With the conclusion of another successful British Library Labs Symposium, and what has been a rather unusual year, it is a good time to reflect on some of the things that the Digital Research Team at the British Library has been busy with – and some of our plans for the coming year too. Despite pandemic-related challenges, we managed to deliver various strands of work towards fulfilling our mission: to enable the use of the British Library’s digital collections for research, inspiration, creativity, and enjoyment.

Innovative Projects

We undertook innovative research, projects and collaborations, using digital methods on our collections to showcase their potential and improve access for our users. One such project is the Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship, with which Rossitza Atanassova from the team is involved. It is a 12-month collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab, the British Library, and Yale University Library, funded under the AHRC UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions: Partnership Development Grants scheme. The project covers computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues, and combines corpus linguistic methods and archival research to characterise curatorial “voice”. It also develops sectoral capability in digital scholarship through co-produced training materials and workshops.

Another example is our Living with Machines project, which has been thriving. For those of you who (still!) don’t know it, it is a collaborative project between the Alan Turing Institute, academics at UK universities and the British Library. Mia Ridge from the team is one of the project co-investigators. With her expertise in crowdsourcing, the project launched its first crowdsourcing tasks in late 2019, and watched them being finished by volunteers in the first weeks of lockdown. Contributors were asked to identify accidents reported in 19th century newspapers – this proved to be very popular! As a next step, the project is launching more ‘language’-related tasks – such as to read small sections of newspaper articles that talk about a 'machine‘, and then identify what kind of machine was meant in each example.

Mia’s other crowdsourcing initiative, the In the Spotlight project hosted on the Library’s LibCrowds platform, is almost ready to celebrate a whopping quarter of a million contributions to this platform. She plans to bring both those experiences to the process of collaboratively writing a book in a fortnight on crowdsourcing and digital participation in cultural heritage through a networking project called Collective Wisdom, funded by the same AHRC scheme mentioned above.

Groundbreaking Technologies

One of our main goals is to enable digital content to be as accessible as possible, and one of the most efficient ways to go about this is to create machine-readable text from digitised material through OCR/HTR - Optical Character Recognition and Handwritten Text Recognition. I (Adi) have been involved in work in this area as well as Tom Derrick, who works with the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. We made Arabic and Bengali OCR/HTR datasets available through the British Library repository, and delivered some OCR/HTR training to BL staff (one-day course and a Transkribus workshop).

Tom used Transkribus to OCR an entire series of books using the Bangla trained model (ca. 150 early Bengali books), and is now using Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource to present text of books alongside the scanned images. He plans on running a competition in partnership with the Bengali Wikisource community in spring 2021, encouraging volunteers to improve OCR of Bengali books in Wikisource. The plan is also to make these transcriptions available as an open dataset and keyword searchable through the Library viewer.

Emerging Formats

We welcomed two British Library Collaborative Doctoral Students researching different aspects relating to the creation, production, consumption, value and collecting of UK digital comics: Linda Berube, “Understanding UK digital comics information and publishing practices: From creation to consumption,” City, University of London, supervised by Ian Cooke; and Thomas Gebhart, “Collecting UK Digital Comics: Social, cultural and technological factors for cultural institutions”, University of the Arts, supervised by Stella Wisdom.

Digital comics in the UK are at the cutting-edge of how imaginative, immediate and emotionally engaging stories can be told in the 21st Century. New creative tools, new formats, and new methods of distribution have expanded the reach of ideas communicated through digital comics. On top of embracing technological change, digital comics have the potential to reflect, embrace and contribute to social and cultural change in the UK. We look forward to reading more about Thomas and Linda’s research!

Cutting-Edge Literacy

The British Library and partners Birkbeck University and The National Archives have been awarded £222,420 in funding by the Institute of Coding (IoC) to co-develop a one-year part-time postgraduate Certificate (PGCert), Computing for Cultural Heritage, as part of a £4.8M University skills drive. Nora McGregor has co-ordinated this trial, aimed at information professionals working in the cultural heritage sector.

From deploying simple scripts for everyday tasks, to developing tools for analysing collections data, the British Library and The National Archives explored different ways to meet demand for such skills, arising particularly from colleagues in curatorial and collection-based roles. This trial explored a model whereby cultural heritage professionals could gain crucial computational skills, immediately relevant to their roles, while earning a formal qualification in computer science, with the express support of their institution.

A cohort of 20 staff from British Library (12) and The National Archives in the UK (8), undertook two newly designed modules at Birkbeck University as part of the trial: Demystifying Computing with Python and Work-based project: Digital project design and development. Examples of some of the exciting projects the cohort undertook can be found on the project page. A final module, Analytic Tools for Information Professionals, is currently under development and will be launched as part of the full Applied Data Science Postgraduate Certificate starting in January 2021, and a final report on the trial will be available in spring 2021.

Boosting Staff Skills

This year we kept running our usual Digital Scholarship Training Programme, transitioning fully to online delivery. This is an internal training programme aimed at enabling Library staff to support and/or undertake digital research. We run different types of events, including courses, hands-on workshops (Hack & Yacks), talks and a reading group. We’ve had Deirdre Sullivan helping us run many events as smoothly as possible, around topics such as Library Carpentry, OpenRefine, Machine Learning and AI, OCR/HTR, emerging formats, and Wikimedia training.

