsewhere, these sources provide the largest concentrations of material. A dedicated joke book, such as this Book of Humour, Wit and Wisdom, contains hundreds of viable jokes in a single package. Similarly, many Victorian newspapers carried weekly joke columns containing around 30 gags at a time – over the course of a year, a regularly printed column yields more than 1,500 jests. If we can develop an efficient way to extract jokes from these texts then we’ll have a good chance of meeting our target of 1 million gags.

Our initial searches have focused on two digital collections:

1)      The 19^th Century British Library Newspapers Database.

2)      A collection of nineteenth-century books digitised by Microsoft.

In order to interrogate these databases we’ve compiled a continually-expanding list of search terms. Obvious keywords like ‘jokes’ and ‘jests’ have proven to be effective, but we’ve also found material using words like ‘quips’, ‘cranks’, ‘wit’, ‘fun’, ‘jingles’, ‘humour’, ‘laugh’, ‘comic’, ‘snaps’, and ‘siftings’. However, while these general search terms are useful, they don’t catch everything. Consider these peculiarly-named columns from the Hampshire Telegraph:

At first glance, they look like recipes for buckwheat cakes – in fact, they’re columns of imported American jokes named after what was evidently considered to be a characteristically Yankee delicacy. I would never have found these columns using conventional keyword searches. Uncovering material like this is much more laborious, and requires us to manually look for peculiarly-named books and joke columns.

In the case of newspapers, this requires a bit of educated guesswork. Most joke columns appeared in popular weekly papers, or in the weekend editions of mass-market dailies. So, weighty, morning broadsheets like the London Times are unlikely to yield many gags. Similarly, while the placement of jokes columns varied from paper to paper (and sometimes from issue to issue), they were typically placed at the back of the paper alongside children’s columns, fashion advice, recipes, and other miscellaneous tit-bits of entertainment. Finally, once a newspaper has been proven to contain one set of joke columns, the likelihood is that more will be found under other names. For example, initial keyword searches seem to suggest that the Newcastle Weekly Courant discontinued its long-running ‘American Humour’ column in 1888. In fact, the column was simply renamed ‘Yankee Snacks’ and continued to appear under this title for another 8 years.

Tracking a single change of identity like this is fairly straightforward; once the new title has been identified we simply need to add it to our list of search terms. Unfortunately, the editorial whims of some newspapers are harder to follow. For example, the Hampshire Telegraph often scattered multiple joke columns throughout a single issue. To make things even more complicated, they tended to rename and reposition these columns every couple of weeks. Here’s a sample of the paper’s American humour columns, all drawn from the first 6 months of 1892:

For papers like this, the only option is to manually locate jokes columns one at a time. In other words, while our initial set of core keywords should enable us to find and extract thousands of joke columns fairly quickly, more nuanced (and more laborious) methods will be required in order to get the rest.

It’s important to stress that jokes were not always printed in organised collections. Some newspapers mixed humour with other pieces of entertaining miscellany under titles such as ‘Varieties’ or ‘Our Carpet Bag’. The same is true of books, which often combined jokes with short stories, comic songs, and material for parlour games. While it’s fairly easy to find these collections, recognising and filtering out the jokes is more problematic. As our project develops, we’d like to experiment with some kind of joke-detection tool that pick out content with similar formatting and linguistic characteristics to the jokes we’ve already found. For example, conversational jokes usually have capitalised names (or pronouns) followed by a colon and, in some cases, include a descriptive phrase enclosed in brackets. So, if a text includes strings of characters like “Jack (…):” or “She (…):“ then there’s a good chance that it might be a joke. Similarly, many jokes begin with a capitalised title followed by a full-stop and a hyphen, and end with an italicised attribution. Here’s a characteristic example of all three trends in action:

Unfortunately, conventional search interfaces aren’t designed to recognise nuances in punctuation, so we’ll need to build something ourselves. For now, we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on harvesting the low-hanging fruit found in clearly defined collections of jokes.

