The Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and curatorial Voice project: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship is enabling transformational impacts in digital scholarship within cultural institutions by opening up new and important directions for computational, critical and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Over the past year and a half the project has actively engaged with colleagues across the cultural heritage sector to discuss the project approach and develop training materials for the computational analysis of legacy catalogue data.

As the project draws to a close, we invite members of the community to join the final project workshops in February 2022 to set shared agendas and agree next steps. The UK-based event will be hosted by the Digital Humanities Hub, University of Southampton (Covid-19 situation permitting) and the US-based event will be held online. Both workshops will work towards a single co-produced output: an infographic explaining the problem area, our shared priorities and next steps for action.

In anticipation of these events we thought we would share a summary of our July workshop which was attended by over 40 participants from our target beneficiary communities in the UK and US. At the event members of the project team spoke briefly on aspects of their research, before leading participatory breakout sessions that explored the themes in greater detail.

James Baker (Southampton) argued that historical research into legacy cataloguing can usefully form the basis for reparative re-description and social justice work in cultural institutions. Rossitza Atanassova (British Library) reported on the utility of the project methodology and tools for accelerating institutional responses to contemporary challenges and how the capacity building work aligns with the Library’s Anti-Racism Project action plan.

Cynthia Roman (Lewis Walpole Library) discussed her investigations into the history of cataloguing at the Library in relation to the transmission of curatorial voice from the British Museum to the Lewis Walpole Library records for Georgian satirical prints. Andrew Salway (Sussex) described what computational methods and process were used to detect the spatial and temporal transmission of the satirical prints data between catalogues.

Peter Leonard (Yale University Library DH Laboratory) introduced experimental computational work that uses machine learning techniques to produce new texts and images based on historic catalogue data and prints, thus opening up further possibilities for studying features in the real data. In the breakout sessions there was a demonstration of some of the tools developed by the project and an exploration of how to present legacy descriptions in collection catalogues and flag up any issues with users. These tools and other resources are included in the workshop report aimed to encourage and enable further critical reflections on catalogues’ legacies.

We hope that some of you will be interested in joining the final project events. To book your place please use the contact details on the events page.

Rossitza Atanassova, James Baker, Cynthia Roman

Many things have happened in the past couple of years. Following the closure of physical spaces with the first lockdown, and with reduced access to library systems, British Library staff had to swiftly transition to new ways of working. In this blog post I will looked at the ways in which this transformation has been experienced from the perspective of the Library’s Digital Research team. How did we change the way we work, what changes have we encouraged and witnessed, and what practices should we keep for the future?

Let’s look at our Digital Scholarship Training Programme (DSTP), one of our flagship activities. Created in 2012, this programme aims to develop the skills and knowledge of Library staff to support emerging areas of scholarship. With the swift change to working from home, we transitioned the delivery of our training events from onsite to a fully online delivery. We also started recording training sessions, so that members of staff could watch later if they could not attend. This transition took place very early in the pandemic, with the first online training event on offer on 17 March 2020 (“Library Carpentry Workshop: Tidy Data”).

Screenshot from our “Introduction to Emerging Formats” course

 

We’ve seen a steady growth in attendance for our training programme. It became easier to provide more training opportunities online, which saw the number of attendees almost doubling between 2018-2019 and 2020-2021, from 819 to 1,552. At the same time, this has become less costly for us, saving on expenses of travel and subsistence. Our training programme has been well subscribed and more people could attend our events due to several reasons: we transitioned quickly to online delivery, when some members of staff could not do their regular tasks and needed some positive distractions; the Library has been encouraging learning and personal development; and, we don’t have to cap number of attendees as before – there are no room capacity limitations.

The shift to online delivery has many benefits: We can deliver more events more easily; we can now invite speakers from abroad – so there’s better international exposure; thanks to the recordings, our training offer is available for staff to use after the training takes place; more staff members learn and develop themselves in different areas of digital scholarship; and, as a result, members of staff make our digital collections more accessible online – which is great for our users.

