Since March 2016, the Digital Scholarship Reading Group at the British Library has discussed articles, videos, podcasts, blog posts and chapters that touch on digital scholarship in libraries. I've shared our readings up to May 2018 and taken a thematic look at our readings at the intersection of digital scholarship and anti-racism in July 2020.

As the Living with Machines project draws to an end this (northern) summer, I thought I'd give an updated list of our readings since June 2018. I started including more pieces on deep learning, machine learning, AI ('artificial intelligence'), big data, data science, digital history, digitised newspapers, and user experience design for digital collections when we began discussing what became Living with Machines in early 2017. This was partly a way for me to catch up with relevant topics, and partly to lay the groundwork for LwM across the organisation. You can see that reflected in our topics up to May 2018 and onward.

Of course, the group continued to cover other topics, and sessions were suggested and/or led by colleagues including Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Annabel Gallop, Graham Jevon, Jez Cope, Lucy Hinnie, Mary Stewart, Nora McGregor, Sarah Miles, Sarah Stewart and Stella Wisdom. Especial thanks to Rossitza Atanassova and Deirdre Sullivan who’ve been helping me run the group in recent years. In 2021 we started using the January session to invite colleagues across the Library to look around and pick topics for discussion in the year ahead.

So what did we discuss from June 2018 to the end of 2022?