I’ve just finished co-ordinating and co-delivering a course on digital mapping last week with Gethin Rees and a few other colleagues. We took on board some of the learnings from last time that we ran the course, published in a Journal of Map & Geography Libraries article.

In total, this year, we hosted 50 events, with 1,167 overall attendees. These training opportunities reached 343 colleagues across 42 teams. Looking forward to seeing more of you next year!

Linking Collections

One area of training worth focusing on is our collaboration with Wikimedia UK. During 2020, Stella Wisdom ran a programme of four online talks and five training sessions for BL staff, to raise awareness and understanding of the Wikimedia family of platforms, including Wikisource and Wikidata. The training sessions, entitled Wikimedia Wednesdays included the following:

1. Getting Started with Wikipedia
2. Contributing to Wikimedia Commons
3. Transcribing and Translating with Wikisource
4. Hack & Yack Wikipedia edit-a-thon session 
5. Working with Wikidata and an Introduction to SPARQL

Looking ahead to 2021, we plan to host a new British Library Wikimedian-in-Residence who will collaborate with Library colleagues to increase engagement with the Wikimedia community.

Goodbye, 2020

And here’s to a better, vaccine-fuelled, 2021!

The Digital Research Team with (human and animal) friends!

 

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

 

Winter may be here, but a walk in the woods is a lovely experience at all times of the year. Here in Digital Scholarship we are also interested in how technology can be used to create explorable virtual natural environments, which we can enjoy from home, and a few months ago we took part in an event about virtual walks. Furthermore, lead by our culture team in Yorkshire, the Library recently commissioned the fantastic Invisible Flock to create a wonderful online interactive woodland called Faint Signals for Light Night Leeds, an annual free multi-arts and light festival.

It is very pleasing to see this work recognised in the 2020 BL Labs Awards, where it is runner up in the artistic category. These awards were announced at the BL Labs Symposium yesterday, but if you missed the livestream you can watch a recording here. Congratulations Invisible Flock and all the other winners and runners up.

The Invisible Flock team, who created Faint Signals

Please do explore Faint Signals, it is an interactive website, where you can wander through the woodland as it changes through all four seasons, and evolves from day to night. Each tile you move across unlocks narrative and data on the landscape, all of which are based on real life environments, with wildlife, weather and other nature sounds reflecting the diversity and complexity of ecosystems in the Yorkshire region. A rich variety of sounds can be unlocked by discovering particles of light lingering in the forest. It works best in browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, but is not currently optimised for mobile devices, please also note that it contains flashing images. 

Over 300 wildlife and environmental recordings from the Library’s sound archive were used to create the audio element of the experience. All were handpicked and selected with both geography and habitat in mind - though Faint Signals invites the user to explore an imaginary Yorkshire woodland, we wanted to ensure that all species featured in the piece could actually be encountered either in or around the edges of a real live Yorkshire wood. A more relaxed approach was taken when choosing environmental components such as weather and water, however even here the sounds of background species were taken into account. Creating an engaging yet authentic digital experience was incredibly important and this was achieved in part thanks to the sheer breadth of audio content available.

To give you a bit of a taster, here are just a few of the recordings that are included in Faint Signals:

Blackcap song recorded in Shropshire England on 20 May 1977 by Richard Margoschis (WS5551 C1)

Song Thrush song recorded in Dyfed Wales on 29 October 1992 by Richard Margoschis (WS6075 C5)

Small stream on rocks recorded in Dyfed Wales on 7 May 1994 by Phil Riddett (W1CDR0000258 BD3)

Virtually all of the recordings had been digitised as part of the Library’s Unlocking our Sound Heritage project. Now in its fourth year, this UK-wide project aims to digitally preserve and provide public access to some of the nation’s most unique and at risk sound recordings. Thousands of wildlife recordings from all over the world have been digitised so far and you can keep up-to-date with the project’s progress by following @BLSoundHeritage.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) and Wildlife and Environmental Sounds Curator, Cheryl Tipp (@CherylTipp).

If anything 2020 has taught us, it is that we can achieve much more by communicating, connecting and collaborating. I've learned greatly this year from attending a number of online conferences, symposiums, talks and workshops, virtually meeting some wonderful new contacts at these events. Looking ahead to 2021, here at the British Library we are excited to be co-hosting the AURA Research Network's second online workshop with The National Archives in the UK.

The AURA network is funded by a joint programme between the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK. Its aim is to bring together digital humanists, computer scientists, archivists and various other stakeholders to explore issues, ethical, legal and technical, relating to current and future use of and access to born digital archives, including web archives and personal digital archive collections. At present, applying Artificial Intelligence to archives remains at the exploratory stage, but to make sense of born digital collections, new methodologies are urgently needed, combining traditional humanistic methods with data-rich approaches. 

The first AURA workshop on Open Data versus Privacy took place last month and was organised by Annalina Caputo from Dublin City University. Rachel MacGregor provides a great write-up of this event here.

Looking ahead, the second virtual workshop will be about AI and Archives: Current Challenges and Prospects of Digital and Born-digital archives will be held online on 28th and 29th January 2021. Each day will include four short presentations, two interactive sessions and a round-table discussion. Our hope is that the workshop will generate dialogue around key challenges that professionals across all sectors are grappling with, with a view to beginning to implement solutions. 