                The project is still in the pilot stage, but we’ve already identified the locations of more than 100,000 jokes. This is more than enough for our current purposes, but I hope we’ll be able to push onwards towards a million as the project expands. The most effective way to do this may well to be harness the power of crowdsourcing and invite users of the database to help us uncover new sources. It’s clear from our initial efforts that a fully-automated approach won’t be effective. Finding and extracting large quantities of jokes – or, indeed, any specific type of content – from among the millions of pages of books and newspapers held in the library’s collection requires a combination of computer-based searching and human intervention. If we can bring more people on board we’ll be able to find and process the jokes much faster.

Finding gags is just the first step. In the next blog post I’ll explain how we’re extracting joke columns from the library’s digital collections, importing them into our own database, and transcribing their contents. Stay tuned!

Posted on behalf of David Normal (edited by Sophie McIvor and Mahendra Mahey)

The British Library meets Burning Man…

In December 2013 the British Library uploaded over a million images from our 19^th century digitised books onto Flickr Commons, with the invitation for anyone to remix, re-use and re-purpose the content as they wish.

The response from the online community was outstanding, but by far the most unexpected use of the British Library’s Flickr Commons images is happening this week - the collection has inspired four large-scale artworks on display at this year’s Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, created by David Normal, a California-based artist with a special interest in 19^th century illustration.

One of David’s four paintings being installed at Burning Man 2014
(photographed by Andrew Spalding)

 
A video showing the process of one of the lightboxes being installed at Burning Man 2014 
(Courtesy of David Normal)

Before he headed off to the desert to install his “Crossroads of Curiosity’ artworks at the festival, we spoke to David about how this came about, and how he used the image collection:

What first attracted you to the idea of using 19th Century illustrations in your art?

Beginning as a teenager I was interested in making “seamless” collages, in which the elements go together so smoothly that it looks as though it were all one illustration. I love Max Ernst’s collage novel, “Une Semaine De Bonte” which took this seamless collage aesthetic to its zenith using 19th century illustration.  Recently, I began painting over digital collage prints, and this process opened up a lot of possibilities, to the point where I felt that I could use the 19th century in a fresh way that is not derivative of Ernst’s work.

How did you come across the British Library’s Flickr Commons collection?

The guitarist of the punk band “Flipper” mentioned something about it and at the time I had already initiated the plan to create paintings based on 19th Century images for Burning Man, and so learning of this vast online collection was thrilling and truly fortuitous since it was exactly what I was looking for.

How has the Library’s collection informed your artwork?

After being introduced to the collection I realized that everything I needed was there.  I decided to use the collection exclusively, and make that one of the hallmarks of the project. Indeed, I feel that the “Crossroads of Curiosity” celebrates this amazing collection.

One of the most striking aspects of the collection is its colossal size.  Having a lot of material to choose from is important in collage making, since out of excess come the chance juxtapositions that are so magical.

Another thing that was very helpful to me was the randomness.  The majority of the images are in no particular order in the photostream, and viewing the images in succession was like taking a journey through a landscape of illustrated symbols. 

How did you identify which images you wanted to use?

Certain images have some symbolic power or strangeness that intrigues me and those are the images I am drawn too.  This has to do with thematic preoccupations that percolate up from my subconscious on the one hand, and with my taste in things on the other, and also with the specific theme I am working with on the Burning Man project, which is “Caravansary - The Silk Road”.  I have favorited nearly 3000 images on my own Flickr page.

What happens next?

I start with selecting several images that I think will go together well.  I bring them into Photoshop and then begin to arrange and play with them.  As the composition develops the images are increasingly cleaned up, edited, and composed together. 

These images below outline the development of the collage painting, “Conflamingulation”, one of four which will be featured on 8’x20’ lightpanels at Burning Man:

The chance conjunction of the machine gunner and the skunk suggests an idea for a collage.


 A rough collage is made.

Different arrangements are experimented with.

A final version is arrived at that is the basis of the painting.

Finished painting: 
“Conflamingulation”, Acrylic on polypropylene film, lightpanel,  35” x 96”, 2014

Which is your favourite of all the images you’ve discovered on the Flickr Commons collection?

