This blog post is by Alan Danskin, Collection Metadata Standards Manager, British Library. [email protected]

What is Share-VDE and why has the British Library joined the Share-VDE Community?

Share-VDE is a library-driven initiative bringing library catalogues together in a shared Virtual Discovery Environment.  It uses linked data technology to create connections between bibliographic information contributed by different institutions

Figure 1: SVDE page for Sir Tim Berners-Lee

For example, searching for Sir Tim Berners-Lee retrieves metadata contributed by different members, including links to his publications. The search also returns links to external sources of information, including Wikipedia.

The British Library will be the first institution to contribute its national bibliography to Share-VDE and we also plan to contribute our catalogue data. By collaborating with the Share-VDE community we will extend access to information about our collections and services and enable information to be reused.

The Library also contributes to Share-VDE by participating on community groups working to develop the metadata model and Share-VDE functionality. This provides us with a practical approach for bridging differences between the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) and the Bibframe initiative, led by Library of Congress.

Share VDE is promoted by the international bibliographic agency Casalini Libri and @Cult, a solutions developer working in the cultural heritage sector.

Andrew MacEwan, Head of Metadata at the British Library, explained that, “Membership of the Share-VDE community is an exciting opportunity to enrich the Library’s metadata and open it up for re-use by other institutions in a linked data environment.”

Tiziana Possemato, Chief Information Officer at Casalini Libri and Director of @Cult, said "We are delighted to collaborate with the British Library and extremely excited about unlocking the wealth of data in its collections, both to further enrich the Virtual Discovery Environment and to make the Library's resources even more accessible to users."

For further information about:

SHARE-VDE  

Linked Data

Linked Open Data

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Up to 10 million people visit the British Library website - www.bl.uk - every year where they can view up to 4 million digitised collection items and over 40 million pages.

Casalini Libri is a bibliographic agency producing authority and bibliographic data; a library vendor, supplying books and journals, and offering a variety of collection development and technical services; and an e-content provider, working both for publishers and libraries.

@Cult is a software development company, specializing in data conversion for LD; and provider of Integrated Library System and Discovery tools, delivering effective and innovative technological solutions to improve information management and knowledge sharing.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer is drawing to a close and autumn feels hot on its heels. On recent walks I’ve noticed blackberries ripening in the hedgerows, tree leaves turning colour and bats darting through the air.

Thinking of nature and the senses, today is the first day of Sound Walk September, the yearly global festival celebrating sound walks. If you want to check some of these out, there is a comprehensive list of walking pieces on their website and also many interesting events planned. Including one about virtual walks; exploring how we can enjoy the great outdoors, by using digital technology to experience virtual nature, when staying indoors.

Sound Walk September, 1-30 September 2020

We'd love for you to join us for this online Virtual Walks panel discussion on Wednesday 16^th September at 7pm (BST), booking details are here.

This event will be chaired by Sue Thomas, author of “Nature and Wellbeing in the Digital Age”, who champions how we can use technology to feel better without logging off.

Sue will be joined by cultural geographer and digital media artist, Jack Lowe, who will talk about a genre of video games known as ‘walking simulators’ and his research in developing location-based online games, as a method of place based digital storytelling.

Virtual Whitby Abbey, one of the British Library’s “Off the Map” gothic winning entries. Created by Team Flying Buttress, i.e. six students from De Montfort University, Ben Mowson, Elliott Pacel, Ewan Couper, Finn McAvinchey, Kit Grande and Katie Hallaron.

Use of atmospheric sound recordings is very much part of the ambience of virtual walking simulators and videogames. Completing the panel will be British Library Wildlife and Environmental Sounds Curator, Cheryl Tipp and myself discussing how digitised sound recordings from the Library’s sound archive have been innovatively used in videogames made by UK students, as part of the "Off the Map" initiative.

If you are inspired to make your own digital sound walk, then you may want to take a read of this previous blog post, which has lots of practical advice. Furthermore, if you use any openly licensed British Library sound recordings in your walk, such as ones on the "Off the Map" SoundCloud Gothic, Alice or Shakespeare sets, or these ones on Wikimedia Commons, then please do let us know by emailing digitalresearch(at)bl(dot)uk, as we always love to share and showcase what people have done with our digital collections.