The first day aims to discuss issues of access both from infrastructural and user’s perspectives. It will explore the ethical implications of the use of AI and advanced computational approaches to archival practices and archival research. On the second day the workshop will discuss the challenges of access to email archives and collaborative initiatives to overcome these challenges. In the afternoon there will be discussions about infrastructural and cultural issues relating to web archives and emerging format collections, including web-based interactive narratives.

As this is a participatory event, spaces are limited. If you are interested in joining the workshop please email an expression of interest including (i) your name (ii) affiliation (if there is one), (iii) role, expertise or area of research and (iv) days of participation: only on 28/01, only on 29/01 or both days to The National Archives’ Research Mailbox by the 31^st of December 2020. Early-career researchers and students are strongly encouraged to apply.

Provisional Programme for AI and Archives: Current Challenges and Prospects of Digital and Born-digital archives

Day 1

28 January, The National Archives UK:

11:00 – 11:10 Welcome to Day 1: Eirini Goudarouli, Head of Digital Research Programmes, The National Archives UK; Lise Jaillant, Senior Lecturer in English and Digital Humanities, Loughborough University; and Annalina Caputo, Assistant Professor, Dublin City University (10 min)

11:10 – 11:40 Chair: Patrick McInerney, Lecturer in Computer Science, Waterford Institute of Technology

• Catherine Elliott, Head of Digital Services, The National Archives – Transforming how our users engage with the archive online (10 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Bernard Ogden, Research Software Engineer, The National Archives, and Lora Angelova , Head of Conservation: Research & Audience Development, The National Archives – Towards Computer Vision Search and Discovery of our National Collection: Challenges and Prospects in Accessing Image Collections (10 min + 5 min Q&A)

5 minutes “break” – split the group in 4 break-out rooms

11:45 – 12:15 interactive session 1

Afternoon Break (1h and 15 min)

13:30 – 14:00 Chair: Larry Stapleton, Senior academic and international consultant, Waterford Institute of Technology

• Lorna Hughes, Professor in Digital Humanities, Glasgow University – Lucky town, or lost in the flood?: the ethics of linking and searching community generated content (10 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Nora McGregor, Digital Curator: European and Americas Collections, British Library – The evolution of the British Library Digital Scholarship Staff Training Programme: From HTML to Ethics in AI (10 min + 5 min Q&A)

5 minutes “break” – split the group in 4 break-out rooms

14:05 – 14:35 interactive session 2

Comfort Break (10 min)

14:45 – 15:15 Chair: Pip Willcox, Head of Research, The National Archives

Wrap-up: roundtable discussion

Day 2

29 January, British Library:

11:00 – 11:10 Welcome to Day 2: Rachel Foss, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts, British Library; Larry Stapleton, Senior academic and international consultant, Waterford Institute of Technology; Mathieu d’ Aquin, Professor of Informatics, National University of Ireland Galway (10 min)

11:10 – 11:40 Chair: TBC

Email Archives: challenges of access and collaborative initiatives

• Callum McKean, Curator for Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives, British Library – on email collections, processes and challenges (10 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Two other speakers TBC

5 minutes break – split the group in 4 break-out rooms

11:45 – 12:15 Interactive Session 1

Afternoon Break (1h and 15 min)

13:30 – 14:00 Chair: TBC

• Lynda Clark, Post-doctoral research fellow in Narrative and Play at InGAME: Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise, University of Dundee, and Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator for Digital Publications, British Library – Collecting Emerging Formats: Capturing Interactive Narratives in the UK Web Archive (10 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Coral Manton, Lecturer in Creative Computing, Bath Spa University, and Birgitte Aga, Senior Advisor for User Experience at Riksantikvaren, The Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway – Women Reclaiming AI: a collectively designed AI Voice Assistant (10 min + 5 min Q&A)

5 minutes break – split the group in 4 break-out rooms

14:05 – 14:35 interactive session 2

Comfort Break (10 min)

14:45 – 15:15 Chair: TBC

Wrap-up: Roundtable discussion

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Please do join the AURA mailing list and follow the network's discussions on twitter via #AURA_network.

You may also be interested in the current call for papers for a Special Issue on “Born Digital” – Shedding Light into the Darkness of Digital Culture to be published by the AI & Society Journal of Culture, Knowledge and Communication, the abstract submission deadline is 11th January 2021.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Screenshots from the 10 BL Labs shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020

After much deliberation and intense discussion with key people from the BL Labs Advisory board and British Library we have come up with a fantastic shortlist for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The official announcement of who has been awarded prizes for the Awards in each category (Research, Artistic, Educational and Community) will take place tomorrow between 1400-1700 (GMT), Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online BL Labs Symposium 2020. We will also announce our Staff Awards there too.

There are still a few places available - so hurry and BOOK NOW to find out if the project you voted for won! Also, learn more about some of the amazing projects that were submitted this year and listen and be inspired by our fantastic range of speakers in our packed programme.

In this strange, difficult and remarkable pandemic year, we decided to do something really special.

We we want you, the public, to choose which shortlisted entry will be crowned overall the 'BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020'. It's going to be difficult as the projects this year are so diverse and difficult to compare. Also, you only have today and tomorrow to decide (voting will close around 1615 GMT tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020).