I think I have not viewed more than 10% of the collection altogether, so I can’t say that I have enough familiarity to choose a favourite fairly.  However, if I had to select a single image then perhaps I would choose this skunk because of his great versatility as a piece of clip art.

Image available at the British Library Flickr Commons page
Taken from  page 42 of the book, OUR EARTH AND ITS STORY, A Popular Treatise on Physical Geography, Edited by Robert Brown, Published by Cassell and Company Limited

What is special about a collection like this?

Being able to use illustrations as a way of approaching books is interesting - typically the reverse is the case;  reading a book you find the illustrations and not vice versa.

What do you hope that people at Burning Man will take from the finished pieces?

Larry Harvey, the director of Burning Man, has said that he hopes the pieces will evoke a feeling of “romance”, in the sense of the romanticism of myths and fairytales such as the Arabian Nights.  I will concur with that.  The pieces are meant to show the intersections of distant times, places, peoples and things in humorous and thought provoking ways.  It is a cabinet of curiosities that has opened up to encompass the world in series of dramatic tableaux.  I hope the Crossroads of Curiosity fills the viewer with wonder, and arouses their own curiosity.

David Normal’s ‘Crossroads of Curiosity’ artworks are on display at the Burning Man Festival from 25 August – 1 September.

Here is one his illuminated panels from Burning Man 2014:

One of David Normal's illuminated panels for Burning Man 2014.

You can discover more about his work at www.davidnormal.com.

From this week onwards, visitors to the Library may come face-to-chest with the institution’s very own example of cryptozoology. An enormous specimen, hunched (though only when passing through doorways) and pallid from too much time spent in the Rare Books Reading Room, this survival of an earlier era can most often be found in the foyer lapping at the water fountain, reading quietly on his iPad, or roaming the canteen, hunting for delicious vegetarian prey.

The British Library is very pleased to welcome the Library's first Interactive Fiction Writer-in-Residence: Rob Sherman is a writer and games designer whose first digital project, the enormous and sprawling browser-based storygame The Black Crown Project, was published by Random House and challenged digital expectations in the publishing industry. Another notable project is his recent Twine game for Shelter about the housing crisis; called The Spare Set .

Rob has successfully acquired CreativeWorks London funding from their entrepreneur-in-residence scheme; to be the attached digital writer for the Library’s upcoming exhibition, Lines In The Ice, which will display documents, maps and paraphernalia relating to arctic exploration expeditions, including John Franklin’s ill-fated voyage to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. The ensuing tales of cannibalism, exposure and desperate contact with the local Inuit are sure to suit Rob’s nightmarish yet delicate prose, once compared to ‘knitting intestines’ by a staunch admirer.

As well as being glimpsed in the corner of your eye as you walk around the Library, Rob will be researching the collections and producing original and unique digital and physical works to accompany the exhibition. While the details are still being finalised, rest assured that you will not need to visit the Library physically to experience Rob’s work; everything will be released online, and any physical works will be digitised. He will also be documenting his progress via a research blog, and hosting events, where he will be sharing his work and documenting his journey into the farthest reaches of our collections.

However, he would like to point out that he is not as scary and legendary as all that, and if you spot him, he will happily stop for a chat.

Rob Sherman, Interactive Fiction Writer-in-Residence for the Lines in the Ice Exhibition

http://bonfiredog.co.uk/

@rob_sherman

In this post, the British Library Big Data Experiment team reflect on their work in the first six weeks of the project. For more information on this collaboration between the British Library Digital Research team, University College London Computer Science, and University College London Centre for Digital Humanities see our kickoff post.