• 'Big Data' and Digital Collections – pick one or more of pdf, CHISpaper.pdf, Digital archives as Big data.pdf, 1461444816661553.pdf
• Access & Management for Meaningful Collections - Machine Learning & Crowdsourcing – take a look at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/secrets-of-rebel-slaves-in-barbados-will-finally-be-revealed; https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2022/02/behind-the-scenes-at-the-british-library-graham-jevon-cataloguer-for-the-endangered-archives-program.html; https://blogs.bl.uk/endangeredarchives/2021/07/help-trace-the-stories-of-enslaved-people-in-the-caribbean-using-colonial-newspapers.html
• Becoming a Desk(top) Profession: Digital Photography and the Changing Landscape of Archival Research
• Cancel Culture, Social Media & the Importance of Forgetting - listen, read or watch whatever you are able to, or just come along for the discussion! Podcast (20 mins) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08ybt8d; Short article - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527476420918828; Video (10 mins) - https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/emma-smith-forgetting-digital-age
• Citation Capture: Enhancing Understanding of the Use of Unique and Distinct Collections within Academic Research.
• Climate Change and the Digital Humanities – watch Jo Walton’s Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (appx. 6 minutes long, 24:00-30:00); Helen Hardy’s Collections & Climate (appx. 7 minutes long, 42:24-51:00). Also Digital Humanities Climate Change Manifesto – mentioned in Jo Walton’s talk; Mobilising museums for climate action toolkit – In a nutshell, pp. 4-5; UKRI targets net zero computing blog post; Communicating Climate Risk, a Toolkit – Executive summary and key messages
• Cultural Analytics - Data Cultures, Culture as Data, https://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2127/10.22148/16.035.
• Data science or data humanities? Opportunities, barriers, and rewards in digitally-led analysis of history, culture and society (in-person excursion to the Turing lecture by Melissa Terras)
• Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence
• Deepfakes and Misinformation – pick one of 'Deepfakes & Misinformation: How dangerous are deepfakes?' - a blog post from the Dutch AV museum; 'Snapshot Paper - Deepfakes and Audiovisual Disinformation'; 'How do we work together to detect AI-manipulated media?' from the Witness Media Lab
• Digital Art History and the Computational Imagination
• Digitisation & Data Sovereignty - the CARE Principles (PDF summary); The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, http://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2240/10.5334/dsj-2020-043; Working with the CARE principles: operationalising Indigenous data governance
• Digitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History
• Emerging Formats Research and Collecting - Interactive Storytelling, https://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2127/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_27
• Emerging Formats: Complex digital media and its impact on the UK Legal Deposit Libraries
• Engaging in Collaboration from Trading Zones of Digital History
• Enhanced Curation and Contextual Collections - Berendse, Z, 2020. Browsing History: Archiving Video Game Context; also Newman, J (2011) '(Not) playing games: player-produced walkthroughs as archival documents of digital gameplay'; blog post by Shu-Wen Lin: Level Up: Playing to Document and Preserve Video Games.
• Exploring the Bloodaxe Archive: a creative and critical dialogue
• George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online
• Ground Truth: In the Archives That Train Machine Learning – online excursion to a lecture at the National Archives by Kate Crawford
• How NOT to create a digital media scholarship platform: the history of the Sophie 2.0 project
• Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
• Is Santa Claus Real?
• Language Preservation & Discoverability - Bugis manuscripts and Batak manuscripts (and provenance). Also check out Equitable Access: Using Metadata to Level the Playing Field in a Multilingual Country (video, from 0:00-11:40); Challenging legacies slidedeck (Arlis 13 May 2022) – Alan Danskin, Collection Metadata Standards Manager, BL
• New Scholarship in the Digital Age: Making, Publishing, Maintaining, and Preserving Non-Traditional Scholarly Objects and Library of Congress Digital Scholarship Working Group Report
• Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers
• Open Access in Digital Scholarship - Open Humanities: Why Open Science in the Humanities is not Enough
• Oral History & COVID Collection – pick from Charlie Morgan’s Oral History Society blog post on the rapid response approach to collecting tricky remote interviews: https://www.ohs.org.uk/general-interest/when-the-crisis-fades-what-gets-left-behind/; references the excellent Eira Tansey blog post: https://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/. “First, Do No Harm”: Tread Carefully Where Oral History, Trauma, and Current Crises Intersect, Jennifer A. Cramer, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2020.1793679; collecting during COVID in this short blog post: https://oralhistoryreview.org/current-events/nhs-70-covid-19/ (Stephanie Snow and Angela Whitecross)
• Participation in heritage crowdsourcing
• Practical AI Ethics – pick one of Lessons from archives: strategies for collecting sociocultural data in machine learning or Managing Bias When Library Collections Become Data
• Queer Criticalities, Instagram, and the Ethics of Museum Display
• Reviews in Digital Humanities – pick an article that matches your interests
• Serving researchers in a self-service world
• Slow librarianship – pick one of https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2021/10/18/what-is-slow-librarianship/ or http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/the-innovation-fetish-and-slow-librarianship-what-librarians-can-learn-from-the-juicero/
• Strategies for the Curiosity‐Driven Museum Visitor
• The Consequences of Framing Digital Humanities Tools as Easy to Use
• The Equivalence of “Close” And “Distant” Reading; Or, toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History
• The Nightmare of Surveillance Capitalism
• Towards a User-Centric Evaluation of UK Non-Print Legal Deposit: A Digital Library Futures White Paper
• Triggers, Decontextualisation & Digitised Collections - pick one of On Trigger Warnings: https://www.aaup.org/report/trigger-warnings; Labeling and Rating Systems: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/labelingrating; What to Know When Watching Gone With the Wind (4 minutes 25 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DF2FKRToiQ; Digitization Selection Criteria as Anti-Racist Action: https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/14667
• User experience design for libraries – pick one of slides for 'UX, ethnography and possibilities: for Libraries, Museums and Archives' by Ned Potter https://www.slideshare.net/thewikiman/ux-ethnography-and-possibilities-for-libraries-museums-and-archives; a short overview article: 'User Experience (UX) in Libraries: Let’s Get Physical (and Digital)' by Leo Appleton https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.317/
• Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms
• Web 3 and Commercialisation of the Web. Take a look at: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/what; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3; NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This by Anil Dash https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/; Web3 Is Headed Our Way. Are Cultural Institutions On Board? https://jingculturecrypto.com/we-are-museums-wac-fellowship-web3/
• What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction? by Jo Guldi
• What is Digital Humanities? Read Ain't No Way Around It: Why We Need to Be Clear About What We Mean By “Digital Humanities” and have a look through the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences
• Where are we now? A review of research on the history of women's soccer in Ireland
• Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original ‘Superman’ Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
• You and AI – Just An Engineer: The Politics of AI (video)

This is a guest post by Natalie Lucy, a PhD student at University College London, who recently undertook a British Library placement to work on a project Mapping Caribbean Diasporic Networks through the correspondence of Andrew Salkey.