The winner will be announced near the end of the BL Labs Symposium 2020 tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020, just before 1700 GMT.

How to vote for the BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020?

It's really simple:

1. Read the descriptions below and follow the links to learn more about each entry.
2. Vote for your favourite (you can only chose one!) using our VOTING FORM which is now live.
3. You will be asked if you wish to have the results emailed to you after you have voted. If you choose this option, all you will be able to see are the number of people who have voted.
4. The form will remain open from 1100 GMT Monday 14 December to 1615 GMT Tuesday 15 December 2020 (that's just over 30 hours).
5. The winner will be announced around 1655 GMT tomorrow on 15 December 2020 near the end this year's online BL Labs Symposium 2020.

Only have 5 minutes to look through the entries and vote?

No problem! We have created a BL Labs Public Awards YouTube shortlist 2020 which contains ten 30-second promotional videos for each shortlisted entry to give you their 'essence'. It's just over 5 minutes and then you can VOTE!

You can also ownload a .zip file with all the submissions for this year's BL Labs Public Awards 2020 (all entries) if you prefer.

The shortlisted entries for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020 this year are (in alphabetical title order):

1. Afrobits
   An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
   by Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.
   
   Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
2. Afro Hair And Its Heritage
   A celebration of Black Heritage through Black Afro Hair.
   by Roslyn Henry (self-taught surface pattern designer, from Les Belles Bêtes, France)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details(1) and (2)
   
   
3. Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
   16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
   by Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia) and Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
4. Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
   A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.
   by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details
   
   
5. Faint Signals
   Interactive artwork that generates an imagined Yorkshire forest, densely populated with sounds of nature from the British Library's archive.
   by the Invisible Flock team who are Ben Eaton (Technical Director), Victoria Pratt (Creative Director),  Klavs Kurpnieks (Studio Manager), Catherine Baxendale (Executive Producer), Amy Balderston (General Manager) and Simon Fletcher (Interactions Engineer).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
6. Flickr Georeferencing completed
   Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.
   by 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
7. Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
   Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
   by Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
8. In the Spotlight volunteers
   Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.
   by 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
9. Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
   Research in 19th-century Mexican sources and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approaches underpinning the creation of an interactive web map that enables users to spatially explore the British Library's recently digitized Libros de Hijuelas collection.
   by John Erard (Undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
10. Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
    by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
    
    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

What happens to the projects not shortlisted?

Though we have criteria to decide which projects should be shortlisted it was still incredibly difficult to choose which ones should be. Judging can be so subjective! Remember it's a point in time with a specific group of people in a particular mood and set of lenses. At a different time, with another group of people I am sure they would probably come up with another selection.

So if you were not chosen this year, please do not be disheartened. The whole point of the BL Labs Awards is to shine a light and showcase uses of our digital collections through innovative projects and activities. These projects have often gone on to be developed further such as someone happened to have come across it and connected with individuals involved and ended up collaborating with them. Many projects have also inspired others to develop their own using the British Library's as well as other institution's cultural heritage digitised and born digital collections.

Details of all the projects entered this year are contained in the BL Labs Digital Projects Archive.

BL Labs can promote your work through our various communication channels (if we haven't already!). Who knows where that might lead? For some of these entrants, I would definitely recommend that they re-submit next year when the projects have been developed further and have had a chance to have further impact.

So for now, a quick thank you to the following people who took the time enter (we have also provided links for those who would like to read further about these entries), we really, really appreciate it:

1. Drawings inspired by the British Library's Sound Archive of Wildlife Recordings by Viv Youell (England)
2. Curatr: A Data Interface for the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus by University College Dublin's Insight team and Centre for Cultural Analytics, Ireland
3. Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1768-1833 by Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
4. Surfacing the impact of doctoral research: working with the EThOS collection by Catherine Montgomery, Craig Stewart, Tom Roberts, Sharon Riddle and Jinjie Huang from Durham University, England
5. Baking in Better Catalogue Data by Sara Wingate Gray, University College London, England
6. The Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Labelling Archives) holographic search and browsing interface for cultural heritage photogrammetry models by Martyn Harris (Birkbeck) and Mark Levene (University College London), England
7. Visualizing Space by Tara McDarby, United Kingdom
8. The Interpreter and You Are Not An Island by Noriko Okaku, England (2 entries)
9. Librorum: the British Library Edition by Janet Luk (Australian National University (ANU), Man-Ting Hsu (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra, Australia), Billy Nam Cheng (ANU), Jingyi Lai (Haiwan Middle School (Shenzhen, China), Mengfei Liu (Access Canberra (Canberra, Australia) and Xiaohan Jiang (China Maritime Museum (Shanghai, China))
10. BL Illuminated Glyphs CAPS: Typographic System of Illuminated Manuscript Letterings by Michelle Devlin , England

I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow at the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 and seasons greetings to you all, Mahendra.

Applications for the British Library 2021/22 PhD Placements are now open, with 16 different placement projects happening across the Library. Contemporary British Collections have advertised two placements for opportunities to work with born digital collections: “The “Long Tail” of Born-Digital Publications in the UK: What can we learn from Legal Deposit Data?” and “Interactive Digital Media and Web Archiving: Helping Develop the New Media Writing Prize Online Collection”.