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

This is a guest post by Linda Berube, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and City, University of London. If you would like to know more about Linda's research, please do email her at [email protected].

“There are those who claim that Britain no longer has a comics industry.” (John Freeman, downthetubes.net, quoting Lewis Stringer)

Freeman goes onto say that despite the evidence supporting such a view (have you ever really looked at a WH Smith comics rack? He has: see his photo of one here), the British comics industry is not just all licenced content from the United States, and it has continued to produce new publications. Maybe the newsstand is not necessarily the best place to look for them.
For the newsstand does not tell the whole story. Comics are not all kiddie and superhero characters now, if they ever were (Sabin 1993). Not that there is anything wrong with that content, but prevailing attitudes about the perceived lack of seriousness of these types of comics can inhibit a consideration of comics as cultural objects in their own right, worthy of research. Novelist Susan Hill (2017) expresses a widely held view when she stated: "Is it better for young people to read nothing at all than read graphic novels-which are really only comics for an older age group?". No amount of book awards, academic departments or academic journals have eliminated such sentiments^[1].

The best place for looking at all UK comics have to offer is online. Digital comics have not only brought a whole new audience but new creators, as well as new business models and creative processes. My Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Programme funded research will take a deep dive into these models and processes, from creation to consumption. For this work, I have the considerable support of supervisors Ian Cooke and Stella Wisdom (British Library) and Ernesto Priego and Stephann Makri (Human-Computer Interaction Design Centre, City, University of London)^[2].

Figure 1: Charisma.ai uses innovative technology to create comics

This particular point in time offers an excellent opportunity to consider the digital comics, and specifically UK, landscape. We seem to be past the initial enthusiasm for digital technologies when babies and bathwater were ejected with abandon (see McCloud 2000, for example), and probably still in the middle of a retrenchment, so to speak, of that enthusiasm (see Priego 2011 pp278-280). To date, there have been few attempts at viewing the creation to consumption process of print comics in their entirety, and no complete studies of the production and communication models of digital comics. While Benatti (2019) analysed the changes to the roles of authors, readers, and publishers prompted by the creation of webcomics, she admits that “the uncertain future of the comics print communications circuit makes the establishment of a parallel digital circuit…more necessary than ever for the development of the comics medium”. (p316)

Figure 2: Helen Greetham is part of the international Spider Forest Webcomic collective, one way of distributing and marketing digital comics

Benatti was using the wider publishing industry’s process models and the disruption caused by digital technology as a lens through which to view webcomics. Indeed, historians have discovered cohesive patterns in the development of ideas, especially as embodied in print books. These patterns, most often described as cycles, chains, or circuits, follow the book through various channels of creation, production, and consumption. (See Darnton 1982, diagram of Communication Circuit below, for example). However, they have undergone a significant transformation, disruption even, when considered in the context of the digital environment (Murray and Squires 2013 have update Darnton for the digital and self-publishing age). And at first, it seemed that the disruption would prove terminal for certain types of communication, but most especially books and newspapers in print.

Figure 3: Robert Darnton’s Communication Circuit

What about the production patterns for comics within this publishing context? Have print comics given way to digital comics? And are digital comics the revolution they once seemed?
My research, a scoping study in its first year looking at the UK comics landscape and interviewing comics gatekeepers-mediators (CGMs)^[3], seeks to address the gap in the understanding of the creation to consumption process for digital comics. This first year’s work will be followed up by research into the creative process of digital comics writers and artists and what readers might contribute to that process. It will be the first such research to investigate cohesive patterns and production models through interdisciplinary empirical research for UK digital comics: analysing how an idea and digital comic object is formed, communicated, discussed and transformed by all the participants involved, from authors to CGMs to readers.

References:

Benatti, Francesca (2019). ‘Superhero comics and the digital communications circuit: a case study of Strong Female Protagonist’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics,10 (3), pp306-319. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2018.1485720.

Darnton, R. (1982). ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Daedalus,111(3), pp65-83. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/20024803.  Also available at:  https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3403038/darnton_historybooks.pdf

Freeman, John (2020).   ‘British Comics Industry Q&A’, downthetubes.net: exploring comics and more on the web since 1998. Quoting British comics creator and archivist Lew Stringer in a 2015 assessment of news stand comics on his Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics blog.  Available at: https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=7110).

