These are exciting and busy times for BL Labs and the digital scholarship team, and we have a few digital/art-themed events next week - book your tickets and come along!
Friday 5th April sees the long-anticipated launch of the Imaginary Cities exhibition in the entrance hall gallery. The exhibition is the work of the British Library's artist in residence, Michael Takeo Magruder, who has been collaborating with BL Labs since 2016, transforming digitised 19th century urban maps into fantastic installations. We will post more about the exhibition next week, so watch this space. The exhibition will run until 14th July and is free to visit.
You can learn about Michael's residency through British Library Labs here (six minute video):
To launch the public opening of the exhibition, Michael is giving a talk about his work on the evening of Friday 5th April at the British Library (18:45 - 20:00). The talk is free but you need to book a place. On the same evening, we are hosting a Late at the Library Algorave in the British Library atrium (19:00 - 23:00) where algorave artists will live-code music and visuals, writing code sequences generating algorithmic beats beneath the iconic Kings’ Library Tower. The event is curated by the audio-visual artist, Coral Manton, in collaboration with the British Library Events team, BL Labs, Digital Scholarship, and the Alan Turing Institute.
Coral is a Research Affiliate of the British Library. She's interested in the aesthetics of stored knowledge and exploring this in VR. She led a research project with the EThOS team exploring multimedia research in UK PhD theses and future multimodal theses. This project was cited in the AHRC Academic Book of the Future Report and in multiple academic publications.
Back in November 2017, Coral and Joanne Armitage rounded off the BL Labs Symposium with a mini algorave. We didn't record ourselves raving, but you can find our more about the algorave scene and what live coding is in Coral and Joanne's short presentation from the symposium here:
See here for a post about more details about the Algorave artists who are playing at the Algorave Late event, and about the Imaginary Cities exhibition on this blog soon.
This guest blog is by Jennie Grimshaw on behalf of her team who were the BL Labs Staff Award runners up for 2018.
The UK Legal Deposit Web Archive (LDWA) contains terabytes of data harvested from the UK web domain. It has a public search interface at https://webarchive.org.uk/ , but finding individual documents in what is in effect a vast unstructured dataset is challenging. The analogy of looking for a needle in a haystack comes to mind as being entirely appropriate.
The Digital Documents Harvesting and Processing Tool (DDHAPT) was designed to overcome the problem of finding individual known documents in the LDWA. It is an adaptation of the web archiving software that enables selectors to set up regular in-depth crawls of target, document heavy websites. The system then extracts new pdfs published since its previous visit from the target websites and presents them to the selector in a list with the most recent at the top:
The selector can then view an image of the document on the screen by clicking on the title. If the document is in scope, basic metadata is created by completing an on-screen form. If the document doesn’t make the grade for the creation of an individual record, it can be removed from the list of new documents for selection by clicking on the green Ignore button on the right of the screen.
The metadata we create records the title and subtitle, publication year and publisher, edition, series, personal and corporate authors and ISBN (if present). Some fields such as title, publication year and publisher are automatically populated. A broad subject heading is assigned from a pick list. Our aim is to create a “good enough” record that can stand without upgrading by the digital cataloguers, avoiding double handling.
To save time and avoid transcription errors system allows the selector to highlight information in the document such as personal author, publisher, series title or ISBN. You then mouse up, which calls up a list of fields. Clicking on the appropriate field automatically transfers the data into it.
Once the metadata has been created, the selector clicks on a submit button which starts the process of loading it into the British Library catalogue and the catalogues of the other five legal deposit libraries – the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and Trinity College Dublin. The document remains in the Legal Deposit Web Archive. Its URL in the web archive is recorded in the metadata and creates the link between the document and its catalogue record. Readers who find the record in the British Library’s public catalogue or those of any of the legal deposit libraries can then click on the “I want this” button and view the document on screen.
The DDHAPT is currently being used to monitor the publications of Westminster government departments and help us ensure that future generations of researchers can reliably access known official documents via the catalogues of the six legal deposit libraries. However, we intend to extend its use to cover the output of other non-commercial publishers such as campaigning charities, think tanks, academic research centres, and pressure groups as a way of making their archived publications easily discoverable.
Normally material collected under the non-print legal deposit regulations can only be viewed by law on the premised on one of the six legal deposit libraries. However, the Libraries have negotiated licences with the UK government and many other non-commercial online publishers that allow us to make their archived websites and the documents on them open and available remotely. These licences lift non-print legal deposit restrictions and allow us to make the documents covered by them available 24/7 from anywhere in the world.