Since the project began in early June we have had an interesting time coming to terms with the typical workflow of a researcher from the arts and humanities.  One of the key tasks for this goal was conducting a focus group where we learnt a variety of different things, for instance, considering research conventions within the field, it was surprising to discover that researchers are willing to leverage modern computing tools such as text analysis.  During the focus group researchers expressed views and ideas which had never occurred to us, such as, “each instance of a book is a different object, it is unique because one specific copy is particular,” and “the person who composes the content can be different from the person who actually writes it.”  Having the researcher’s perspective conveyed to us in such a way was invaluable.  It was also useful to learn how they would improve existing search systems, “I would like intelligent suggestions” and another felt “feedback on which collection has been searched would be particularly useful.”  Overall the focus group was an essential learning exercise for getting this project off the ground.

We have also spent some time interrogating the British Library’s data and gained an appreciation for the variety, volume, velocity and veracity of its structure.  This presents a challenge which is interesting because it is not possible to resolve using familiar database software systems.  The data we have begun working with is quite diverse, it was created during the digitisation of approximately 40,000 titles (equates to approximately 65,000 volumes) which until recently been challenging for researchers and the public to access.  Now, all of the metadata, data and scans within the collection are dedicated into the public domain for unrestricted use.

The team have taken the opportunity to consult with key stakeholders and leading academics of the field.  All of this has set us up very nicely to begin development work.  In the coming weeks, we hope to build a powerful and intuitive service which will enable arts and humanities researchers to better interact with the British Library’s digitised collection of public domain books, thereby enabling them to access the data in a more meaningful way.

Nektaria Stavrou (Team Leader and MSc Software Systems Engineering, University College London), Stelios Georgiou (Testing Director and MSc Software Systems Engineering, UCL), Wendy Wong (MSc Computer Science, UCL), Stefan P. Alborzpour (MSc Computer Science, UCL)

Some months back we released digital images of 430 objects from our collections into the public domain via Flickr Commons. Well short of the million we made available in December, these images have the benefit of being more precisely described at an individual level. Indeed they derive from Images Online, an extensive repository of high quality imagery that reflects the vast size and diversity of the British Library collections.

The World before the Deluge (1865)

The selection covers a range of topics, including images from the 12th century Topographia Hibernica, the signature of William Shakespeare from a Blackfriars mortgage-deed, engravings after drawings made in the countries Captain Cook visited during his first voyage to the South Pacific, illustrations from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, drawings depicting eighteenth century Hungarian and Saxon dress, Georgian caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson, and many more.

These digital images are freely available for unrestricted use and reuse, and are of an ideal quality for blogging, teaching, and creative work. We know that the community have already been viewing and sharing the collection, but if you've put the images to good use do let us know by emailing [email protected] or adding your work to our growing wiki of British Library Public Domain projects.

The Penitential and other Psalms (circa 1509-1546)

Seal from letter of Lord Nelson (1801)

James Baker

Curator, Digital Research

@j_w_baker

Posted on behalf of Bob Nicholson (a more detailed explanation of his winning entry to the British Library Labs competition for 2014)

Introducing the Victorian Meme Machine

What would it take to make a Victorian joke funny again?

Nothing short of a miracle, you might think. After all, there are few things worse than a worn-out joke. Some provoke a laugh, and the best are retold to friends, but even the most delectable gags are soon discarded. While the great works of Victorian art and literature have been preserved and celebrated by successive generations, even the period’s most popular jokes have now been lost or forgotten.

Fortunately, thousands of these endangered jests have been preserved within the British Library’s digital collections. I applied to this year’s Labs Competition because I wanted to find these forgotten gags and bring them back to life. Over the next couple of months we’re going to be working together on a new digital project – the ‘Victorian Meme Machine’ [VMM].

  The Victorian Meme Machine (VMM)

The VMM will create an extensive database of Victorian jokes that will be available for use by both researchers and members of the public. It will analyse jokes and semi-automatically pair them with an appropriate image (or series of images) drawn from the British Library’s digital collections and other participating archives. Users will be able to re-generate the pairings until they discover a good match (or a humorously bizarre one) – at this point, the new ‘meme’ will be saved to a public gallery and distributed via social media. The project will monitor which memes go viral and fine-tune the VMM in response to popular tastes. Hopefully, over time, it’ll develop a good sense of humour!