Project Objectives

The project, supervised by curators Eleanor Casson and Stella Wisdom, focussed on the extensive correspondence contained within Andrew Salkey’s archive. One of the initial objectives was to digitally depict the movement of key Caribbean writers and artists, as it is evidenced within the correspondence, many of whom travelled between Britain and the Caribbean as well as the United States, Central and South America and Africa. Although Salkey corresponded with a diverse range of people, we therefore focused on the letters in his archive which were from Caribbean writers and academics and which illustrated  patterns of movement of the Caribbean diaspora. Much of the correspondence stems from 1960s and 1970s, a time when Andrew Salkey was particularly active both in the Caribbean Artists Movement and, as a writer and broadcaster, at the BBC.

Photograph of Andrew Salkey

Andrew Salkey was unusual not only for the panoply of writers, artists and politicians with whom he was connected, but that he sustained those relationships, carefully preserving the correspondence which resulted from those networks. My personal interest in this project stemmed from the fact that my PhD seeks to consider the ways that the Caribbean trickster character, Anancy, has historically been reinvented to say something about heritage and identity. Significant to that question was the way that the Caribbean Artists Movement, a dynamic group of artists and writers formed in London in the mid-1960s, and of which Andrew Salkey was a founder, appropriated Anancy, reasserting him and the folktales to convey something of a literary ‘voice’ for the Caribbean. For this reason, I was also interested in the writing networks which were evidenced within the correspondence, together with their impact.

What is Gephi?

Prior to starting the project, Eleanor, who had catalogued the Andrew Salkey archive and Digital Curator, Stella, had identified Gephi as a possible software application through which to visualise this data. Gephi has been used in a variety of projects, including several at Harvard University, examples of the breadth and diversity of those initiatives can be found here. Several of these projects have social networks or historical trading routes as their focus, with obvious parallels to this project. Others notably use correspondence as their main data.

Gathering the Data

Andrew Salkey was known as something of a chronicler. He was interested in letters and travel and was also a serious collector of stamps. As such, he had not only retained the majority of the letters he received but categorised them. Eleanor had originally identified potential correspondents who might be useful to the project, selecting writers who travelled widely, whose correspondence had been separately stored by Salkey, partly because of its volume, and who might be of wider interest to the public. These included the acclaimed Caribbean writers, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Jan Carew and Edward Kamau Brathwaite and publishers and political activists, Jessica and Eric Huntley.

Our initial intention was to limit the data to simple facts which could easily be gleaned from the letters. Gephi required that we did so on a spreadsheet ,which had to conform to a particular format. In the first stages of the project, the data was confined to the dates and location of the correspondence, information which could suggest the patterns of movement within the diaspora. However, the letters were so rich in detail, that we ultimately recorded other information. This included any additional travel taken by any of the correspondents,  and which was clearly evidenced in the letters, together with any passages from the correspondence which demonstrated either something of the nature and quality of the friendships or, alternatively, the mutual benefit of those relationships to the careers of so many of the writers.

Creating a visual network

Dr Duncan Hay was invited to collaborate with me on this project, as he has considerable expertise in this field, his research interests include web mapping for culture and heritage and data visualisation for literary criticism.  After the initial data was collated, we discussed with Duncan what visualisations could be created. It became apparent early on that creating a visualisation of the social networks, as opposed to the patterns of movement, might be relatively straightforward via Gephi, an application which was particularly useful for this type of graph. I had prepared a spreadsheet but, Gephi requires the data to be presented in a strictly consistent way which meant that any anomalies had to be eradicated and the data effectively ‘cleaned up’ using Open Refine. Gephi also requires that information is presented by way of a system of ‘nodes’; ‘edges’  and ‘attributes’ with corresponding spreadsheet columns. In our project, the ‘nodes’ referred to Andrew Salkey and each of the correspondents and other individuals of interest who were specifically referred to within the correspondence. The edges referred to the way that those people were connected which, in this case, was through correspondence. However, what added to the potential of the project was that these nodes and edges could be further described by reference to ‘attributes.’ The possibility of assigning a range of ‘attributes’ to each of the correspondents allowed a wealth of additional information to be provided about the networks. As a consequence, and in order to make any visualisation as informative as possible, I also added brief biographical information for each of the writers and artists to be inputted as ‘attributes’ together with some explanation of the nature of the networks that were being illustrated.