In these ways the DDHAPT improves the discoverability of non-commercially published documents collected under non-print legal deposit, facilitates metadata creation through auto-population of some fields, and avoids double handling through creation of good quality metadata at the point of selection.
Watch the Digital Documents Harvester team receiving their award and talking about their project on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 8.15 to 14.45):
Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.
This guest blog was written by David Zvi Kalman on behalf of the team that received the runner up award in the 2018 BL Labs Commercial category.
The bentsher is a strange book, both invisible and highly visible. It is not among the more well known Jewish books, like the prayerbook, Hebrew Bible, or haggadah. You would be hard pressed to find a general-interest bookstore selling a copy. Still, enter the house of a traditional Jew and you’d likely find at least a few, possibly a few dozen. In Orthodox communities, the bentsher is arguably the most visible book of all.
Bentshers are handbooks containing the songs and blessings, including the Grace after Meals, that are most useful for Sabbath and holiday meals, as well as larger gatherings. They are, as a rule, quite small. These days, bentshers are commonly given out as party favors at Jewish weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs, since meals at those events require them anyway. Many bentshers today have personalized covers relating the events at which they were given.
Bentshers have never gone out of print. By this I mean that printing began with the invention of the printing press and has never stopped. They are small, but they have always been useful. Seder Oneg Shabbos, the version which I designed, was released 500 years after the first bentsher was published. It is, in a sense, a Half Millennium Anniversary Special Edition.
Bentshers, like other Jewish books, could be quite ornate; some were written and illustrated by hand. Over the years, however, bentshers have become less and less interesting, largely in order to lower the unit cost. In order to make it feasible for wedding planners to order hundreds at a time, all images were stripped from the books, the books themselves became very small, and any interest in elegant typography was quickly eliminated. My grandfather, who designed custom covers for wedding bentshers, simply called the book, “the insert.” Custom prayerbooks were no different from custom matchbooks.
This particular bentsher was created with the goal of bucking this trend; I attempted to give the book the feel of the some of the Jewish books and manuscripts of the past, using the research I was able to gather a graduate student in the field of Jewish history. Doing this required a great deal of image research; for this, the British Library’s online resources were incredible valuable. Of the more than one hundred images in the book, a plurality are from the British Library’s collections.
In addition to its visual element, this bentsher differs from others in two important ways. First, it contains ritual languages that is inclusive of those in the LGBTQ community, and especially for those conducting same-sex weddings. In addition, the book contains songs not just in Hebrew, but in Yiddish, as well; this was a homage to two Yiddishists who aided in creating the bentsher’s content. The bentsher was first used at their wedding.
Watch David accepting the runner up award and talking about the Seder Oneg Shabbos Bentsher on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 5.33 to 7.26):
David Zvi Kalman was responsible for the book’s design, including the choice of images. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on the relationship between Jewish history and the history of technology. Sarah Wolf is a specialist in rabbinics and is an assistant professor at the Jewish Theology Seminary of America. Joshua Schwartz is a doctoral student at New York University, where he studies Jewish mysticism. Sarah and Joshua were responsible for most of the books translations and transliterations. Yocheved and Yudis Retig are Yiddishists and were responsible for the book’s Yiddish content and translations.
Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.
On 7th February 2019, the Imaging Team from the British Library Qatar National Library Partnership drew up the blinds in the studio and turned it into an artist’s workshop once again for our second Hack Day. The team produced their Hack ideas and responded creatively to the collection items we are digitising and uploading to the Qatar Digital Library under the theme of International Women’s Day. Taking place on 8th March, we worked a month in advance in order to ensure our ideas could develop and be ready to share in time. International Women’s Day is celebrated globally and aims to end worldwide discrimination. The day is also dedicated to celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women now and in the past.
To advertise the Hack Day, Hannah Nagle produced a leaflet and two posters that superimposed information about the upcoming day onto images of items from the collection. The posters included details about the Prep Session on 24th January. This was a productive meeting where we were able to give informal presentations to our colleagues on the project and staff from the wider library. It allowed us to exchange ideas, receive feedback and talk about possible collaborations between staff (while also feasting on Hack Snacks provided by Sotirios Alpanis).
In the final run up to 7th February, clear themes and patterns in our approach had already begun to emerge. As you will see below, many of us wanted to bring light to stories about women, empower the photographs of women who will forever remain nameless and bring focus to the idea of gender within the collection.