Screenshot from a 21st Century Curatorship staff talk entitled “Identify yourself! (Almost) Everything you wanted to know about persistent identifiers but were afraid to ask”

 

Admittedly, online training does have its shortcomings. For example, the instructor may not be able to immediately identify and resolve problems that course attendees run into. In addition, many of us prefer face-to-face interaction. However, looking into the feedback we received from attendees, it is overwhelmingly positive – staff would like to have the option of onsite or online delivery, and enjoys the availability of recordings. It is therefore unlikely that we’ll go back to fully onsite delivery. A mixed delivery of our training programme looks like a good way forward. For example, if the training event involves more listening than doing, then online delivery is probably better.

Moving on to digital collections. At the beginning of the pandemic, Library users and staff members lost access to the physical collection. With that lack of access, attention was naturally turned to our digital collections. These became the only source of content for the Library to create engaging online content, to promote materials to researchers, and to provide access to its collections. We have seen colleagues using and communicating digital collections during this time, using digital tools and platforms, resulting in an increase of guest blog posts on the Digital Scholarship blog (about two-thirds of our posts in 2020-2021 were guest posts).

Collages created by Hannah Nagle using the British Library's Flickr image collection

 

There are so many examples to choose from. See for instance the story map created by Jenny Norton-Wright, curator for Arabic scientific manuscripts from the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership project, visualising the journey during which a musical compendium was written in the 17^th century. In fact, this was just one of many digital initiatives coming from the Qatar project – many of which are a result of their Imaging Hack Days – days set aside for the team to use their creative and technical skills to ‘hack’ the material in the digitised collection. From Hannah Nagle’s brilliant guide on how to make collages using images from the British Library Flickr collection, through the Watermarks project unveiling hidden watermarks in manuscripts, to making data into sound and investigating Arabic verb forms, there is something for everyone. You can read more about these and other projects in Laura Parsons’ blog posts here and here.

This past year has also seen more of us harnessing the power of IIIF to tell stories to online audiences. Earlier this year one of our Hack & Yack workshops was based around the topic of ‘Making interactive online exhibits and teaching resources with IIIF Manifests’ by exploring a tool called Exhibit. This tool was created by Mnemoscene for the University of St Andrews, and it allows people to create online exhibits. Several curators and other staff members used this IIIF-powered tool to showcase collection items. These included, for example, an exhibit created by Sara Hale from the Heritage Made Digital programme dedicated to Japanese Design Books; or another exhibit prepared by Jana Igunma, curator for Thai, Lao and Cambodian collections, focusing on an illustrated Thai cat treatise.

Screenshot from Sara Hale’s Japanese Design Books exhibit

 

We have also seen a noticeable increased engagement during the pandemic with our crowdsourcing projects. These became more popular than ever, especially early on when some people could not perform their usual duties or go out, and needed something positive to do. Colleagues have witnessed a very high demand for crowdsourcing tasks, and have received many positive comments and feedback, about how participating and contributing to projects have helped raise the morale during these difficult times. These projects include, for example, In the Spotlight, Living with Machines tasks, Agents of Enslavement, Canadian Wildlife, and the Georeferencer. We now have a landing page for British Library crowdsourcing projects, check it out.

Other crowdsourcing work was done internally by the Collection Metadata team – the ‘crowd’ being British Library staff! Members of staff helped enhancing the metadata of legacy records. For example, colleagues with specific language skills were able to assist with checking machine-assigned language codes, identifying languages and adding keywords to records. Library staff were also adding information such as place and date of publication, genres, and editions, to books digitised as part a partnership with Microsoft.

Screenshot from the Agents of Enslavement project on Zooniverse

 

Working with the Wikimedia family platforms, such as Wikidata, Wikibase and Wikisource, has also been on the rise come pandemic. Earlier this year, the team was joined by Lucy Hinnie, our Wikimedian-in-Residence. Lucy noted repeated references to the way the pandemic has shifted people's attention towards Wikimedia – more prioritisation of Wikimedia-related projects. One such British Library use case was inspired by a Wikisource project taking place at the National Library of Scotland, correcting OCRed text of 3,000 Scottish chapbooks. A staff talk delivered by Gavin Willshaw, then at the NLS, inspired digital curator Tom Derrick’s Bengali Wikisource project, which included two proofreading competitions for digitised and OCRed Bengali books, as part of the Two Centuries of Indian Print project.