The visual illustration below shows not only the quantity of letters from the sample of correspondents to Andrew Salkey (the pink lines),  but also shows which other correspondents formed part of those networks and were referenced as friends or contacts within specific items of correspondence. For example, George Lamming references academic, Rex Nettleford and writer and activist, Claudia Jones, the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival, in his correspondence, connections which are depicted in grey. 

Gephi: Andrew Salkey correspondence network

The aim was, however, for the visualisation to also be interactive. This required considerable further manipulation of the format and tools. In this illustration you can see the information that is revealed about the prominent Barbadian writer, George Lamming which, in an interactive format, can be accessed via the ‘i’ symbols beside many of the nodes coloured in green.  

Whilst Gephi was a useful tool with which to illustrate the networks, it was less helpful as a way to demonstrate the patterns of movement, one of the primary objectives of the project. A challenge was, therefore, to create a map which could be both interactive and illustrative of the specific locations of the correspondents as well as their movement over time. With Duncan’s input and expertise, we opted for a hybrid approach, utilising two principal ways to illustrate the data: we used Gephi to create a visualisation of the ‘networks’ (above) and another software tool, Kepler.gl, to show the diasporic movement.

A static version of what ultimately will be a ‘moving’ map (illustrating correspondence with reference to person, date and location) is shown below. As well as demonstrating patterns of movement, it should also be possible to access information about specific letters as well as their shelf numbers through this map, hopefully making the archive more accessible.

Patterns of diasporic movement from Andrew Salkey's correspondence, illustrated in Kepler.gl

Whilst we are still exploring the potential of this project and how it might intersect with other areas of research and archives, it has already revealed something of the benefits of this type of data visualisation. For example, a project of this type could be used as an educational tool, providing something of a simple, but dynamic, introduction to the Caribbean Artists Movement. Being able to visualise the project has also allowed us to input information which confirms where specific letters of interest might be found within the archive. Ultimately, it is hoped that the project will offer ways to make a rich, yet arguably undervalued, archive more accessible to a wider audience with the potential to replicate something of an introductory model, or ‘pilot’ for further archives in the future. 

Don’t forget to register for the 2023 BL Labs Symposium (https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oAApT1laSFSCm28Kyfz4bA)

Following the latest advancements in AI is almost a job in itself. The constant excitement sometimes feels almost bewildering, and it leaves us a little room to really get stuck into peculiarities and joys of data and AI methods and tools emerging in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM). For the second part of the BL Labs Symposium this year, we will be looking to spend some time with the examples of real data, tools and methods emerging in the GLAM AI world.

We will start our Data and AI session with an exciting presentation by Yannis Assael from Deep Mind. Yannis will show us Ithaca, the first Deep Neural Network interactive interface built to restore and attribute ancient Greek inscriptions. We expect this to be a real game changer for the use of AI for the collections that include complex and incomplete fragments of text.

We will also explore some British Library examples of AI and machine learning, mainly using the examples of data derived from our newspaper and map collections. Kalle Westerling will reflect on the latest from the Living with Machines project, this is a ground-breaking research collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL, King’s College). Gethin Rees will tell us about his work that is engaging public with geospatial data and in the process improving our capabilities to locate national collections.

BL Labs are dedicated to opening up the British Library’s data, especially for all researchers who want to use it for different types of computational research. This remains a daunting task. But we have been working on it! Silvija Aurylaite, BL Labs Manager, will share the BL Labs direction of travel, including sharing our new BL Labs website in Beta. The site will be live for the first time, with the Symposium audience kicking off our testing and engagement phase.

We hope that this session will give us some time to share and reflect on the ongoing AI work in GLAM with all its excitement, challenges and opportunities. All going well, there may be even a chance to get your hands on some new datasets.

We hope you can join us at the BL Labs Symposium on Thursday 30 March 2023. For the full programme, and further information on all our speakers, please read our earlier blog post. We are also delighted to be going ahead with an informal drinks and networking drop in session at the Library between 6.30pm and 7.30pm and you are all most welcome to join us. Register for this and / or the Symposium here. 