The first placement will investigate the use of the ‘Publisher Submission Portal’, which provides a simple method for small publishers to deposit digital-only works with the Library under Legal Deposit Regulations. Legal Deposit provides the regulation for our collecting of contemporary UK publications, and this lies at the heart of many British Library’s collections. The placement student will analyse the data relating to deposit to help us understand the digital activity of small publishers and support the Library engagement with publishers and creators, especially ones that might be less well represented within our legal deposit collections.

The second placement will focus on the forthcoming New Media Writing Prize collection in the UK Web Archive. The New Media Writing Prize is awarded annually to interactive works that use technology in innovative and often quite experimental and exciting ways. The collection includes highly-interactive digital publications that cross genres, languages and formats, sometimes blurring the line between video games and literature. They were collected using different web archiving tools: the process itself is quite experimental, and will take several attempts to generate a good quality copy (instance) in our Web Archive. The placement student will help us identify the best instance for each publication, and have the chance to create a creative response to the collection.

The New Media Writing Prize logo

These placements offer an opportunity to learn more about contemporary collecting and curating at a cultural heritage institution, in the context of Legal Deposit and Emerging Formats. Both placements are expected to start after May 2021 and to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, both can be undertaken remotely, as well as part-time.

Applications for all 2021/22 PhD Placements close on Friday 18 December 2020, 5pm. Further information on eligibility, conditions and how to apply is available on the British Library website: https://www.bl.uk/news/2020/october/phd-placement-adverts-2020.

This post is by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator of Digital Publications on twitter as @giugimonogatari.

Posted on behalf of Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Digital Humanities Research, Australian National University by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

The teaching philosophy and pedagogy of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research (CDHR) at the Australian National University (ANU) focus on research-fuelled, practice-led, object-orientated learning. We value collaboration, experimentation, and individual growth, rather than adhering to standardised evaluation matrix of exams or essays. Instead, students enrolled in jointly-taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses are given a task: to innovate at the intersection of digital technologies and cultural heritage sector institutions. They are given a great degree of autonomy, and are trusted to deliver. Their aim is to create digital prototypes, which open up GLAM sector material to a new audience.

HUMN2001: Digital Humanities Theories and Projects, and its postgraduate equivalent HUMN6001 are core courses for the programs delivered from the CDHR. HUMN2001 is a compulsory course for both the Minor and the Major in Digital Humanities for the Bachelor of Arts; HUMN6001 is a core, compulsory course in the Masters of Digital Humanities and Public Culture. Initially the course structure was quite different: experts would be invited to guest lecture on their Digital Humanities projects, and the students were tasked with carrying out critical evaluations of digital resources of various kinds. What quickly became apparent, was that without experience of digital projects, the students struggled to meaningfully and thoughtfully evaluate the projects they encountered. Many focused exclusively on the user-interface; too often critical factors like funding sources were ignored; the critical evaluative context in which the students operated was greatly skewed by their experiences of tools such as Google and platforms such as Facebook.

The solution to the problem became clear - students would have to experience the process of developing digital projects themselves before they could reasonably be expected to evaluate those of others. This revelation brought on a paradigm shift in the way in which the CDHR engages with students, projects, and their cultural heritage sector collaborators.

In 2018, we reached out to colleagues at the ANU for small-scale projects for the students to complete. The chosen project was the digitisation and the creation of metadata records for a collection of glass slides that form part of the Heritage in the Limelight project. The enthusiasm, diligence, and care that the students applied to working with this external dataset (external only to the course, since this was an ANU-internal project) gave us confidence to pursue collaborations outside of our own institution. In Semester 1 of 2019, Dr Katrina Grant’s course HUMN3001/6003: Digital Humanities Methods and Practices ran in collaboration with the National Museum of Australia (NMA) to almost unforeseeable success: the NMA granted five of the top students a one-off stipend of $1,000 each, and continued working with the students on their projects, which were then added to the NMA’s Defining Moments Digital Classroom, launched in November 2020. This collaboration was featured in a piece in the ANU Reporter, the University’s internal circular. 

Encouraged by the success of Dr Grant’s course, and presented with a serendipitous opportunity to meet up at the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) conference in 2018 where he was giving the keynote, I reached out to Mahendra Mahey to propose a similar collaboration. In Semester 2, 2019 (July to November), HUMN2001/6001 ran in collaboration with the British Library. 

Our experiences of working with students and cultural heritage institutions in the earlier semester had highlighted some important heuristics. As a result, the delivery of HUMN2001/6001 in 2019 was much more structured than that of HUMN3001/6003 (which had offered the students more freedom and opportunity for independent research). Rather than focus on a theoretical framework per se, HUMN2001/6001 focused on the provision of transferable skills that improved the delivery and reporting of the projects, and could be cited directly in future employment opportunities as a skills-base. These included project planning and time management (such as Gantt charts and SCRUM as a form of agile project management), and each project was to be completed in groups.

The demographic set up of each group had to follow three immutable rules:

• The first, was that each team had to be interdisciplinary, with students from more than one degree program.
• Second, the groups had to be multilingual, and not each member of the group could have the same first language, or be monolingual in the same language.
• Third, was that the group had to represent more than one gender.

Although not all groups strictly implemented these rules, the ones that did benefitted from the diversity and critical lens afforded by this richness of perspective to result in the top projects.