Research Libraries UK (RLUK) called this the “Digital Shift” – “an umbrella term for the analogue-digital transition of many library services, operations, collections, and audience interactions.” The “Digital Shift” includes a lot of different things, but from our perspective, it is plain to see that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this digital transformation – and, as long as this is of benefit to our users, we will keep transforming, adjusting, and exploring new directions.

 

This blog post is by Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, British Library. She's on Twitter as @BL_AdiKS.

Engagement with cultural heritage collections and the research impact beyond mainstream metrics in arts and humanities

Open and Engaged, the British Library’s annual event in Open Access Week, took place virtually on 25 October. The theme of the conference was Understanding the Impact of Open in the Arts and Humanities beyond the University as you may see in a previous blog post.

The slides and the video recordings together with their transcripts are now available through the British Library’s Research Repository. This blog post will give you a flavour of the talks and the sessions in a nutshell.

Two main sessions formed the programme of the conference; one was on increasing the engagement with cultural heritage collections and the other one was on measuring and evaluating impact of open resources beyond journal articles.

British Library and Piazza by Paul Grundy

 

Session One: Increasing Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections

The first session was opened with a talk from Brigitte Vézina from Creative Commons (CC). It was about how CC supports GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in embracing open access and unlocking universal access to knowledge and culture. Brigitte introduced CC’s Open GLAM programme which is a coordinated global effort to help GLAMs make the content they steward openly available and reusable for the public good.

The British Library’s Sam van Schaik presented Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) which provides funding for projects to digitise and preserve archival materials at risk of destruction. The resulting digital images and sound files are made available via the British Library’s website. Sam drew attention to the challenges around ethical issues with the CC licenses used for these digital materials and the practical considerations with working globally.

Merete Sanderhoff from National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) raised a concern about how the GLAM sector at the institutional level is lagging behind in embracing the full potential of open cultural heritage. Merete explained that GLAM users increasingly benefit from arts and knowledge beyond institutional walls by using data from GLAM collections and by spurring on developments in digital literacy, citizen science and democratic citizenship.

Towards a National Collection (TaNC), the research development programme funded by AHRC was the last talk of this session and presented by Rebecca Bailey, Programme Director at TaNC. The programme sponsors projects that are working to link collections and encourage cross-searching of multiple collection types, to enable research and enhance public engagement. Rebecca outlined the achievements and ambitions of the projects, as they start to look ahead to a national collections research infrastructure.

This session highlighted that the GLAM sector should embrace their full potential in making cultural heritage open for public good beyond their physical premises. The use of more open and public domain licences will make it easier to use digital heritage content and resources in the research and creative spheres. The challenge comes with the unethical use of digital collections in some cases, but licensing mechanisms are not the tools with which to police research ethics.

 

Session Two: Measuring and Evaluating Impact of Open Resources Beyond Journal Articles

The second half of the conference started with a metrics project, Cobaltmetrics, which works towards making altmetrics genuinely alternative by using URIs. Luc Boruta from Thunken talked about bringing algorithmic fairness to impact measurement, from web-scale attention tracking to computer-assisted data storytelling.

Gemma Derrick from University of Lancaster presented on the hidden REF experience and highlighted assessing the broader value of research culture. Gemma noted that the doubt in whether the impact can be measured doesn’t comes from lack of tools, but it is more about what is considered as impact that differs between individuals, institutions, and fields of disciplines. As she stated, “the nature of impact and the nature of evaluation is inherently better when humans are involved, mainly because mitigating factors and mitigating aspects of our research, and what makes our research culture really important, are less likely to be overlooked by an automated system.” This is what they addressed in the hidden REF, celebrating all research outputs and every role that makes research possible

Anne Boddington from Kingston University reflected on research impact in three parts; looking at its definition, partnering and collaboration between GLAMs and higher education institutions, and the reflections on future benefits. Anne talked about the challenges of impact, the kinds of evidence it demands and the opportunities it presents. She concluded her talk noting that impact is here to stay and there are significant areas for growth, opportunities for innovation and leadership in the context of impact.

Helen Adams from Oxford University Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM) presented the Online Active Community Engagement (O-ACE) project where they combined arts and science to measure the benefits of online culture for mental health in young people. She highlighted how GLAM organizations can actively involve audiences in medical research and how cultural interventions may positively impact individual wellbeing, prior to diagnosis, treatment, or social prescribing pathways. The conference ended with this great case study on impact assessment.