Hill, Susan (2017). Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books: A Year of Reading. Profile Books.

McCloud, Scott (2000). Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.  New York, N.Y: Paradox Press.

Murray, P.R.  and Squires, C. (2013). ‘Digital Publishing Communications Circuit’, Book 2.0, 3(1), pp3-23. Available at: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/btwo.3.1.3_1. See also: Stirling University, Book Unbound https://www.bookunbound.stir.ac.uk/research/.

Priego, Ernesto (2011). The Comic Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction. City, University of London. Journal contribution. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.754575.v4.

Sabin, Roger (1993). Adult comics: An introduction. London: Routledge. See Part 1: Britain 1. The first adult comics 2. Kid's stuff 3.Underground comix  4. 2000AD: 'The Comic of tomorrow!'  5. Fandom and direct sales 6. 'Comics grow up!': dawn of the graphic novel  7.From boom to bust 8.Viz: 'More fun than a jammy bun!'  9. The future.

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Footnotes

1. For example, the Pulitzer Prize[Maus]; The Guardian’s First Book Award 2001 [Jimmy Corrigan]; Man Booker Prize longlist [Sabrina], not to mention the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. The fact that graphic novels are singled out from comics here is another entire blog post… ↩︎

2. Ernesto does a nice line in comics himself: see Parables of Care. Creative Responses to Dementia Care, As Told by Carers and I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care, as well as The Lockdown Chronicles. ↩︎

3. The word ‘publisher’, at least in its traditional sense, just does not seem to apply to the various means of production and distribution. ↩︎

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Who doesn’t love owls? Here at the British Library we certainly do.

Often used as a symbol of knowledge, they are the perfect library bird. A little owl is associated and frequently depicted with the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena. The University of Bath even awarded Professor Yoda the European eagle owl a library card in recognition of his valuable service deterring seagulls from nesting on their campus.

The British Library may not have issued a reader pass to an owl (as far as I am aware!), but we do have a wealth of owl sound recordings in our wildlife and environmental sounds collection, you can read about and listen to some of these here.

British Library digitised image from page 45 of "Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa."

Little Owl calls recorded by Nigel Tucker in Somerset, England (BL ref 124857)

Owls can also be discovered in our UK Web Archive. Our UK Web Archivists recently examined the Shine dataset to explore which UK owl species is the most popular on the archived .uk domain. Read here to find out which owl is the winner.

They also curate an Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK collection, which features bird watching and some owl related websites in the Animal related hobbies subsection. If you know of websites that you think should be included in this collection, then please fill in their online nomination form.

British Library Flickr owl album

Here in Digital Scholarship I recently found many fabulous illustrations of owls in our Mechanical Curator Flickr image collection of over a million Public Domain images. So to honour owls on International Owl Awareness Day, I put together an owl album.

These owl illustrations are freely available, without copyright restrictions, for all types of creative projects, including digital collages. My colleague Hannah Nagle blogged about making collages recently and provided this handy guide. For finding more general images of nature for your collages, you may find it useful to browse other Mechanical Curator themed albums, such as Flora & Fauna, as these are rich resources for finding illustrations of trees, plants, animals and birds.

British Library digitised image from page 136 of "A Final Reckoning, a tale of Bush Life in Australia. With illustrations by W. B. Wollen"

If you creatively use our Mechanical Curator Flickr images, please do share them with us on twitter, using the hashtag #BLdigital, we always love to see what people have done with them. Plus if you use any of our owls today, remember to include the #InternationalOwlAwarenessDay hashtag too!

We also urge you to be eagle-eyed (sorry wrong bird!) and look out for some special animated owls during the 4th August, like this one below, which uses both sounds and images taken from our collections. These have been created by Carlos Rarugal, our arty Assistant Web Archivist and will shared from the Wildlife, Web Archive and Digital Scholarship Twitter accounts. 