Let’s take a closer look at how it’ll work. Here’s a simple, two-line joke taken from a late-Victorian newspaper:

Chicago Woman: How much do you charge for a divorce?
Chicago Lawyer: One hundred dollars, ma’am, or six for 500dols.

Users will then be invited to give the joke descriptive tags, highlight key words, and describe its structure. Here’s an example of how our sample joke might be encoded:

Encoding a joke for the VMM

This will give the VMM all the data it needs to pair the joke with an appropriate image. In this first example, the joke had been paired with an image featuring a woman talking to a lawyer and presented in the form of a caption:

  Joke paired with an image to create a meme.

We also hope to present the jokes in other formats, such as speech bubbles: 

Joke represented as speech bubbles. 

Each of these images is a close match for the joke – both feature women speaking to men who appear to be lawyers. However, if we loosen these requirements slightly then the pairings begin to take on a new (and sometimes rather bizarre) light:

  A selection of representations of the joke.

These are just some early examples of what the VMM might offer. When the database is ready, we’ll invite the public to explore other ways of creatively re-using the jokes. Together, I hope we’ll be able to resurrect some of these long-dead specimens of Victorian humour and let them live again – if only for a day.

Dr Bob Nicholson
Lecturer in History, Edge Hill University
Winner of British Library Labs Competition 2014

Bob Nicholson is lecturer in history specialising in nineteenth-century Britain and America, with a particular focus on journalism, popular culture, jokes, and transatlantic relations. Bob has been exploring representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture, in Victorian newspapers and periodicals. He is a keen proponent of the Digital Humanities and likes to experiment with the new possibilities offered to both researchers and teachers by digital tools and archives. He has written for The Guardian, had his research covered by The Times, and was shortlisted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in their first search for New Generation Thinkers (2011).

@DigiVictorian

www.DigitalVictorianist.com

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator in the Digital Research team announced the two winners of the second British Library Labs 2014 competition as part of her opening key note speech at the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) : Lingering Gold conference at the University of Bath on 11 June, 2014.

A judging panel made up of leaders in Digital Scholarship, some who sit on the British Library Labs advisory board (Claire Warwick and Melissa Terras at University College London, Andrew Prescott at Kings College London, Tim Hitchcock at University of Sussex, David De Roure at the University of Oxford and Bill Thompson from the BBC) and members of the British Library's Digital Scholarship team met at the end of May to decide upon two winners of this year's competition. After much deliberation, we can now proudly announce that the winners for the 2014 British Library Labs competition are the 'Victorian Meme Machine' and the 'Text to Image Linking Tool'.

Victorian Meme Machine

Bob Nicholson of Edge Hill University
Twitter: @DigiVictorian Web: http://www.digitalvictorianist.com/

What would it take to make a Victorian joke funny again?

While the great works of Victorian art and literature have been preserved and celebrated by successive generations, even the period’s most popular jokes have now been lost or forgotten. Fortunately, thousands of these endangered jests have been preserved within the British Library’s digital collections. This project aims to find these forgotten jokes and bring them back to life.

Victorian Meme Machine

The ‘Victorian Meme Machine’ [VMM] will create an extensive database of Victorian jokes that will be available for use by other scholars. It will analyse jokes and semi-automatically pair them with an appropriate image (or series of images) drawn from the British Library’s digital collections and other participating archives. Users will be able to re-generate the pairings until they discover a good match (or a humorously bizarre one) – at this point, the new ‘meme’ will be saved to a public gallery and distributed via social media. The project will monitor which memes go viral and fine-tune the VMM in response to popular tastes.

Bob Nicholson is lecturer in history specialising in nineteenth-century Britain and America, focusing on journalism, popular culture, jokes, and transatlantic relations. Bob has been exploring representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture in Victorian newspapers and periodicals. He is a keen proponent of the Digital Humanities and has written for The Guardian, had his research covered by The Times, and was shortlisted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in their first search for New Generation Thinkers (2011).

Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)

Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber of the University of Queensland
Twitter account: @bltilt and @AnnaGerber

 
Video of Desmond and Anna explaining TILT

In order to make old printed books and manuscripts accessible to a Web audience, it is essential to display the page image / facsimile of the original document next to its transcription. This allows the user to comment on the text, and to read it clearly, but because original documents are often hard to read, or have different line-breaks than text on a computer screen, it is easy to get lost trying to match up words in the document with words in the transcription. To overcome this, the team are developing semi-automatic methods to generate links that highlight corresponding parts of the page image and the text.

Visualising manuscript regions to enable linking to transcriptions

More information about TILT can be found here, http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/ab-112.html

Anna Gerber is a software developer and technical project manager specialising in Digital Humanities projects at the University of Queensland’s ITEE (Information Technology and Electrical Engineering) eResearch group. Anna was the senior software engineer for the AustESE project, developing eResearch tools to support the collaborative authoring and management of electronic scholarly editions. She is a contributor to the W3C (World Wide Web) Community Group for Open Annotation and was a co-principal investigator on the Open Annotation Collaboration project.

Desmond Schmidt has degrees in classical Greek papyrology from the University of Cambridge, UK, and in Information Technology from the University of Queensland, Australia. He has worked in the software industry, in information security, on the Vienna Edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein, on Leximancer, a concept-mining tool, and on the AustESE (Australian Electronic Scholarly Editing) project. He is currently a Research Scientist at the Institute for Future Environments, Queensland University of Technology.

The winners will work with the British Library for the next 5-6 months on their ideas and their work will be showcased at the British Library Conference Centre on Monday November 3rd 2014, whereupon a first prize of £3,000 and second prize of £1,000 will be awarded.

Finally, we would like to thank all of those that entered the competition this year and we hope to continue to run events and organise meetings where we can support researchers who would like to use the Library's digital content for their scholarly work.

We will be blogging about each of the projects over the next few months and you can track progress by following us on @BL_Labs

Mahendra Mahey @mahendra_mahey

This month Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK opened at the British Library, a major exhibition celebrating the UK's rich heritage of mainstream and underground comic and comic art. Though much of the exhibition focuses on work produced by recent icons of the genre - Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Posy Simmonds - the British Library collections contains a wealth of early work from artists both iconic (James Gillray, George Cruikshank) and those whose work is unknown, forgotten, and unattributed.

As we are a library, much of this work is hidden away inside books, making it hard to find. This is where we need you.

Last year we released a collection of over a million images from the British Library's 18th, 19th, and 20th century digitised book collections into the Public Domain for unrestricted use and reuse (for more info see 'A million first steps'). As we used automated processes to clip these images from each digitised book, we knew very little about them apart from the title of the books themselves. Since then members of the public have added over 80,000 tags to these images, thereby aiding discovery of and research using the collection. As a result, certain patterns have been identified: there are many portraits, there are many maps, there are many beautiful decorative flourishes. But there is also a wealth of comic art in the collection: including reproductions of and homages to Georgian satire, gentle late-19th-century humorous illustration, picture puzzles, political drama, and early-Victorian cat memes.

We have collected these together in Flickr under the tag 'comic_art' but we suspect there are many more hidden comic treasures to be found.

This is where you come in. All we ask is that you to head to the British Library Flickr page, enter some creative search terms in the search box (remember to select 'The British Library's Photostream' from the dropdown, or alternatively enter the URL https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=12403504@N02&q=YOURSEARCHTERMHERE into your web browser), browse the collection, tag any humorous, funny, satirical, ribald, or comic art you find with the tag 'comic_art', and share them via your prefered social network.

Update 14 May. We have two sets that refresh daily: 'Illustrations needing tags!' and 'Unseen Illustrations'. These sets represent the least tagged and least seen of the 1 million images. One approach would be to pick through those each day in search of comic art!

Before Comic Unmasked closes we'll collect them all together as a set and report back on the fruits of your labour. Your efforts will help us unlock the secrets of the collection for the benefit of all, so we look forward to seeing what you find!

James Baker

Curator, Digital Research

@j_w_baker