In her closing remarks, Rachael Kotarski of the British Library underlined that opening up GLAM organizations is not only allowing us to break down the walls of our buildings to get content out there but also crosses those geographic boundaries to get content in front of communities who might not have had a chance to experience it before. It also allows us to work with communities who originated content to understand their concerns and not just the concerns of our organizations. Rachael echoed that licensing restrictions are not the solution to all our questions, or to the ethical issues. It is important that we can reflect on what we have learned to adjust and rethink our approach and identify what really allows us to balance access, engagement, and creativity.

In the context of research impact, we need to centre the human in our assessment and the processes. The other factor in impact assessments is the relatively short period of time to assess it. The examples like O-ACE project also showed us that the creation of impact can take much longer than we think and what impacts can be seen will vary through that time. So, assessing those interventions also needs a longer-term views.

Those who didn’t attend the conference or would like to re-visit the talks can find the recordings in the British Library’s Research Repository. The social media interactions can be followed with #OpenEngaged hashtag.

We are looking forward to hosting the Open and Engaged 2022 hopefully in person at the British Library.

This blog post was written by Ilkay Holt, Scholarly Communications Lead, part of the Research Infrastructure Services team.

BL Labs 9th Symposium – Special Climate Change Edition is taking place on Tuesday 7 December 2021. This special event is devoted to looking at computational research and climate change.

British Library digitised image from page 303 of "A Voyage of Discovery, made under the orders of the Admiralty, in his Majesty's ships Isabella and Alexander for the purpose of exploring Baffin's Bay, and enquiring into the possibility of a North-West Passage".

To help us explore a range of complex issues at the intersection of computational research and climate change we are delighted to announce our expert panel:

• Schuyler Esprit – Founding Director of Create Caribbean Research Institute & Research Officer at the School of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of West Indies
• Helen Hardy – Science Digital Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum, London, responsible for mass digitisation of the Museum’s collections of 80 million items
• Joycelyn Longdon – Founder of ClimateInColour, a platform at the intersection of climate science and social justice, and PhD Student on the Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk programme at University of Cambridge
• Gavin Shaddick – Chair of Data Science and Statistics, University of Exeter, Director of the UKRI funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence: Data Science and AI for Sustainable Futures, co-Director of the University of Exeter-Met Office Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence and an Alan Turing Fellow
• Richard Sandford – Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at the Institute of Sustainable Heritage at University College London
• Joseph Walton – Research Fellow in Digital Humanities and Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Sussex

Join us for this exciting discussion addressing issues such as how digitisation can improve research efficiency, discussing pros and cons of AI and machine learning in relation to climate change, and the links between new technologies, climate and social justice.

You can see more details about our panel and book your place here.

Since 29 September, to support and guide the management of its collection, the Library has adopted a new persistent identifier policy. A persistent identifier or PID is a long lasting digital reference to an entity whether it is physical or digital. PIDs are a core component in providing reliable, long-term access to collections and improve their discoverability. They also make it easier to track when and how collections are used. The Library has been using PIDs in various forms for almost a decade but following the creation of a case study as part of the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection funded project, PIDs as IRO Infrastructure, the Library recognised the need to document its rationale and approach to PIDs and lay down principles and requirements for their use.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

The Library encourages the use of PIDs across its collections and collection metadata. It recognises the role PIDs have as a component in sustainable, open infrastructure and in enabling interoperability and the use of Library resources. PIDs also support the Library’s content strategy and its goal of connecting rather than collecting as they enable long term and reliable access to resources.  

Many different types of PIDs are used across the Library, some of which it creates for itself, e.g. ARKs, and others which it harvests from elsewhere, e.g. DOIs that are used to identify journal articles. While not all existing Library services may meet the requirements described in this policy, it provides a benchmark against which they can be measured and aspire to develop.

To make sure staff at the Library are supported in implementing the policy, a working group has been convened to run until the end of December 2022. This group will raise awareness of the policy and ensure that guidance is made available to any project or service which is under review to consider the use of PIDs.

A public version of the policy is available on this page and an extract with the key points are provided below. The group would like to acknowledge the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s policy which was influential in the creation of this policy.

Principles

In its use of identifiers, the British Library adheres to the following principles, which describe the qualities PIDs created, contributed or consumed by the Library must have.  