Video created by Carlos Rarugal,  using Tawny Owl hoots recorded by Richard Margoschis in Gloucestershire, England (BL ref 09647) and British Library digitised image from page 79 of "Woodland Wild: a selection of descriptive poetry. From various authors. With ... illustrations on steel and wood, after R. Bonheur, J. Bonheur, C. Jacque, Veyrassat, Yan Dargent, and other artists"

One of the benefits of making digital art, is that there is no risks of spilling paint or glue on your furniture! As noted in this tweet from Damyanti Patel "Thanks for the instructions, my kids were entertained & I had no mess to clean up after their art so a clear win win, they really enjoyed looking through the albums". I honestly did not ask them to do this, but it is really cool that her children included this fantastic owl in the centre of one of their digital collages:

Showed the kids this collage guide from the BL & they created some fab images https://t.co/VqJDZ0mYqu pic.twitter.com/IC9b9vJtIS

— Damyanti Patel (@damyantipatel) May 22, 2020

I quite enjoy it when my library life and goth life connect! During the covid-19 lockdown I have attended several online club nights. A few months ago I was delighted to see that one of these; How Did I Get Here? Alternative 80s Night! regularly uses the British Library Flickr images to create their event flyers, using illustrations of people in strange predicaments to complement the name of their club; like this sad lady sitting inside a bird cage, in the flyer below.

Their next online event is Saturday 22nd August and you can tune in here. If you are a night owl, you could even make some digital collages, while listening to some great tunes. Sounds like a great night in to me!

Flyer image for How Did I Get Here? Alternative 80s Night!

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

In this post, Dr Mia Ridge gives a sense of why sightings of Ira Aldridge in our historical playbills collection resonate...

Ira Aldridge is one of the most popular 'celebrity spottings' shared by volunteers working with historical playbills on our In the Spotlight project. Born on this day in New York in 1807, Aldridge was the first Black actor to play a Shakespearean role in Britain.

Portrait of Aldridge by James Northcote

Educated at the African Free School and with some experience at the African Grove Theatre in New York, the teenaged Aldridge emigrated to Britain from the US in 1824 and quickly had an impact. In 1826 painter James Northcote captured him as Othello, a portrait which became the first acquisition by the Manchester Art Gallery. (If you're reading this before August 15th, you can attend an online tour exploring his work.)

While his initial reviews were mixed, he took The Times' mocking reference to him as the 'African Roscius' and used both the references to the famous Roman actor and his African ancestry in promotional playbills. Caught up in debates about the abolition of slavery and facing racism in reviews from critics about his performances in London's theatres, Aldridge toured the regions, particularly British cities with anti-slavery sympathies. He performed a range of roles, and his Shakespearean roles eventually including Othello, Shylock, Macbeth, King Lear and Richard III.

From 1852, he toured Europe, particularly Germany, Poland and Russia. This 'List showing the theatres and plays in various European cities where Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius, acted during the years 1827-1867, compiled by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, shows how widely he travelled and the roles he performed.

As the 1841 playbill from Doncaster's Theatre Royal (below) shows, the tale of his African ancestry grew more creative over time. The playbill also advertises a lecture and memoirs from Aldridge on various topics. In the years around the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, he spoke powerfully and directly to audiences about the injustices of slavery and racism. Playbills like this demonstrate how Aldridge managed to both pander to and play with perceptions of 'the African'.

This is necessarily a very brief overview of Aldridge's life and impact but I hope it's given you a sense of why it's so exciting to catch a glimpse of Aldridge in our collections.

Sources used and further reading include:

• Howard, Tony. 2016. ‘Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare’s Black Othello’. HistoryExtra. https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/ira-aldridge-shakespeares-black-othello/.
• Lindfors, Bernth, ed. 2017. Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius.
• Rob, Abdul. 2016. ‘Ira Aldridge’. Black History 365. https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/bhm-firsts/ira-aldridge/.
• Ross, Alex. 2013. ‘Othello’s Daughter’. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/othellos-daughter.
• Sakowska, Aleksandra. 2016. ‘Ira Aldridge’s Polish Journey: Developing the Shakespearean Canon and Influencing Local Politics’. British Library European Studies Blog (blog). https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/09/ira-aldridge-in-poland.html.
• Vaughan, Virginia Mason. 2016. ‘Critical Approaches to Othello’. The British Library: Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance. The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/critical-approaches-to-othello.