Three examples that best showcase the diversity (and the creative genius!) of these groups and their approach to the British Library’s collection include a virtual reality (VR) concert hall, a Choose-You-Own-Adventure-Game travelling through Medieval manuscripts, and an interactive treasure hunt mobile app.

Examples of student projects

(VR)2 : Virtuoso Rachmaninoff in Virtual Reality

Research Team: Angus Harden, Noppakao (Angel) Leelasorn, Mandy McLean, Jeremy Platt, and Rachel Watson

Figure 1: Angel Leelasorn testing out (VR)2

Figure 2: Snapshots documenting the construction of (VR)2

This project is a VR experience of the grand auditorium of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. It has an audio accompaniment of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, Op.3, No.2, the score for which forms part of the British Library’s collection. Reflective of the personal experiences of some of the group members, the project was designed to increase awareness of mental health, and throughout the experience the user can encounter notes written by Rachmaninoff during bouts of depression. The sense of isolation is achieved by the melody playing in an empty auditorium. 

The VR experience was built using Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 4. The music was produced  using midi data, with each note individually entered into Logic Pro X, and finally played through Addictive Keys Studio Grand virtual instrument.

The project is available through a website with a disclosure, and links to various mental health helplines, accessible at: https://virtuosorachmaninoff.wixsite.com/vrsquared

Fantastic Bestiary

Research Team: Jared Auer, Victoria (Vick) Gwyn, Thomas Larkin, Mary (May) Poole, Wen (Raven) Ren, Ruixue (Rachel) Wu, Qian (Ariel) Zhang

Figure 3:  Homepage of A Fantastic Bestiary

This project is a bilingual Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hypertext game that engages with the Medieval manuscripts (such as Royal MS 12 C. xix. Folios 12v-13, based off the Greek Physiologus and the Etymologiae of St. Isidore of Seville) collection at the British Library, first discovered through the Turning the Pages digital feature. The project workflow included design and background research, resource development, narrative writing, animation, translation, audio recording, and web development. Not only does it open up the Medieval manuscripts to the public in an engaging and innovative way through five fully developed narratives (~2,000-3,000 words each), all the content is also available in Mandarin Chinese.

The team used a plethora of different tools, including Adobe Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Audition and Audacity. The website was developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment. 

The project is accessible at: https://thomaslarkin7.github.io/hypertextStory/

ActionBound

Research Team: Adriano Carvalho-Mora, Conor Francis Flannery, Dion Tan, Emily Swan

Figure 4: (Left) Testing the app at the Australian National Botanical Gardens, (Middle) An example of one of the tasks to complete in ActionBound (Right) Example of sound file from the British Library (a dingo)

This project is a mobile application, designed as a location-based authoring tool inspired by the Pokemon Go! augmented reality mobile game. This educational scavenger-hunt aims to educate players about endangered animals. Using sounds of endangered or extinct animals from the British Library’s collection, but geo-locating the app at the Australian National Botanical Gardens, this project is a perfect manifestation of truly global information sharing and enrichment.

The team used a range of available tools and technologies to build this Serious Game or Game-With-A-Purpose. These include GPS and other geo-locating (and geo-caching), they created QR codes to be scanned during the hunt, locations are mapped using Open Street Map. 

The app can be downloaded from: https://en.actionbound.com/bound/BotanicGardensExtinctionHunt. 

Course Assessment

Such a diverse and dynamic learning environment presents some pedagogical challenges and required a new approach to student evaluation and assessment. The obvious question here is how to fairly, objectively, and comprehensively grade such vastly different projects? Especially since not only do they differ in both methodology and data, but also in the existing level of skills within the group. The approach I took for the grading of these assignments is one that I believe will have longevity and to some extent scalability. Indeed, I have successfully applied the same rubric in the evaluation of similarly diverse projects created for the course in 2020, when run in collaboration with the National Film and Sound Archives of Australia. 

The assessment rubric for this course awards students on two axis: ambition and completeness. This means that projects that were not quite completed due to their scale or complexity are awarded for the vision, and the willingness of the students to push boundaries, do new things, and take on a challenge. The grading system allows for four possible outcomes: a High Distinction (for 80% or higher), Distinction (70-79%), Credit (60-69%), and Pass (50-59%). Projects which are ambitious and completed to a significant extent land in the 80s; projects that are either ambitious but not fully developed, or relatively simple but completed receive marks in the 70s; those that very literally engaged with the material, implemented a technologically straightforward solution (such as building a website using WordPress or Wix, or using one of the suite of tools from Northwestern University’s Knightlab) were awarded marks in the 60s. Students were also rewarded for engaging with tools and technologies they had no prior knowledge of. Furthermore, in week 10 of a 12 week course, we ran a Digital Humanities Expo! Event, in which the students showcased their projects and received user-feedback from staff and students at the ANU. Students able to factor these evaluations into their final project exegeses were also rewarded by the marking scheme.

Notably, the vast majority of the students completed the course with marks 70 or higher (in the two top career brackets). Undoubtedly, the unconventional nature of the course is one of its greatest assets. Engaging with a genuine cultural heritage institution acted as motivation for the students. The autonomy and trust placed in them was empowering. The freedom to pursue the projects that they felt best reflected their passions, interests in response to a national collection of international fame resulted, almost invariably, in the students rising to the challenge and even exceeding expectations.