The Hacks
Both Rebecca Harris and Daniel Loveday created visuals to be used on social media platforms to replace profile pictures and banners during the build up to International Women’s Day. Dan used the International Women’s Day logo to create a GIF. Within the logo it flips through portraits of women we have very little information about from the archive. ‘I thought this would be a different way to explore how to empower our nameless women.’
Rebecca created a banner and five interactive photographs. ‘Both works are intended for use on Twitter and have been designed to draw traffic back towards the Qatar Digital Library and specifically the women found within it.’ Rebecca used the application ‘Thinglink’ to create the interactive photographs seen in the screenshot below. You can also see the banner in use on the @BLQatar Twitter page: https://twitter.com/BLQatar
Jordi Clopes took a different approach and decided to focus on handwriting. Taking two letters written by Ms. Ruth Honor Hotblack, he extracted, resized and saved the individual characters to create the new and personalised ‘Ruth Honor Typography’. With some characters missing, Jordi created these in the style of Hotblack’s handwriting. Using the app ‘Calligraphr’ to create the font, Jordi wrote a piece of text and then superimposed it onto an image of an empty page from a book in the collection. You can see an example of the letters Jordi used and Jordi’s font in the images below.
‘With more time and by using another female author more prolific in the collection, a nicer font could be created and, like the ‘Ruth Honor Typography’, could be installed onto any computer to be used in text editing software like Microsoft Word and Outlook.’
India Office Records (IOR)/L/PS/12/3651 (Letters from Ruth Honor Hotblack regarding her cousin)
Hannah Nagle chose to focus on data visualisations. Using the Qatar Digital Library, she collected a set of data on the reliability of the search engine to source photographs of women. Using this information Hannah created a zine called ‘She Was Here’. Its aim is to highlight photographs of women in the collection, particularly where the search engine has not given them appropriate prominence. The zine is also a collection of experimentations on representing data in imaginative ways. These include collages and manipulating photographs to highlight the women in the photographs. The first half of the zine explores the data through graphs and statistics while the second half is a creative exploration of the photographs of unnamed women from the search results. Hannah used visual techniques to comment on the lack of information recorded about them while giving them space and focus outside of the archive.
...
Darran Murray worked with four studio portraits of enslaved women. ‘These images have no identification of who they were, where they came from, where they were enslaved, or anything about their experience. For the Hack Day I incorporated new imagery and text into these images in the hope that the images used will provoke the viewer to re-think how they consider these women.’
Our Quality Assurance Officer worked on her project ‘Sounds of the Past’, aiming to showcase the lives and songs of female singers in the Arab world. The project focuses on the singers whose songs can be found in the Qatar Digital Library’s sound archive. The application used is Esri’s ArcGIS Story Maps and helped to create a more engaging and interactive narrative with text, images, sound and videos.
Melanie Taylor developed Instagram accounts for a range of Western Women who played a significant role in the British Imperialist efforts but who don’t typically appear in traditional studies of imperial history. These women include Lady Mary Curzon (the Vicereine of India), Gertrude Bell, Violet Dickson, Lady Anne Blunt and Lady Dorothy Mills. Melanie sourced archival material like letters, journals, articles, books and photographs held in British Library collections.
‘These women each took to the practice of letter and journal writing to record their day-to-day experiences - a highly mediated activity where the author wrote with their audience in mind and constructed their texts according to how they thought their lives should appear.’ In the future, Melanie wants to include interaction between these accounts to emulate the relationships these women would have had in real life via comments and likes. Melanie also wants to consider how these women would exploit social media platforms to fulfil their own personal missions. Watch this space and follow the link for more posts from Lady Curzon: https://www.instagram.com/lady_mary_curzon/
Matt Lee’s work for both this and the previous Hack Day explored alternative ways of drawing meaning from the collection items we digitise. ‘Since our first Imaging Hack Day, my aim has been to create a range of visual typologies from elements such as stamps, typography, colours and textures. By collecting and organising visual elements by general type I hope to provide a perspective of the collection items that we otherwise would not notice.’
For the second Hack Day, Matt created images that place, in sequence, every written description or mention of gender within randomly selected collection items. The result is a visual tapestry that shows the quantity and types of words that are used in reference to gender. To differentiate between the two genders one has been inverted.
If you would like to explore the photographs and documents used in our Hack Day creations from the Qatar Digital Library or find out more about the India Office Records please follow the links below:
The Imaging Team would like to thank Ruth Thompson, Ula Zeir, Serim Abboushi, Noemi Ortega-Raventos, Matt Griffin, Rolf Killius, Louis Allday, Francis Owtram, Richard Davies, Sotirios Alpanis and Renata Kaminska for their help and support.