My thanks to everyone who suggested references for this post, in particular: Christian Algar, Naomi Billingsley, Nora McGregor, Susan Reed from the British Library; Dorothy Berry from the Houghton Library at Harvard and In the Spotlight participants including beccabooks10, Nosnibor3, Elizabeth Danskin (who shared a link to this video about his daughter, Amanda Aldridge), Nicola Hayes, and Sylvia Morris (who has written extensively about Aldridge on her blog).

Post by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections.

During recent months of working from home, the Wikimedia family of platforms, including Wikidata and Wikisource, have enabled many librarians and archivists to do meaningful work, to enhance and amplify access to the collections that they curate.

I’ve been very encouraged to learn from other institutions and initiatives who have been working with these platforms. So I recently invited some wonderful speakers to give a “World of Wikimedia” series of remote guest lectures for staff, to inspire my colleagues in the British Library.

Logos of the Wikimedia Family of platforms

Stuart Prior from Wikimedia UK kicked off this season with an introduction to Wikimedia and the projects within it, and how it works with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. He was followed by Dr Martin Poulter, who had been the Bodleian Library’s Wikimedian In Residence. Martin shared his knowledge of how books, authors and topics are represented in Wikidata, how Wikidata is used to drive other sites, including Wikipedia, and how Wikipedia combines data and narrative to tell the world about notable books and authors.

Continuing with the theme of books, Gavin Willshaw spoke about the benefits of using Wikisource for optical character recognition (OCR) correction and staff engagement. Giving an overview of the National Library of Scotland’s fantastic project to upload 3,000 digitised Scottish Chapbooks to Wikisource during the Covid-19 lockdown. Focusing on how the project came about, its impact, and how the Library plans to take activity in this area forward in the future.

Tippet is the dandy---o. The toper's advice. Picking lilies. The dying swan, shelfmark L.C.2835(14), from the National Library of Scotland's Scottish Chapbooks collection

Closing the World of Wikimedia season, Adele Vrana and Anasuya Sengupta gave an extremely thought provoking talk about Whose Knowledge? This is a global multilingual campaign, which they co-founded, to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the majority of the world) online. Their work includes the annual #VisibleWikiWomen campaign to make women more visible on Wikipedia, which I blogged about recently.

One of the silver linings of the covid-19 lockdown has been that I’ve been able to attend a number of virtual events, which I would not have been able to travel to, if they had been physical events. These have included LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group online meetings; which is a biweekly zoom call on Tuesdays at 9am PDT (5pm BST).

I’ve also remotely attended some excellent online training sessions: “Teaching with Wikipedia: a practical 'how to' workshop” ran by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. Also “Wikimedia and Libraries - Running Online Workshops” organised by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland (CILIPS), presented by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, and previously the Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council. From attending the latter, I learned of an online “How to Add Suffragettes & Women Activists to Wikipedia” half day edit-a-thon event taking place on the 4th July organised by Sara, Dr t s Beall and Clare Thompson from the Protests and Suffragettes project, this is a wonderful project, which recovers and celebrates the histories of women activists in Govan, Glasgow.

We'd shared this elsewhere (on evilFB) but not twitter – here's the 'group pic' of #ProtestandSuffragettes recent #WikipediaWorkshop – we had 35 folks come along (many new to #Wiki) & we're looking forward to working w/ them again... #WMUKAGM20https://t.co/jlQy9cW3k0 pic.twitter.com/yAcnzSRLQ3

— dr t s Beall (@tsBeall) July 18, 2020

We have previously held a number of in person Wikipedia edit-a-thon events at the British Library, but this was the first time that I had attended one remotely, via Zoom, so this was a new experience for me. I was very impressed with how it had been organised, using break out rooms for newbies and more experienced editors, including multiple short comfort breaks into the schedule and having very do-able bite size tasks, which were achievable in the time available. They used a comprehensive, but easy to understand, shared spreadsheet for managing the tasks that attendees were working on. This is definitely an approach and a template that I plan to adopt and adapt for any future edit-a-thons I am involved in planning.

Furthermore, it was a very fun and friendly event, the organisers had created We Can [edit]! Zoom background template images for attendees to use, and I learned how to use twinkles on videocalls! This is when attendees raise both hands and wiggle their fingers pointing upwards, to indicate agreement with what is being said, without causing a soundclash. This hand signal has been borrowed it from the American Sign Language word for applause, it is also used by the Green Party and the Occupy Movement.