• A PID must never be deleted but may be marked as deprecated if required
• A PID must be usable in perpetuity to identify its associated entry
• A PID must only describe one entity and must never be reused for different entities 
• A PID must have established versioning processes and procedures in place; these may be defined locally by the Library as a creator or by the PID provider  
• A PID must have established governance mechanisms, such as contracts, in place to ensure the standards of use of the PID are met and continue to be met  
• A PID must resolve to metadata about the entity available in both a human and machine readable format 
• A publicly accessible PID must be resolvable via a global resolver
• A PID must have an operating model that is sustainable for long-term persistent use 

Established user community 

• A PID must have an established user community, which has adopted it as a standard, either through an organisation such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or as a de factostandard through widespread adoption; the Library will support and develop the use of new types of PIDs where there is a defined and recognised use case which they would address 

Interoperable 

• A PID must be able to link with the other identifiers in use at the Library through open metadata standards and the capability to cross-reference resources 

New PID types or new use 

• New types of PIDs should only be considered for use in the Library where there is a defined need which cannot reasonably be met by a combination of PIDs already in use 
• Any new PID type used by the Library should meet the requirements described in this policy 
• Where a PID type is emerging and does not have an established community, the Library can seek to influence its development in line with principles for open and sustainable infrastructures 

Requirements

These requirements outline the Library’s responsibilities in using PID services and creating PIDs. While the Library uses identifiers which do not meet all of these requirements, they are included for future work and developments.  

• The Library aspires to assign PIDs to all resources within its collections, both physical and digital, and associated entities, in alignment with the guiding principles of the Library’s content strategy 2020-2023. 
• The Library has varying levels of involvement in different PID schemes, but all PIDs created by the Library must meet the requirements described in this section and the Library prefers the use of PIDs which meet the principles
• Identifiers created by the Library must have an opaque format, i.e. not contain any semantic information within them, to ensure their longevity 
• A PID must resolve to information about the entity to which it refers 
• The Library must have a process to specify the granularity at which PIDs are assigned and how relationships between PIDs for component and overarching entities are managed 
• The Library must have a process to manage versioning including changes, merges and retirement of entities 
• Standard descriptive information about an entity, e.g. creator, should have a PID 
• All metadata associated with a PID should comply with Collection Metadata Licensing Guidelines 
• Where a PID referring to a citable resource resolves to a webpage, that webpage should display a suggested citation including the hyperlink to the PID to encourage ongoing use of the PID outside the Library

If you would like to hear more about this policy and the Library’s approach to persistent identifiers, feel free to contact the Heritage PIDs project on Twitter or email [email protected].

This post is by Frances Madden (@maddenfc, orcid.org/0000-0002-5432-6116), Research Associate (PIDs as IRO Infrastructure) in the Research Infrastructure Services team.

In response to the Climate Emergency and issues raised by the COP26, the 9th British Library Labs Symposium is devoted to looking at computational research and climate change.  Registration Now Open.

The British Library Labs is the British Library programme dedicated to enabling people to experiment with our digital collections, including deploying computational research methods and using our collections as data. This inevitably means that we, and the communities we work with, are increasingly applying computational tools and methods that have environmental impact on our planet.

As our millions of pages of digitised content are becoming an exciting new research frontier, and we are increasingly using machine learning methods and tools on the large-scale projects, such as the Living with Machines project, it is also inevitable that this exciting new work comes with the increased use of computational resource and energy. With the view of the climate emergency, we are hoping to ensure that climate and sustainability considerations inform everything we do – meaning that we need much better understanding of digital environmental impacts and how this should inform our practice in all things related to computational research.

We know that this is not a simple issue - digitisation and digital preservation is often a lifeline for cultural heritage in the communities where museums, libraries and archives are already endangered due to the climate change - for example, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is dedicated to digitising and saving archives in danger of destruction, including due to climate change. The new digital resources, such the UK Web Archive’s collections, the Climate Change collection in particular, as well as the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Climate Change collection, are essential resources for climate researchers, especially as we are increasingly working with researchers who wish to text and data mine our collections for the insights that can broaden our understanding of changing climate and biodiversity, and the impact of these changes on different communities.