One half of the 2023 British Library Labs Symposium will be dedicated to digital storytelling. This has been a significant part of BL Labs work over the years; we have collaborated with experimental artists from David Normal’s creative reuse of British Library Flickr images for his giant lightbox collage Crossroads of Curiosity installation at the 2014 Burning Man festival, to working with first runner up in the BL Labs 2016 competition Michael Takeo Magruder on his 2019 exhibition Imaginary Cities.

Crossroads of Curiosity by David Normal

In the last few years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic disruption, digital stories and engagement have become mainstream across the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector. New types of digital storytelling mixing social media, online exhibitions embedding narratives and digital objects, and interactive online events reaching entirely new audiences, delighted us all. However, we also discovered that there can be a saturation point with online engagement, and that many digital developments have some way to go to reach their full potential.

As we are hopefully entering healthier times, new opportunities to mix virtual and physical worlds are starting to open up. With this in mind, we felt that this is the right moment to explore a new age of digital storytelling at the 2023 BL Labs Symposium.

The idea is to explore what is changing in the world of technological possibilities and how they are continuing to develop. We have envisaged a journey that will take us from the big picture of the arising digital possibilities to more specific examples from the British Library’s work. In true BL Labs spirit we will also celebrate initiatives that creatively reuse the Library’s digital collections.

To help us look into the big trends, we are delighted to be joined by Zillah Watson, whose extraordinary breath of experience working with BBC, Meta, BFI and Royal Shakespeare Company amongst many others, will help us to get a deeper sense of the opportunities of virtual reality (VR). Zillah will look into what it means, not just to be dazzled with technological possibilities, but also to enter the magic of storytelling.

Talking of magic, we are lucky to welcome award winning Director, Anrick Bregman, and award winning Producer, Grace Baird. Anrick and Grace will take us deeper into the potential of using VR to uncover hidden stories. Anrick’s film A Convict Story is an interactive VR project built on British Library data that brings to life a story discovered by the linking of data from centuries ago, using data research powered by machine learning.

Even closer to home, our own Stella Wisdom and Ian Cooke, will talk about their current work on curating the British Library’s forthcoming Digital Storytelling exhibition (2 June – 15 October 2023), which will explore the ways technology provides opportunities to transform and enhance the way writers write and readers engage. Drawing on the Library’s collection of contemporary digital publications and emerging formats to highlight the work of innovative and experimental writers. It will feature interactive works that invite and respond to user input, reading experiences influenced by data feeds, and immersive story worlds created using multiple platforms and audience participation. This is an exciting development, as we can see how earlier British Library creative digital experiments, collaborations and research projects are building into an exhibition in its own right.

We hope you can join us for discussion at the BL Labs Symposium on Thursday 30 March 2023. For the full programme, and further information on all our speakers, please read our earlier blog post.

 You can book your place here. 

If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, this event is for you.

The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support GLAM organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories.

We had the first event in Edinburgh, in-person, hosted by the National Museums Scotland on 31 January. An online training event followed this on 8 March tailored on the basis of audience feedback in Edinburgh.

Our third training event will be in-person, the University of York will kindly host us in York on Thursday, 23 March 2023.

Photograph by Jonas Kakaroto from Pexels

Who is this training for?

We invite everyone who are working in cultural heritage or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

What will you learn?

This one-day training session is designed as a starting point to a broader set of knowledge that will help you to:

• Understand research landscape in cultural heritage organisations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.
• Lay foundation for repository services including stakeholder engagement, policy development, technical overview and project planning.
• Adopt common principles and frameworks, technical standards and requirements in establishing repository services in a cultural heritage organisation.
• Explore basics of the scholarly communications ecosystem in the context of cultural heritage practices.

Prerequisites

No previous knowledge of the topic is required. However, an understanding of open access will maximise the benefit of the taught content for attendees.

Programme

10: 30  Welcome and introductions

11:00   Session 1 Opening up heritage research

This session covers the topics of understanding the research landscape in GLAM organisations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and frameworks.