At our most recent Wikipedia Workshop on 4th July the ‘Protests and Suffragettes’ project created ZOOM backgrounds – just for fun – here are a few of them, which you can download from #Wiki Commons! #WMUKAGM20https://t.co/m7lGvnPFcg pic.twitter.com/GOo3HBbEJg

— dr t s Beall (@tsBeall) July 18, 2020

With enthusiasm fired up from my recent edit-a-thon attending experience, last Saturday I joined the online Wikimedia UK 2020 AGM. Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, gave updates on changes in the global Wikimedia movement, such as implementing the 2030 strategy, rebranding Wikimedia, the Universal Code of Conduct and plans for Wikipedia’s 20th birthday. Lucy also announced that three trustees Kelly Foster, Nick Poole and Doug Taylor, who stood for the board were all elected. Nick and Doug have both been on the board since July 2015 and were re-elected. I was delighted to learn that Kelly is a new trustee joining the board for the first time. As Kelly has previously been a trainer at BL Wikipedia edit-a-thon events, and she coached me to create my first Wikipedia article on Coventry godcakes at a Wiki-Food and (mostly) Women edit-a-thon in 2017.

In addition to these updates, Gavin Willshaw, gave a keynote presentation about the NLS Scottish chapbooks Wikisource project that I mentioned earlier, and there were three lightning talks: Andy Mabbett; 'Wiki Hates Newbies', Clare Thompson, Lesley Mitchell and Dr t s Beall; 'Protests and Suffragettes: Highlighting 100 years of women’s activism in Govan, Glasgow, Scotland' and Jason Evans; 'An update from Wales'.

Before the event ended, there was a 2020 Wikimedia UK annual awards announcement, where libraries and librarians did very well indeed:

• UK Wikimedian of the Year was awarded to librarian Caroline Ball for education work and advocacy at the University of Derby (do admire her amazing Wikipedia dress in the embedded tweet below!)
• Honourable Mention to Ian Watt for outreach work, training, and efforts around Scotland's COVID-19 data
• Partnership of the Year was given to National Library of Scotland for the WikiSource chapbooks project led by Gavin Willshaw
• Honourable Mention to University of Edinburgh for work in education and Wikidata
• Up and Coming Wikimedian was a joint win to Emma Carroll for work on the Scottish Witch data project and Laura Wood Rose for work at University of Edinburgh and on the Women in Red initiative
• Michael Maggs was given an Honorary Membership, in recognition of his very significant contribution to the charity over a number of years.

Big congratulations to all the winners. Their fantastic work, and also in Caroline's case, her fashion sense, is inspirational!

I really ought to be wearing my amazing Wikipedia dress in celebration right now... https://t.co/ewvVT3gdGa pic.twitter.com/IqxJN12rZD

— Caroline Ball 🌈🦄🧁🏳️‍🌈 (@heroicendeavour) July 18, 2020

For anyone interested, the next online event that I’m planning to attend is a #WCCWiki Colloquium organised by The Women’s Classical Committee, which aims to increase the representation of women classicists on Wikipedia. Maybe I’ll virtually see you there…

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

This guest post is by James Baker, Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex.

This month the team behind "Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship" ran two training sessions as part of our Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project. Each standalone session provided instruction in using the software tool AntConc and approaches from computational linguistics for the purposes of examining catalogue data. The objectives of the sessions were twofold: to test our in-development training materials, and to seek feedback from the community in order to better understand their needs and to develop our training offer.

Rather than host open public training, we decided to foster existing partnerships by inviting a small number of individuals drawn from attendees at events hosted as part of our previous Curatorial Voice project (funded by the British Academy). In total thirteen individuals from the UK and US took part across the two sessions, with representatives from libraries, archives, museums, and galleries.

Carpentries-style lesson about analysing catalogue data in Antconc

The training was delivered in the style of a Software Carpentry workshop, drawing on their wonderful lesson template, pedagogical principles, and rapid response to moving coding and data science instruction online in light of the Covid-19 crisis (see ‘Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online’ and ‘Tips for Teaching Online from The Carpentries Community’). In terms of content, we started with the basics: how to get data into AntConc, the layout of AntConc, and settings in AntConc. After that we worked through two substantial modules. The first focused on how to generate, interact with, and interpret a word list, and this was followed by a module on searching, adapting, and reading concordances. The tasks and content of both modules avoided generic software instruction and instead focused on the analysis of free text catalogue fields, with attendees asked to consider what they might infer about a catalogue from its use of tense, what a high volume of capitalised words might tell us about cataloguing style, and how adverb use might be a useful proxy for the presence of controlled vocabulary.