We're setting sail for Denmark! Along with colleagues from the UK, Austria, Belgium, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Qatar, Spain, Sweden and the USA, we will be mooring at Copenhagen's Black Diamond, waterfront home to Denmark's Royal Library, for the second International Building Library Labs event: 4-5 March 2019.
For some time now, leading national, state, university and public libraries around the world have been creating 'digital lab type environments'. The purpose of these 'laboratories' is to afford access to their institutions' digital content - the digitised and 'born digital' collections as well as data - and to provide a space where users can experiment and work with that content in creative, innovative and inspiring ways. Our shared ethos is to open up our collections for everyone: digital researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and everyone in between.
BL Labs has been running in such a capacity for six years. In September 2018, we hosted a 2-day workshop at the British Library in London for invited participants from national, state and university libraries - the first event of its kind in the world. It was a resounding success, and it was decided that we should organise a second event, this time in collaboration with our colleagues in Copenhagen.
Next week's participants, from over 30 institutions, will be sharing lessons learned, talking about innovative projects and services that have used their digital collections and data in clever ways, and continuing to establish the foundations for an international network of Library Labs. We aim to work together in the spirit of collaboration so that we can continue to build even better Library Labs for our users in the future.
Our packed programme is available to view on Eventbrite or as a Googledoc. We still have a few spaces left so if you are interested in coming along, you can still book here. As well as presentations and plenary debates, we will have eight lightning talks with topics ranging from how to handle big data to how to run a data visualisation lab. To accommodate our many delegates, with their own interests and specialisms, we will break out into 12 parallel discussion groups focusing on subjects such as how to set up a lab; how to get access to data; moving from 'project' lab to 'business as usual'; data curation; how to deal with large datasets; and using Labs & Makerspaces for data-driven research and innovation in creative industries.
We will blog again after the event, and provide links to some of the presentations and outputs. Watch this space!
Danish-themed images trawled from our British Library Flickr Images set: pages 37, 126, and 15 of Copenhagen, the Capital of Denmark, published by the Danish Tourist Society, 1898. Find the original book here.
Some of you may remember the Bangla printed books competition which took place at ICDAR2017 which generated significant interest among academic institutions and technology providers both in India and across the world. The 2017 competition set the challenge of finding an optimal solution for automating recognition of Bangla printed text and resulted in Google’s method performing best for both text detection and layout analysis.
Fast forward to 2019 and, thanks to Jadavpur University in Kolkata, we have added more ground truth transcriptions for competition entrants to train their OCR systems with. We hope that the competition encourages submissions again from cutting-edge OCR methods leading to a solution that can truly open up these historic books, dating between 1713 and 1914, for text mining, enabling scholars of South Asian studies to explore hundreds of thousands of pages on a scale that has not been possible until now.
Image showing a transcribed page from one of the Bengali books featured in the ICDAR2019 competition
As with the Arabic competition, we are collaborating with PRImA (Pattern Recognition & Image Analysis Research Lab) who will provide expert and objective evaluation of OCR results produced through the competition. The final results will be revealed at the ICDAR2019 conference in Sydney in September.
So if you missed out last time but are interested in testing your OCR systems on our books the competition is now open! For instructions of how to apply and more about the competition, please visit https://www.primaresearch.org/REID2019/
This post is by Tom Derrick, Digital Curator for Two Centuries of Indian Print, British Library. He is on Twitter as @TommyID83 and Two Centuries of Indian Print tweet from @BL_IndianPrint
I am very pleased to announce that the British Library in collaboration with PRImA (Pattern Recognition & Image Analysis Research Lab) and the Alan Turing Institute are launching the ICDAR2019 Competition on Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts.
Why are we doing this?
The British Library has a significant collection of Arabic manuscripts, among the largest in Europe and North America. These include copies of major religious, historical, literary and scientific works. As a post-digitisation step, we aim to make their contents more discoverable and usable by creating machine-readable text from scanned images. Opening up this content for full-text search and enabling text analysis at scale can revolutionise research!
What did we do last year?
In collaboration with the aforementioned partners, we launched a competition as part of the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2018). This competition was aimed at finding an optimal solution for an automatic Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts (RASM2018).
For this purpose, we provided competition participants with a ground truth set – digitised images and XML files – derived from the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership digitised collection of historical Arabic manuscripts available on the Qatar Digital Library. This set files indicated the different text regions and lines, alongside their accurate transcription. It was used to train participants’ text recognition systems to automatically identify Arabic script in other images. We supplied participants with an additional set of 85 digitised images to try this out – and then PRImA evaluated the results using objective comparative evaluation methods.