11:45   Break time

12:00   Workshop

12:30   Lunch

13:30   Session 2 Getting started with heritage GLAM repositories

This session covers the topics on role of repository infrastructure in open access to heritage research and positioning research repositories in an organisation including policy and development.

14:15   Break time

14:30   Session 3: Realising and expanding the benefits

This module covers technical overview and requirements for running a cultural heritage repository including an overview of BL’s Shared Research Repository, platforms and software, content administration, technical features. 

15:15   Closing remarks

15:30   Closure

Book your place

In-person sessions are planned for a maximum of 35 people per event and registrants from cultural heritage institutions will be prioritised. Registration for the event is free. Please fill this form to book your place by 20th March. Confirmation and event details will be sent to the registered email address.

Members of the Research Infrastructure Services Team at the British Library will be delivering the training programme. The team has over ten years of broad experience and extensive knowledge in supporting open scholarship across the sector and with international partners. They also provide a Shared Research Repository Service for cultural heritage organisations.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or comments about this training programme.

British Library digitised image from BL Flickr Collection - When Life is Young: a collection of verse for boys and girls by Mary Elizabeth Dodge

The BL Labs Symposium 2023 is taking place on Thursday 30^th March as an online webinar.

This year we will be exploring two themes – digital storytelling and innovative uses of data and AI. As always, we are aiming to hear from some guest speakers, as well as showcase the recent work using the British Library digital collections. The programme also include an update of BL Labs, including our new website and services.

We hope this will spark many further ideas and collaborations.

The full programme for the BL Labs Symposium is as follows:

14.00 – Welcome

Part 1: Digital Storytelling

14.05 – How to bring the magic of VR to audiences – Zillah Watson

14.15 – There Exists – A VR experience about hidden narratives – Anrick Bregman and Grace Baird

14.25 – Curating a Digital Storytelling exhibition – Stella Wisdom and Ian Cooke

14.35 – Panel Q&A

15.00 – In Memoriam Maurice Nicholson

15.05 – Break

15.15 – BL Labs Update – Silvija Aurylaite

Part 2 – Data and AI

15.35 - Ithaca: Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks - Yannis Assael

15.45 – Living with Machines: Using digitised newspaper collections from the British Library in a data science project – Kalle Westerling

15.55 – Locating a National Collections through audience research. How cultural heritage organisations can engage the public using geospatial data – Gethin Rees

16.05 – Panel Q&A

16.30 – END

You can register for the BL Labs Symposium here.

We are currently planning an evening networking session at the British Library, starting at 18.30 for those who can join us in London. We are aware of the train strike planned for this day, so will confirm details nearer the time.

Below are a few details about our speakers:

Zillah Watson	Zillah Watson Zillah Watson led the BBC's award winning VR studio, winning a host of awards at festivals around the world, including an Emmy nomination. She led pioneering work taking VR to audiences in libraries around the UK. She now consults on the metaverse, and content and audience growth strategies for organisations including Meta, London & Partners, the BFI, International News Media Association, Arts Council England, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She's had a long and varied media career, including 20 years at the BBC, where she was a TV and radio current affairs journalist, head of editorial standards for BBC Radio and led R&D research on future content. She is a lecturer at UCL and the new London Interdisciplinary School. She recently co-founded Phase Space, a tech for good start-up to use VR to support mental health for students and young people.
Anrick Bregman	Anrick Bregman Anrick is director and founder of an R&D studio that explores the future of spatial immersive storytelling by creating experiences built with virtual and augmented reality, computer vision and machine learning. His mission is to find new and interesting ways to merge technology with meaningful narratives which explore the human experience.
Grace Baird	Grace Baird Grace is a Producer with twelve years' experience working on audience-centred projects in the Arts, TV, and Immersive industries. She is experienced in immersive and digital production and distribution, particularly entertainment content. Grace has produced a variety of innovative projects including site-specific installations, an interactive feature-film, and social-VR experiences.
Stella Wisdom	Stella Wisdom Stella is Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections at the British Library. Promoting creative and innovative reuse of digital collections, encouraging game making and digital storytelling in libraries, including collaborating widely with The National Videogame Museum, AdventureX, International Games Month in Libraries, the New Media Writing Prize and on research projects with University College London’s Institute of Education and Lancaster University. Stella research interests also explore the archiving of complex born digital material, examining methods for the collection, preservation and curation of narrative apps, digital comics and interactive fiction.
Ian Cooke	Ian Cooke Ian is Head of Contemporary British Publications at the British Library. He has worked in academic and research libraries with a focus on 20th and 21st-century history and social sciences. His interests are in the role of publishing in contemporary communications, and the everyday experience and expression of politics.
Silvija Aurylaite	Silvija Aurylaite Silvija Aurylaite is BL Labs Manager. She previously worked on the British Library Heritage Made Digital Programme. Her interests and domain of expertise include copyright, curation of digital collections of museums, archives and libraries, data science, design, creativity and social entrepreneurship. Previously, she was an initiator of a new publishing project Public Domain City that aimed to bring a new life into curious & obscure historical books on science, technology and nature. She also organized a retrospective dance film festival Dance in Film, Choreography, Body and Image, and media dance educational activities at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius.
Yannis Assael	Yannis Assael Dr. Yannis Assael is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind working on Artificial Intelligence, and he is featured in Forbes' "30 Under 30" distinguished scientists of Europe. In 2013, he graduated from the Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, and with full scholarships, he did an MSc at the University of Oxford, finishing first in his year, and an MRes at Imperial College London. In 2016, he returned to Oxford for a DPhil degree with a Google DeepMind scholarship, and after a series of research breakthroughs and entrepreneurial activities, he started as a researcher at Google DeepMind. His contributions range from audio-visual speech recognition to multi-agent communication and AI for culture and the study of damaged ancient texts. Throughout this time, his research has attracted the media's attention several times, has been featured on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, and focuses on contributing to and expanding the greater good.
Kalle Westerling	Kalle Westerling Dr Kalle Westerling is a Digital Humanities Research Software Engineer with Living with Machines, a collaboration between the British Library, the Alan Turing Institute, and researchers from a range of UK universities. Kalle holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), where he visualised and analysed networks of itinerant nightlife performers around New York City in the 1930s. Prior to joining the British Library, Kalle managed the Scholars program at HASTAC and the Digital Humanities Research Institute at CUNY, both efforts across higher education institutions in the United States, aiming to build nation-wide infrastructures and communities for digital humanities skill-building.
Gethin Rees	Gethin Rees Gethin’s role at the British Library includes helping to manage the non-print legal deposit of digital maps and coordinating the Georeferencer crowd-sourcing project. He is interested in helping research projects to get the most out of geospatial data and tools and was principal investigator of the AHRC-funded Locating a National Collection project. Before taking up his current position in 2018 he worked on two collaborative history projects funded by the ERC and as a software developer. His PhD in archaeology from University of Cambridge made use of Geographical Information Systems for spatial analysis and data management.

In January James Baker and I visited the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, who are the US partner of the Legacies of catalogue descriptions collaboration. The visit had to be postponed several times due to the pandemic, so we were delighted to finally meet in person with Cindy Roman, our counterpart at Yale. The main reason for the trip was to disseminate the findings of our project by running workshops on tools for computational analysis of catalogue data and delivering talks about Researching the Histories of Cataloguing to (Try to) Make Better Metadata. Two of these events were kindly hosted by Kayla Shipp, Programme Manager of the fabulous Franke Family Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab).

(left to right) Cindy Roman, Rossitza Atanassova, James Baker and Kayla Shipp in the Yale Digital Humanities Lab

This was my first visit to Yale University campus, so I took the opportunity to explore its iconic library spaces, including the majestic Sterling Memorial Library building, a masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture, and the world renowned Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, whose glass tower inspired the Kings’ Library Tower at the British Library. As well as being amazing hubs for learning and research, the Library buildings and exhibition spaces are also open to public visitors. At the time of my visit I explored the early printed treasures on display at the Beinecke Library, the exhibit about Martin Luther King Jr’s connection with Yale and the splendid display of highlights from Yale’s Slavic collections, including Vladimir Nabokov’s CV for a job application to Yale and a family photo album that belonged to the Romanovs.