Tasks in the Searching Concordances section

Running Carpentries-style training over Zoom was new to me, and was - frankly - very odd. During live coding I missed hearing the clack of keyboards as people followed along in response. I missed seeing the sticky notes go up as people completed the task at hand. During exercises I missed hearing the hubbub that accompanies pair programming. And more generally, without seeing the micro-gestures of concentration, relief, frustration, and joy on the faces of learners, I felt somehow isolated as an instructor from the process of learning.

But from the feedback we received the attendees appear to have been happy. It seems we got the pace right (we assumed teaching online would be slower than face-to-face, and it was). The attendees enjoyed using AntConc and were surprised, to quote one attendees, "to see just how quickly you could draw some conclusions". The breakout rooms we used for exercises were a hit. And importantly we have a clear steer on next steps: that we should pivot to a dataset that better reflects the diversity of catalogue data (for this exercise we used a catalogue of printed images that I know very well), that learners would benefit having a list of suggested readings and resources on corpus linguistics, and that we might - to quote one attendee - provide "more examples up front of the kinds of finished research that has leveraged this style of analysis".

These comments and more will feed into the development of our training materials, which we hope to complete by the end of 2020 and - in line with the open values of the project - is happening in public. In the meantime, the materials are there for the community to use, adapt and build on (more or less) as they wish. Should you take a look and have any thoughts on what we might change or include for the final version, we always appreciate an email or a note on our issue tracker.

"Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship" is a collaboration between the Sussex Humanities Lab, the British Library, and Yale University Library that is funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) “UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions: Partnership Development Grants” scheme. Project Reference AH/T013036/1.

Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes, 'It seems a good moment to share some of the articles we've discussed as a primer on how and why technologies and working practices in libraries and digital scholarship are not neutral'.

'Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.'

― Attributed to Maya Angelou 

The Digital Scholarship Reading Group is one of the ways the Digital Research team help British Library staff grapple with emerging technologies and methods that could be used in research and scholarship with collections. Understanding the impact of the biases that new technologies such as AI and machine learning can introduce through algorithmic or data sourcing decisions has been an important aspect of these discussions since the group was founded in 2016. As we began work on what would eventually become the Living with Machines project, our readings became particularly focused on AI and data science, aiming to ensure that we didn't do more harm than good.

Reading is only the start of the anti-racism work we need to do. However, reading and discussing together, and bringing the resulting ideas and questions into discussions about procuring, implementing and prioritising digital platforms in cultural and research institutions is a relatively easy next step.

I've listed the topics under the dates we discussed them, and sometimes added a brief note on how it is relevant to intersectional issues of gender, racism and digital scholarship or commercial digital methods and tools. We always have more to learn about these issues, so we'd love to hear your recommendations for articles or topics (contact details here).

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Digitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History by Dorothy Berry

Abstract: This case study describes a project undertaken at the University of Minnesota Libraries to digitize materials related to African American materials across the Universities holdings, and to highlight materials that are otherwise undiscoverable in existing archival collections. It explores how historical and current archival practices marginalize material relevant to African American history and culture, and how a mass digitization process can attempt to highlight and re-aggregate those materials. The details of the aggregation process — e.g. the need to use standardized vocabularies to increase aggregation even when those standardized vocabularies privilege majority representation — also reveal important issues in mass digitization and aggregation projects involving the history of marginalized groups.

Discussed June 2020.

The Nightmare of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff

For this Reading Group Session, we will be doing something a little different and discussing a podcast on The Nightmare of Surveillance Capitalism. This podcast is hosted by Talking Politics, and is a discussion with Shoshana Zuboff who has recently published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (January, 2019). 

For those of you who would also like to bring some reading to the table, we can also consult the reviews of this book  as a way of engaging with reactions to the topic. Listed below are a few examples, but please bring along any reviews that you find to be especially thought provoking:

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
• https://theintercept.com/2019/02/02/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/

Discussed November 2019. Computational or algorithmic 'surveillance' and capitalism have clear links to structural inequalities. 