This was a learning experience beyond the rubric. To succeed students had to develop the transferable skills of project-planning, time-management and client interaction that would support a future employment portfolio. The most successful groups were also the most diverse groups. Combining voices from different degree programs, languages, cultures, genders, and interests helped promote internal critical evaluations throughout the design process, and helped the students engage with the materials, the projects, and each other in a more thoughtful way.

Figure 5: Two groups discussing their projects with Mahendra Mahey

Figure 6: National Museum of Australia curator Dr Lily Withycombe user-testing a digital project built using British Library data, 2019.

Figure 7: User-testing feedback! Staff and students came to see the projects and support our students in the Digital Humanities Expo in 2019.

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller Biography

Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. She examines the potential of computational tools and digital technologies to support and diversify scholarship in the Humanities. Her publications cover the use of Linked Open Data with musicological information, library metadata, the narrative in ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions, and the role of gamification and informal online environments in education. She has created 3D digital models of cuneiform tables, carved boab nuts, animal skulls, and the Black Rod of the Australian Senate. She is a British Library Labs Researcher in Residence and a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, UK; an eResearch South Australia (eRSA) HASS DEVL (Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory) Champion; an iSchool Research Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2019 - 2021), a member of the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group; and, since September 2020 has been a member of the Territory Records Advisory Council for the Australian Capital Territory Government.

BL Labs Public Awards 2020 - REMINDER - Entries close NOON (GMT) 30 November 2020

Inspired by this work that uses the British Library's digitised collections? Have you done something innovative using the British Library's digital collections and data? Why not consider entering your work for a BL Labs Public Award 2020 and win fame, glory and even a bit of money?

This year's public awards 2020 are open for submission, the deadline for entry is NOON (GMT) Monday 30 November 2020

Whilst we welcome projects on any use of our digital collections and data (especially in research, artistic, educational and community categories), we are particularly interested in entries in our public awards that have focused on anti-racist work, about the pandemic or that are using computational methods such as the use of Jupyter Notebooks.

Work will be showcased at the online BL Labs Annual Symposium between 1400 - 1700 on Tuesday 15 December, for more information and a booking form please visit the BL Labs Symposium 2020 webpage.

Posted on behalf of Professor Leith Davis at Simon Fraser University, British Colombia, Canada by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Picture of cutting taken from the Astley's newspaper clippings archive Th.Cts.35 (held at the British Library)

What do you think of when you hear the word “circus”? Lions, tigers, elephants? Ringmasters in coat-tails? Trapeze artists? In fact, most of the images that we commonly associate with circus derive from nineteenth-century examples of the genre. Circus when it first started out in the late eighteenth century was a different kind of entertainment altogether. Yes, there were animal acts, including equestrian riding stunts, and there were also acrobatics. But early circus also included automatons and air balloons, pantomime and fireworks, musical acts and re-enactments of events like the storming of the Bastille. In short, it was a microcosm of the Georgian world which served to re-present important political and cultural activities by re-mixing them with varieties of astonishing physical entertainments.

Astley's Amphitheatre from Microcosm of London
Image taken from the British Library Archive

Unfortunately, partially as a result of the overpowering influence of the lions and tigers and ringmasters, and partially as a result of its having fallen through the cracks between academic disciplinary divisions, early circus has been largely forgotten.

The database that I created, “Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1768-1833” (https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/circus/), based on materials held by the British Library, aims to bring early circus back from offstage and to connect the ephemeral traces of this eighteenth-century entertainment with the concerns of our contemporary age.

Phillip Astley - Image Copyright 
National Portrait Gallery

The man credited with “inventing” the form of entertainment known now as circus was Philip Astley. Astley was certainly not the first person to perform popular equestrian entertainments for money, but he is acknowledged to have been the first person to have had the idea of using an enclosed space where he could present his equestrian shows to a paying audience. Over the years, Astley’s Amphitheatre and Riding School evolved to include both a ring and a stage. Astley was an astute businessman and was able to expand his enterprise to include circuses in Dublin and Paris. His success also encouraged other entertainment entrepreneurs to try their hand at the circus business. Sites of entertainment similar to Astley’s sprang up within London and other locations in the British archipelago as well as in Europe and North America, including Jones’s Equestrian Amphitheatre in Whitechapel (1786), Swan’s Amphitheatre in Birmingham (1787), the Edinburgh Equestrian Circus (1790), Ricketts's Equestrian Pantheon in Boston (1794) and Montreal (1797), and the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy in London (1782). Circus was not just as a type of entertainment in the metropolis; it was also a transnational phenomenon.

Poney Race at Astley's Amphitheatre, image from V&A Museum

I drew the data for  “Reconstructing Early Circus” from the British Library’s “Astley’s Cuttings From Newspapers” (Th. Cts. 35-37). This source consists of three volumes of close to 3,000 newspaper advertisements of entertainments featured at Astley’s from 1768 to 1833, along with a few manuscript materials and a lock of Astley’s daughter’s hair. The clippings were collected by the theatre manager, James Winston, for a history of theatre which he never published. Working with my research assistant, Emma Pink, I photographed each of the clippings from the BL volumes in the reading room and got 4 undergraduate students to transcribe them. Then I worked with the personnel at Simon Fraser University’s Digital Humanities Research Lab to create the website. Users can browse through the sixty-year history of Astley’s or, using the search function, they can identify the frequency of particular acts or performers, for example. The materials represent a rich treasure trove for scholars of: Romantic-era cultural and media studies; British history; economic and business history; performance studies; fine arts; and cultural memory studies. 