Outside Yale's Stirling Memorial Library

A real highlight of my visit was the day I spent at the Lewis Walpole Library (LWP), located in Farmington, about 40 miles from the Yale campus. The LWP is a research centre of eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole. The collections including important holdings of British prints and drawings were donated to Yale by Wilmarth and Annie Lewis in 1970s, together with several eighteenth-century historic buildings and land.

Prior to my arrival James had conducted archival research with the catalogues of the LWP satirical prints collections, a case study for our project. As well as visiting the modern reading room to take a look at the printed card catalogues many in hand of Mrs Lewis, we were given a tour of Mr and Mrs Lewis’ house which is now used for classes, workshops and meetings. I enjoyed meeting the LWP staff and learned much about the history of the place, the collectors' lives and LWP current initiatives.

The Root House which houses residential fellows

 

Thomas Curricomp House

 

The Cowles House, where Mr and Mrs Lewis lived

 

The two project events I was involved with took place at the Yale DH Lab. During the interactive workshop, Yale Library, faculty and students worked through the training materials on using AntConc for computational analysis and performed a number of tasks with the LWP satirical prints descriptions. There were discussions about the different ways of querying the data and the suitability of this tool for use with non-European languages and scripts. It was great to hear that this approach could prove useful for querying and promoting Yale’s own open access metadata.

 

James presenting at the workshop about AntConc

Rossitza presenting her research with incunabula catalogue descriptions

 

The talks addressed the questions around cataloguing labour and curatorial voices, the extent to which computational analysis enables new research questions and can assist practitioners with remedial work involving collections metadata. I spoke about my current RLUK fellowship project with the British Library incunabula descriptions and in particular the history of cataloguing, the process to output text data and some hypotheses to be tested through computational analysis. The following discussion raised questions about the effort that goes into this type of work and the need to balance a greater user access to library and archival collections with the very important considerations about the quality and provenance of metadata.

During my visit I had many interesting conversations with Yale Library staff, Nicole Bouché, Daniel Lovins, Daniel Dollar, and caught up with folks I had met at the 2022 IIIF Conference, Tripp Kirkpatrick, Jon Manton and Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass. I was curious to learn about recent organisational changes aimed to unify the Yale special collections and enhance digital access via IIIF metadata; the new roles of Director of Computational Data and Methods in charge of the DH Lab and Cultural Heritage Data Engineer to transform Yale data into LOUD.

This has been a truly informative and enjoyable visit and my special thanks go to Cindy Roman and Kayla Shipp who hosted my visit and project events at the start of a busy term and to James for the opportunity to work with him on this project.

This blogpost is by Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator for Digitisation, British Library. She is on Twitter @RossiAtanassova  and Mastodon @[email protected]

If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, then save Wednesday 8 March in your diaries and register for an online repository training session for cultural heritage professionals.

This is the second event in the British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals, which is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support GLAM organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the development of this training programme in an earlier blog post.

Our first event was delivered in-person, in Edinburgh hosted by the National Museum of Scotland on 31 January 2023. This provided the audience with a starting point to a broader set of knowledge in the areas of open scholarship. Attendees had diverse backgrounds and roles such as library manager, collections manager, research manager, research coordinator, repository staff, curatorial staff and collaborative PhD students in cultural heritage organisations. The event created a forum to discuss different aspects of research activities, challenges and opportunities to build openness in GLAM research and sharing research outputs.  

Group photo from The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals, National Museum of Scotland, 31 January 2023.

Our upcoming online session on 8 March is designed as a follow up from the initial in-person event to explore some of the topics further, identified by the attendees in Edinburgh. Topics include but are not limited to research activities in GLAM, benefits of research repositories, persistent identifiers, research data management, copyright and rights management. It is intended for those who are working in cultural heritage or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

The event will take place from 14:00 to 17:00 on Wednesday 8 March. Please register at this link to receive your access details for this online session, the programme will be displayed on the booking form. 

Photos taken at an earlier workshop for The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals, National Museum of Scotland, 31 January 2023.

Our next in-person event will be held on Thursday 23 March in York, hosted by the University of York. It will be an update and re-run of the first face-to-face event in Edinburgh. More information about the programme will be provided in a couple of weeks but registration is open for those who would like to join us there.

Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or comments about this training programme.