Equally, as in all other areas related to the impacts of climate change, we are aware that in relation to digital research, there is also a strong interdependency with the issues of equality and social justice. Digital advancements are enablers of new research, helping us to better understand different communities and to broaden access and opportunities, but we also need to consider how the complexities of computational research and access, as well as expensive set up and energy requirements of the state-of-art infrastructures, might disadvantage researchers and communities that do not have access to relevant technologies, or to prohibitively expensive and energy-demanding resources required to run them.

For this year’s BL Labs Symposium, we are bringing a group of speakers that will consider these issues from different angles - from large-scale digitisation, to digital humanities, climate and biodiversity research, as well as the impact of AI. We will look into how our digital strategies and projects can help us fight climate change and be more inclusive, but also how we can improve our sustainability and reduce our impact on the planet.

As well as the views from our panel, there will be an opportunity for an extended audience input, helping us to bring forward the views from the broader Labs community and learn together how our practice can be improved.

The 9th BL Labs Symposium takes place on Zoom on Tuesday 7^th December from 16.30 until 18.00. Book your place now.

Comics fans, are you getting geared up for Thought Bubble? If you enjoy, or want to learn how to edit Wikipedia and Wikidata about comics, please do join us and our collaborators at Leeds Libraries for our first in-person Wikithon since this residency started, on Thursday 11th November, from 1.30pm to 4.30pm, in the Sanderson Room of Leeds Central Library.

Joining us in person?

Remember the first step is to book your place here, via Eventbrite

If you’d like to get a head start, you can download and read our handy guide to setting up your Wikipedia account. There is advice on creating your account, Wikipedia's username policy and how to create your user page.

Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our Thought Bubble Wikithon dashboard (the enrollment passcode is ltspmyfa) and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:

• Wikipedia Essentials
• Editing Basics
• Evaluating Articles and Sources
• Contributing Images and Media Files
• Sandboxes and Mainspace
• Sources and Citations
• Plagiarism
• Introduction to Wikidata (for those interested in this)

These are all short exercises that will help familiarise you with Wikipedia and its processes. Don’t have time to do them? We get it, and that’s totally fine - we’ll cover the basics on the day too!

You may want to verify your Wikipedia account - this function exists to make sure that people are contributing responsibly to Wikipedia. The easiest and swiftest way to verify your account is to do 10 small edits. You could do this by correcting typos or adding in missing dates. However, another way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt. For further information on adding citations, watching this video may be useful.

When it comes to Wikidata, we are very inspired by the excellent work of the Graphic Possibilities project at the Michigan University Department of English and we have been learning from them. For those interested in editing Wikidata we will be on hand to support this during our Thought Bubble Wikithon event.

Happier with a hybrid approach?

If you cannot join the physical event in person, but would like to contribute, please do check out and sign up to our dashboard. Although we cannot run the training as a hybrid presentation on this occasion, the online dashboard training exercises will be an excellent starting point. From there, all of your edits and contributions will be registered, and you can pat yourself firmly on the back for making the world of comics a better place from a distance.

However, if you can attend in person, please register for the Wikithon at Leeds Central Library here and check out the Thought Bubble festival programme here. Hope to see you there!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) and Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom).

Global warming does not affect only the environment, it affects the entire system we live in. We can’t think of it as detached from gender, social and racial inequalities. Neither as something separated from our cultural heritage. For this reason, when we think about actions we shouldn’t focus only on emissions reductions, but also think about how to preserve our cultural and artistic production and learn how this, with the aid of new technologies, can help us find new ways to shape our future.

Last year, during my spare time, with the help of Marco Magini (writer and environmental policy adviser), Paolo Nelli (writer) and Maddalena Vatti (producer) I started investigating what role digital technologies play in a city like Venice, which is notoriously under the threat of rising waters, and even more so with the increased global warming.

On the 13th of November 2019 an exceptional acqua alta (a high tide) hit the city bringing one of the worst devastation of the last century. Various archives, buildings, commercial activities, homes and cultural venues were damaged. This prompted a question: what can we understand from an event like this? Is the case of Venice an isolated one or is it a cautionary tale for humanity? After all Venice is not the only city which is sinking and where rising tides threaten to unravel the urban fabric. We should not simply mourn the devastation and start to repair the damage, we should consider the event as an opportunity to think about the direct impact of global warming on our cultural heritage and what we can do to reduce it.

