LIBER DH Working Group Workshop: Raising Awareness by Neil Fitzgerald
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This presentation was given as part of the Digital Humanities workshop at LIBER 2017, Patras. For more about LIBER and the Digital Humanities Working Group, please see: www.libereurope.eu
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LIBER DH Working Group Workshop: Raising Awareness by Neil Fitzgerald
- 1. LIBER DH: Raising Awareness Neil Fitzgerald Head of Digital Research
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 Six core purposes Custodianship – we build, curate and preserve the UK’s national collection of published, written and digital content Research – we support and stimulate research of all kinds Business – we help business to innovate and grow Culture – we engage everyone with memorable cultural experiences Learning – we inspire young people and learners of all ages International – we work with partners around the world to advance knowledge and mutual understanding
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 Digital Scholarship •Digital Curators •BL Labs •Endangered Archives Programme •THOR, DataCite •Digitisation
- 4. www.bl.uk 4 Current courses: 101 This is Digital Scholarship 103 Digitisation at the BL 105 Crowdsourcing in GLAM 107 Data Visualisation 108 Geo-referencing & Digital Mapping 116 Metadata at the British Library 118 Cleaning up Data Skills: digital scholarship training programme
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 Help people succeed: Articulate learning outcomes, expected results for exercises Provide clear, printable instructions No more than 15 people in hands-on courses Allow time for all to complete exercises Build in optional activities for advanced participants Training: lessons learnt Participants like: Hands-on, practical exercises Time to explore innovative digital projects Trying new tools, particularly with BL or similar collections Case studies and real world examples The expertise and enthusiasm of instructors Meeting colleagues and learning about BL projects
- 6. www.bl.uk 6
- 7. www.bl.uk 7
- 8. www.bl.uk 8 Releasing open data From ancient manuscripts to web archives, as RDF/XML, CSV, TIFF/JPEG, MARC21, PDF, 3D...
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map-winners-announced/ Competitions BL Labs Awards: recognises Research, Commercial, Artistic, Teaching/Learning work with digital collections BL Labs Competition: winners work with Labs team to make their digital scholarship project idea a reality http://labs.bl.uk
- 10. www.bl.uk 10 "I was able to do in minutes with a python code what I'd spent the last ten years trying to do by hand!" -Dr. Katrina Navickas' Political Meetings Mapper, BL Labs 2015 Importance of case studies
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 Get out there: BL Labs Roadshows
- 12. www.bl.uk 12 Tertiary student projects
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 Thank you Email: digitalresearch@bl.uk Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ Twitter: @BL_DigiSchol
Editor's Notes
- The Digital Scholarship team was set up in 2010 to enable innovative research with the Library’s digital collections and data. It is a cross-disciplinary group supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections. We might help negotiate copyright for a researcher, collaborate on a funding bid, work with university students on collections-based projects, consult on making digitised data available online, advise on computational methods to suit a curator or researcher's needs and discuss exhibition spaces. We also devise and run training courses, write blog posts and run events as well as doing talks like this. BL Labs Mellon-funded. Interesting dynamic - able to move more quickly than the rest of the library, their 'brand' is able to push things further than other departments, ask 'what if'. We're seated together, work closely together to support each other's work. EAP - hugely important work digitising international heritage at risk.
- Staff across all collection areas need to be familiar with the foundational concepts, methods and tools of digital scholarship in order to support it. The programme is the result of an extensive consultation exercise and survey of the digital scholarship landscape to determine what defines the practice today and the skills we need to facilitate digital research, particularly digital humanities research. Began 2012, updated 2016.
- Pre-course Post-course
- Two hours, once a month. Finding tutorials and working through them is a form of horizon scanning, feeds back into training programme. Allows us to be more responsive to requests for specific training. Hack and yack is a play on old digital humanities debate about whether DH scholars need to code or not... We say, both are good. LHS image is from session where we tried data mining tools on images - results actually pretty good, but lots of guesswork.
- DS reading group to help us keep up and as a way to involve people who want more discussion on the implications of digital scholarship. Helps us get to know interested people in other departments and forces us to make time to read in-depth. Image used in posters part of setting the tone - informal, quirky. Discussion really enjoyable. Can't choose anything too long as people probably won't get through it, mightn't come. #image credit ?
- Collecting together datasets under data.bl.uk. Lots of different projects - images on Wikimedia Commons, Flickr Commons; linked open data with BBC Research and Education Space, British National Bibliography; OCR text and digital images from data portal; UK web archive, thesis data, research datasets... Support computational, data-driven research.
- Competitions seem effective way to motivate participation - time-limited, clear expectations re what to submit, clear rewards and recognition. Off the Map, run by colleague Stella Wisdom, explores how British Library digital collections can be used in creative ways. Opportunity for game, design students in the UK to showcase their talents to industry; hopefully lead to engagement with new audiences. BL Labs Awards recognise work done with digital collections (in research, commercial, artistic, teaching/learning categories); Competition winners got to work closely with Labs team for several months to make their DS project idea a reality.
- Great thing about competitions is they help create case studies. Dr Katrina Navickas was a Labs Competition winner whose story particularly resonates with 'traditional' historians. Katrina's research investigates Chartism, the biggest movement for democracy in 19th century Britain. Used text mining techniques to map weekly meetings as advertised in the Northern Star newspaper between 1841 and 1845 - thus the quote. http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk/maps/methods
- Labs team, usually with a digital curator, run workshops and activities at universities around the country, to encourage re-use of digital collections
- From undergraduate group projects, MSc dissertation projects, to PhD supervision. Can be very time-consuming but provide opportunity for targeted application of specific technologies or methods to specific collections. Relies on infrastructure of university, which has positives and negatives, but means we're not held back by need to fit into BL infrastructure and busy IT schedules. Screenshot is MSc project by Thomas Evans, who was asked to create a more browseable interface to search-focused DigCIM, Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.
- Partnerships are another way to explore application of new technologies. This is a screenshot of Transkribus, part of the READ project. They're working on handwritten text recognition, which has huge potential for our manuscript collections. We've signed a Memorandum of Understanding with them to make it easier to share records and learn from their research.
- Crowdsourcing enables us to engage new audiences while making our collections more discoverable. Working with metadata services to ensure results can be incorporated into catalogue at some level of granularity; will also offer as dataset.