You and AI – Just An Engineer: The Politics of AI (video), Kate Crawford

Kate Crawford, Distinguished Research Professor at New York University, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and the co-founder and co-director the AI Now Institute, discusses the biases built into machine learning, and what that means for the social implications of AI. The talk is the fourth event in the Royal Society’s 2018 series: You and AI. 

Discussed October 2018.

'Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy'

Read or watch any one of:

'Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy' By Steve Lohr

Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification by Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru

Abstract: Recent studies demonstrate that machine learning algorithms can discriminate based on classes like race and gender. In this work, we present an approach to evaluate bias present in automated facial analysis algorithms and datasets with respect to phenotypic subgroups. Using the dermatologist approved Fitzpatrick Skin Type classification system, we characterize the gender and skin type distribution of two facial analysis benchmarks, IJB-A and Adience. We find that these datasets are overwhelmingly composed of lighter-skinned subjects (79.6% for IJB-A and 86.2% for Adience) and introduce a new facial analysis dataset which is balanced by gender and skin type. We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%. The substantial disparities in the accuracy of classifying darker females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males in gender classification systems require urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent and accountable facial analysis algorithms.

How I'm fighting bias in algorithms (TED Talk) by Joy Buolamwini

Abstract: MIT grad student Joy Buolamwini was working with facial analysis software when she noticed a problem: the software didn't detect her face -- because the people who coded the algorithm hadn't taught it to identify a broad range of skin tones and facial structures. Now she's on a mission to fight bias in machine learning, a phenomenon she calls the "coded gaze." It's an eye-opening talk about the need for accountability in coding ... as algorithms take over more and more aspects of our lives.

Discussed April 2018, topic suggested by Adam Farquhar.

Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives, Michelle Moravec

Abstract: In this article I reflect on the process of conducting historical research in digital archives from a feminist perspective. After reviewing issues that arose in conjunction with the British Library’s digitisation of the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 2013, I offer three questions researchers should consider before consulting materials in a digital archive. Have the individuals whose work appears in these materials consented to this? Whose labour was used and how is it acknowledged? What absences must be attended to among an abundance of materials? Finally, I suggest that researchers should draw on the existing body of scholarship about these issues by librarians and archivists.

Discussed October 2017.

Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson by Amy E. Earhart, Toniesha L. Taylor.

From their introduction: 'we are also invested in the development of a practice-based digital humanities that attends to the crucial issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the undergraduate classroom and beyond. Our White Violence, Black Resistance project merges foundational digital humanities approaches with issues of social justice by engaging students and the community in digitizing and interpreting historical moments of racial conflict. The project exemplifies an activist model of grassroots recovery that brings to light timely historical documents at the same time that it exposes power differentials in our own institutional settings and reveals the continued racial violence spanning 1868 Millican, Texas, to 2014 Ferguson, Missouri.'

Discussed August 2017.

Recovering Women’s History with Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Fabian News, Jana Smith Elford

Abstract: Literary study in the digital humanities is not exempt from reproducing historical hierarchies by focusing on major or canonical figures who have already been recognized as important historical or literary figures. However, network analysis of periodical publications may offer an alternative to the biases of human memory, where one has the tendency to pay attention to a recognizable name, rather than one that has had no historical significance. It thus enables researchers to see connections and a wealth of data that has been obscured by traditional recovery methodologies. Machine reading with network analysis can therefore contribute to an alternate understanding of women’s history, one that reinterprets cultural and literary histories that tend to reconstruct gender-based biases. This paper uses network analysis to explore the Fabian News, a late nineteenth-century periodical newsletter produced by the socialist Fabian Society, to recover women activists committed to social and political equality.

Discussed July 2017.

Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner

From the introduction: At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.

Discussed April 2017. A classic text from 1980 that describes how seemingly simple design factors can contribute to structural inequalities.

Critical Questions for Big Data by Danah Boyd & Kate Crawford

Abstract: Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article,we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.

Discussed August 2016, suggested by Aquiles Alencar Brayner.

 

This blog post is by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections and Co-Investigator for Living with Machines. She's on twitter at @mia_out.