While conducting interviews with scholars, experts, professionals and citizens with the aim of producing a podcast, we slowly came to understand the role and potential of digital technologies in the study of the evolution of a city in respect to changing climate and urban conditions, as well as the role these play in its preservation.

Digital preservation, 3D rendering and water sensors

A fantastic example of digital preservation  is the one carried out  between the 6th and 17th of July 2020 by a team from the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation in collaboration with the Cini Foundation, EPFL and Iconem (https://www.factumfoundation.org/pag/1640/recording-the-island-of-san-giorgio-maggiore). They spent twelve days in Venice recording the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in its entirety. The result was a virtual rendering of the island made using a mix of LID long-range LIDAR scanning to capture the overall shape of the buildings, external and internal views and high resolution photogrammetry to add the surface detail to that. The island was recorded from more than 600 different recording spots, from which a massive 60.000 million-point cloud was generated. The data acquired through photogrammetry is currently being merged with the point-clouds with the aim of creating a 3D model of the whole island.

First (right) and final (right) data processing of the render of one the statues on the façade © Factum Foundation for ARCHiVe

This massive work enabled researchers to study the sculptures and the inscriptions that are high up on the facade of San Giorgio but also to analyse the way that the plaster covering the walls was being affected by salt and peeling off.

Thanks to these data it is now possible to carry out really detailed recording of the breakdown of a surface and also monitor the speed at which the cobalt coverings are being blown off by the salt, the speed of decay, to really look and create data to discuss how best to preserve the material heritage on the island.

Camera obscura, painting and digital image analysis: what can the past tell us about the present and the future

It is also possible to use paintings and buildings to look at the past to learn our present. In fact, these artifacts can unconsciously record events and phenomena that postdate their own creation, carrying them into the future.

The researcher in atmospheric physics and cultural heritage Dario Camuffo has conducted a scientific analysis of the works of Venetian painters, Canaletto in particular, depicting buildings and compared them with the state of the very same buildings today in an attempt to calculate the impact of land subsidence in Venice.

Canaletto (Venice 1697-Venice 1768) - The Grand Canal looking East from the Carità towards the Bacino

As professor Camuffo has written, “in general paintings provide a qualitative image, but in Venice’s case, a quantitative evaluation of the apparent sea level rise is possible, thanks to accurate paintings by Canaletto and Bellotto, drawn with the aid of the camera obscura. The paintings accurately reproduce all of the details with a high degree of precision, including the algae belt. […] By analysing these paintings, and comparing them with the algae level we see today, we can extend our knowledge of Venice’s submersion, reaching back in time almost as far back as three centuries.”

How many stories and information are buried in the archives? Deep learning image analysis can help to reveal them, we just need to think creatively.

Maps and algorithms, space syntax, literature and architecture

Maps and literature can also reveal more stories about a city than we think.

UCL/Bartlett Institute Professor Sophia Psarra, drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s discarded project for the Venice Hospital, has studied the urban evolution of Venice computing the distribution and distances between bridges, calli (=tiny alleys), squares and wells over time. The analysis, which is based on the approaches developed within the world of space syntax, has shown that Venice has and still evolves as a system that resembles a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’.

What seems a chaotic evolution is in fact the result of the interaction between space and social activity. Maps and data analysis can reveal the modularity of a city and the traces of how social activities have interacted and forged the space. These can help see new connections between literary imagination and the evolution of our society but also help us understand how we can imagine a future which is affected by growing uncertainties.

Digital technologies applied to our cultural heritage as these three examples have shown are an aid to study the past and imagine the future. They can help understand how we as a society can evolve, but also how all our cultural productions are sources of incredible information if we know how to look at them. We can measure the impact of global warming on our cultural artifacts and try to imagine a better future.

To know more on the role of Venice as a vantage point from where to look at the growing emergencies surrounding us –– environmental, cultural, social, and technological –– you can listen to the podcast The Fifth Siren (thefifthsiren.com) and join us for a British Library free online event on Monday 8th November with Professor Sophia Psarra and architectural artists Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine. More info here: https://www.bl.uk/events/venice-tales-of-a-sinking-city.

This post is by Dr Giorgia Tolfo (@giorgiatolfo), Data and Content Manager for the Living with Machines project.