British Library Roadshow 2016 Wales

transcript

1http://labs.bl.uk @BL_Labs @NLWales @AberUni #bldigital labs@bl.uk

http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs

3rd March 2016 – BL Labs Roadshow 2016Presentation at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labsFunded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

3rd March 2016 – BL Labs Roadshow 2016Presentation at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Distant Reading – Adam Crymble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp4y-_VoXdA

Digital research methods

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event (has some examples from researchers)

Corpus analysis toolsText Mining

Visualisations

Location based searching

Geotagging

Annotation

Natural Language Processing

Using Application Programming Interfaces for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

Transcribing

Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

Katrina Navickas (2015) Political Meetings Mapper

http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.ukLabs Symposium 2015 (33 mins)

https://goo.gl/Qq78Oa

Interview 2015 (4 mins)https://goo.gl/BSA3be

The Chartist Newspaperhttp://goo.gl/vOLSnH

Chartist Monster Meeting

Chartists Re-enactment London

https://goo.gl/BSA3be

Adam Crymble (2015)Crowdsource Arcade

What if crowd sourcing

looked like this?

http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W

Game Jam - http://goo.gl/OH9pOZ30 mins talkLabs Symposium (2015)https://goo.gl/7z0j8p

5 min interview (2015)https://goo.gl/SSRsdd

http://goo.gl/0APpE8

Art Treachery – Januz Druz Tag Attack – Antonio Padial

Art Treachery and Tag Attack

What can 65,000books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

Just one digital collection

Snipping out imagesfrom 65,000 Digitised Books

Face recognition

Mechanical Curator

Flickr

Worked better for female faces than men’s

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com>380,000,000 views

> 500,000 tags

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

1,020,418 imagesneed tagging!

Creative uses of imageshttp://goo.gl/qPPgxX

Tagging a million imagesIterative Crowdsourcing

http://www.metadatagames.org/ http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’sLost Visions Project

James Heald

Mario Klingemann

Chico 45

Use computational methods

Human Tagger

Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

Interview David Normal

https://youtu.be/Q3SBxO34Zlc

Finding one image on Flickr

Finding many more!Make collagesMake 4 paintingsExhibit light boxes at Burning Man 2014

In Nevada USA

Work with Labs & British Library to installLight boxes in London

In 2015

Let’s have a party!

Music mix by DY Yoda using British Library Sounds

Exhibited from June to Nov 2015

- https://goo.gl/QilqqT By Kestrel Moon

Animating static images

- https://goo.gl/QilqqT By Kestrel Moon

Animating static images

Victorian Meme Machine (2014)Competition Winner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK95lzaPNp0Bob Nicholson

http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/

Rob WalkerVictorian Mother-in-law Jokes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0

Creative with Wildlife Sounds

http://goo.gl/s7siv0

Sound Edit Wildlife Films Competition 2013 http://vimeo.com/60401313

'Dave's Wild Life' by Samuel de Ceccatty, won first prize!

http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment

Challenges

Language Problems

Library uses different terms than researchers use

•Access

•Collections

•Content

•Crowdsourced

Data Problems [stuff goes in here]

•Metadata isn’t as clean as many think it is

•Many metadata records have square brackets to indicate inferred information

•Code to plot when a record had square brackets by Ben O’Steen

Optical Character Recognition

Training / Teaming up with Expert?• Many researchers lack the technical skills to use Digital Research Methods but have the domain knowledge

• Should support be more focused on training?

• There are plenty of computational experts looking for problems to solve

• Should they be teamed up with those that have problems that need solving

only in Reading

Rooms due to ©

only on site due to

not online – various storage devices

online and open

British Library

online behind paywall

Challenges of Digital access

Labs Residency Model

British NationalBibliography

UK Web Archive Data

Text-mining of electronic journals

Book ordering and anonymised reader

Finding Digital Collections

• Copyright cleared for research use

• Curated (Is there someone who knows the ‘story’ about the collection?)

• Collection / Item Level Metadata available? (What state is and does it need cleaning?)

• Where is it?

Simple Data Structure Please!

•Everything had a URL•The URL linked to page that tells you about the thing

•Link to other things•Machine Readable - not assume a human would always read it

Ideas change once you try to examine, access and use

the data!

Why is the Library doing this?

SupportingDigital Experiments better

BL Labs Git Hub Site Re-OCRing Newspapers Flickr API

BL Explore – Search Catalogue Python Code

Perfection vs Imperfection

•If we focus too much on perfection we will never get anything done!

•Fear of failure seen as a negative thing.

•Just don’t be scared to try experiments!

Lessons…•Huge appetite to use BL digital content & data (see Flickr Commons stats later).

•Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to use BL data.

•Labs can help researchers navigate through the Library to get the data they want.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Fail fasterSmall experiments!

https://goo.gl/Vlv3Yu Let yourself reboot!

Finally…

•Try and examine, use our data and talk to us about your ideas and projects!

•Consider entering the Competition and Awards!

•You never know you might….

Change the world with …British Library & NLW digital content

Accessing the Mini NASMini Network Area Storage Device (NAS) guide:

http://goo.gl/E8aRyQ Find the ‘opendata’ wireless access point and join it. The passphrase is ‘opendata’

Accessing data foldersUsername:guestPassword:guestOr use ftp://10.0.0.1/

What’s on the Mini NAS?• British National Bibliography – 3.5 million records (2

• 90,000 Playbills – 1602 – 1902 (60 Gb)

• ALTO XML (includes METS and MODS) for OCR of 65,000 volumes, 22 million pages mostly from the 19th Century (909 Gb)

• 1 million images snipped from books put on Flickr (667 Gb)

• 70,000 tagged images (170 Gb)

It’s messy but fascinating!

Ideas Lab

•Get into groups of 2-6

•Read the instructions in the Ideas Lab Pack

•We are around to help and advise.

•Enjoy it and have fun!

Pitching your ideas

•Pitch for 2 minutes

•Feedback

Goody bag!

British Library Roadshow 2016 Wales

Education