As I continue to expand and improve on the site, I hope to use my database to explore connections between early circus and other popular entertainments of the day as well as to expand the site to examine circus locations in transatlantic locations. 

Examining the Astley archives allows us to learn more about leisure in the long eighteenth century as well as about the connections between popular entertainment and political and social concerns in Georgian times, and, by extension, in our own era. Lions and tigers and ringmasters you won’t find here, but check out the “little Learned Military Horse,” the trained bees, and, of course, the equestrian feats of Astley himself for more insight into this neglected popular entertainment from 200 years ago. 

(See also Leith Davis. "Between Archive and Repertoire: Astley's Amphitheatre, Early Circus, and Romantic-Era Song Culture." Studies in Romanticism 58, no. 4 (2019): 451-79).

Leith Davis, Professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada

Leith Davis is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada where she researches and teaches eighteenth-century literature and media history. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford UP, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1724-1874 (Notre Dame UP, 2005) as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland, 1688-1745 which explores sites of cultural memory in the British archipelago within the context of the shifting media ecology of the eighteenth century.

BL Labs Public Awards 2020 - REMINDER - Entries close NOON (GMT) 30 November 2020

Inspired by this work that uses the British Library's digital archived cuttings? Have you done something innovative using the British Library's digital collections and data? Why not consider entering your work for a BL Labs Public Award 2020 and win fame, glory and even a bit of money?

This year's public awards 2020 are open for submission, the deadline for entry is NOON (GMT) Monday 30 November 2020

Whilst we welcome projects on any use of our digital collections and data (especially in research, artistic, educational and community categories), we are particularly interested in entries in our public awards that have focused on anti-racist work, about the pandemic or that are using computational methods such as the use of Jupyter Notebooks.

Work will be showcased at the online BL Labs Annual Symposium between 1400 - 1700 on Tuesday 15 December, for more information and a booking form please visit the BL Labs Symposium 2020 webpage.

This week is International Games Week in libraries - “an initiative run by volunteers from around the world to reconnect communities through their libraries around the educational, recreational, and social value of all types of games.”

As a volunteer, participant and collaborator on game events organised by Stella Wisdom in the British Library's Digital Scholarship Team, I’ve particularly enjoyed the International Games Week events held at the Library during previous years, including Adventure X and WordPlay. It’s fitting that a national library acknowledges the value of narratives in games and interactive fiction, as well as those held in books and other formats.

In this post, I wanted to highlight some things that cut across projects I’ve been involved in with the British Library. These include curating UK websites and running online game jams, in addition to the game events mentioned above.

Back in 2018, I co-organised the online Gothic Novel Jam with Stella. In terms of the gothic and supernatural, it’s appropriate that this blog post is published today on Friday the 13th! We’ve blogged about this jam previously, but in summary, the intention was to encourage participants to create games, interactive fiction and other creative outputs using the theme of the gothic novel and British Library Flickr images as inspiration. The response was fantastic, and resulted in a large number of great narrative games being created. I particularly liked As a Glow Brings Out a Haze for the creative reuse of British Library images.

In addition to co-running game jams, I'm a volunteer curator for the UK Web Archive, and as representative for CILIP’s LGBTQ+ Network, I’ve been co-lead on the LGBTQ+ Lives Online project with Steven Dryden from the British Library. This project has focused on identifying UK LGBTQ+ websites, blogs etc. for inclusion in the collection, as a way to preserve them for future generations. To a lesser extent, I’ve also been supporting the curation of the Video Games collection and also Interactive Narratives, which is part of the broader E-publishing trends/Emerging formats collection.

I find it interesting to see where different seemingly unrelated projects overlap, and in this instance, the overlap is an online game called The Tower created by Freya Campbell, which she originally created for Gothic Novel Jam. The game itself is a piece of interactive fiction combining both text and images. For me it was a great example of a narrative that is clearly gothic and dark, but takes a new focus to frame that genre. 

This week is Transgender Awareness Week, and as more UK content is published online about transgender issues and experiences, these sites will be added to the UKWA LGBTQ+ Lives collection. The Tower includes subject matter that is particularly high profile in UK media discussions surrounding LGBTQ+ lives at the moment - transgender identities. As the creator of The Tower is based in the UK, this game is now part of the Interactive Narratives and LGBTQ+ Lives collections in the UK Web Archive.

Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in this online nominations form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/nominate. As part of both International Games Week and Transgender Awareness Week, why not nominate UK websites for inclusion in the Video Games,  Interactive Narratives, and LGBTQ+ Lives Online collections. 

Another overlap connected to The Tower, is that Freya exhibited two other games (Perseids, and Super Lunary ep.1) at AdventureX, when it was held at the British Library during International Games Week in 2018 and 2019. Sadly AdventureX is cancelled in 2020 due to Covid-19, but if you make games and interactive fiction, why not consider taking part in AdvXJam, which starts tomorrow.

This post is by Ash Green (@ggnewed) from the CILIP LGBTQ+ Network.