Who won?
Participants had to address one or more of these three challenges: page segmentation, text line detection and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Text lines segmentation & Text recognition: Hany Ahmed, RDI Company, Cairo University
You can read more about it in this article, published in the proceedings of ICFHR2018.
Why another competition?
The field of OCR and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) is rapidly evolving, and we would like to provide text recognition communities with a larger and more enhanced ground truth set to train their systems. Our goal is to leave the research community with the most useful dataset for developing state-of-the-art solutions for Arabic HTR.
We are also adding another challenge in the current competition! Our Arabic manuscripts provide text recognition systems with many challenges, such as varying text column widths and font sizes, different text directions, faded ink, non-rectangular text regions, decorations and much more. This time we are trying to tackle marginalia – text written in the margins of the manuscripts – which is often less standardised and legible than the main text, and frequently goes in different directions.
Now what?
We are now inviting anyone with a text recognition software to try it out with our unique Arabic material. This competition is held in the context of the 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR2019).
Here you will be able to find more information on this competition, its schedule and resources. To enter the competition please e-mail [email protected]
Organisers:
Prof Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Professor of Pattern Recognition, University of Salford and Head of (PRImA) research lab
Christian Clausner, Research Fellow at the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research lab
This guest blog is by Border Crossing, the 2018 BL Labs Teaching & Learning Award Runners Up, for their project, 'Pocahontas and After'.
Two images, each showing two young women dressed to show their culture, their pride, their sense of self. The first image dates from 1907, and shows The Misses Simeon, from the Stoney-Nakoda people of Western Canada, photographed by Byron Harmon. The second was taken in 2018 by John Cobb at Marlborough Primary School, West London, and shows a pupil of Iraqi heritage called Rose Al Saria, pictured with her sister. It was Rose who chose the particular archive image as the basis for her self-portrait, and who conceptualised the way it would be configured and posed.
This pair of photos is just one example in Border Crossings' exhibition Pocahontas and After, which was recently honoured in the British Library’s Labs Teaching and Learning category. The exhibition - which was seen by more than 20,000 people at Syon House last summer, and goes to St Andrews in February - represents the culmination of a sustained period of education and community work, beginning with the 2017 ORIGINS Festival. During the Festival, we not only held a ceremony for three indigenous women to commemorate Pocahontas at Syon, where she had stayed in the summer of 1616: we also brought indigenous artists into direct contact with the diverse communities around the House, in the two Primary Schools where they led workshops and study sessions, in the wonderful CARAS refugee group, and through our network of committed and energetic festival volunteers. In the following months, a distilled group from each of these partners worked closely with heritage experts from the archives (including the British Library’s own Dr. Philip Hatfield), Native American cultural consultants, and our own artistic staff to explore the ways in which Native American people have been presented in the past.
Their journeys into the archives were rich and challenging. What we think of as "realistic" photographs of indigenous people often turned out to be nothing of the kind. Edward Curtis, for example, apparently carried a chest of "authentic" costumes and props with him, which he used in his photographs to recreate the life of "the vanishing race" as he imagined it may have been in some pre-contact Romantic idyll. In other words, the archive photos are often about the photographer and the viewer, far more than they are about the subject.
As our volunteers came to realise this, they became more and more assertive of the need for agency in contemporary portraiture. Complex and fascinating decisions started to be made, placing the generation of meaning in the bodies of the people photographed. For example, Sebastian Oliver Wallace-Odi, who has Ghanaian heritage, saw how Ronald Mumford’s archive photo had been contrived to show “British patriotism” from First Nations chiefs, riding a car bedecked in a Union Jack, during the First World War. Philip showed him how other photos demonstrated the presence of Mounties at the shoot, emphasising the lack of agency from the subjects. Sebastian countered it with an image in which the red white and blue flag is the symbol of the London Underground where his father works, and the car, like his shirt, is distinctly African.
What I love about this exhibition is that the meaning generated does not reside in one image or the other within the pair - but is rather in the energising of the space between, the dialogue between past and present, between different cultures, between human beings portrayed in different ways. It seems to me to be at once of way of honouring the indigenous subjects portrayed in the archive photographs, and of reinventing the form that was often too reductive in its attempts to categorise them.
Watch the Border Crossing team receiving their Runner Up award and talking about their project on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 3.46 to 10.09):
Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.