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British Library LabsUsing the British Library’s Cultural Heritage DataMahendra Mahey

1445 – 1500, 24-25 November 2016,Second Session Part II: Imagination and Speculative CulturesAccelerating Human Imagination, A workshop with the Arthur C Clark Center for Human Imagination, UC San Diego and the University of Liverpool in London,33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG, UK.

https://goo.gl/2qqj6V

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Arthur C. Clarkes Mysterious World

https://goo.gl/bAo3XR

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Perspective on Accelerating Human Imagination

• Getting Researchers, Artists, Entrepreneurs, Educators and General Public using the British Library’s Cultural Heritage Digital Collections and Data in creative, innovative and imaginative ways!

• Why and how are we doing that?

• What are the challenges and how we overcoming them?

• What are people actually doing as a result?

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

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#bldigital1-2 %* digitised

* estimate

Digitisation

Partnerships Commercial & Other Organisations

Amountincreasing rapidly

Bias in digitisation

http://goo.gl/bR9UJL Sample Generator

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Competition

Awards

Projects

Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content

Show us what you have already done with our digital content in research, artistic, commercial and learning and

teaching categories

Talk to us about working on collaborative projects

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Cultural Heritage DatasetsDatasets about our collections Bibliographic datasets relating to our published and archival holdings

Datasets for content mining Content suitable for use in text and data mining research

Datasets for image analysisImage collections suitable for large-scale image-analysis-based research

Datasets from UK Web ArchiveData and API services available for accessing UK Web Archive

Digital mapping Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital aerial photography and scanned historic map materials https://data.bl.uk

Launched November 7, 2016

Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS

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The Magic of Openness!

• By opening collections up we are creating the possibility to have them used in ways only restricted by human imagination.

• Need to work hard to tell people about our Digital Collections and Data especially if not easy to find, creating serendipity and opportunities for use!

• Give plenty of examples to inspire use!

• Support and celebrate the use!

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Labs Engagement 2016• 18 institutions visited

• 5000 miles travelled

• 50 presentations & 25 workshops

• 900 researchers / artists/ entrepreneurs / educators

• 400 expressions of interest

• 40 researchers, artists, entrepreneurs & educators supported

• 60TB of data via post

• 9TB of data via data.bl.uk (Nov 16)

• Over half a billion views on BL Flickr Commons since launch in Dec 2013

It’s hard work!

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Wider…not just Researches

Researchershttps://goo.gl/WutNyi

Artistshttp://goo.gl/nNKhQ2

LibrariansCurators

https://goo.gl/9NWZUW

Software Developershttps://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf

Archivistshttps://goo.gl/x7b4tg Educators

https://goo.gl/qh01Mi

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Why and how are doing this?

• Working closely with and listening to those who want use our digital collections and data for their work and helping to build services, tools and processes to support them

• We can learn how we are and should be supporting them.– Is the access to digital collections we provide sufficient?– Do we have the right tools?– Do we provide the right support?– Where are the gaps between what they want and what we can

give?– How do we build the bridges to overcome them?– Many more reasons…

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Some Lessons Learned and Challenges so far…

• Everything starts from a conversation (external and internal)!

• Need to have several conversations with several stakeholders and tap into their tacit knowledge that isn’t always written down (esp internal).

• It’s hard work at the beginning!

• Expectations change when researchers actually see the data, systems and experience the ‘culture’ of the organisation.

• We tend to work with researchers who can be ‘flexible’ with their research questions and are willing to embrace challenges.

• Often misunderstandings because of jargon & different meaning of words.

• Embrace dirty data, it may never be perfect!

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Some Lessons Learned and Challenges so far…(2)• Many researchers have the domain knowledge but lack the technical skills to

use Digital Research methods. Should they be teamed up with those that have problems that need solving (Computing) or get trained?

• Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to use data, help them ‘navigate’ through the Library to get the data they want (sometimes).

• Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats).

• Start small and simple, but think big!

• Create and embrace serendipity, stimulate the imagination, work fast, give it energy.

• Learn the lessons, tell the positive stories and move on!

• Fail faster (don’t be afraid), small experiments, reject perfectionism.

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What did people

actually do?

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Finding things in messy data

Mrs Folly• Clean up manually• Get ‘ground truth’• Write code to find things

reliably in it automatically• Try code on messy content• Tweak if necessary

Mrs Folly

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http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com

Victorian Meme Machine (2014)

https://goo.gl/HMqDt3

Bob Nicholson

http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/Bob Nicholson interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme:

http://goo.gl/fmV9ep

And telling jokes to the public:http://goo.gl/xIDRhz

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

Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes

Victorian Comedy Night, 7 Nov 2016

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Katrina Navickas (2015) Political Meetings Mapper

http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.ukhttps://goo.gl/Qq78Oa

Labs Symposium 2015

https://goo.gl/BSA3be

Interview 2015

The Chartist Newspaperhttp://goo.gl/vOLSnH

Chartist Monster Meeting

Chartists Re-enactment London

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Black Abolitionist Performances & their Presence in Britain (2016) – Hannah-Rose Murray

FrederickDouglass

EllenCraft

JosiahHenson

Ida B Wells

A Performance by Joe Williams &

Martelle Edinborough

http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/

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Data-mining verse in 18th Century newspapersBL Labs Project 16-17, Jennifer Batt

https://goo.gl/5Akthd

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What can 65,000books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

Just one open digital collection

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Worked better for female faces than men’s

Press

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.comPosts image every 30 minutes

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

1,020,418 imagesneed tagging!

Creative uses of images

Face recognition

Mechanical Curator

http://goo.gl/qPPgxX

Flickr

Snipping out imagesfrom 65,000 Digitised Books*

>600,000,000 views

>15,500,000 tags

https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM

Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs

and Digital Research Team*Matt Prior - http://goo.gl/j29Tnx

Since Dec 2013

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Tagging a million imagesIterative Crowdsourcing

http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’sLost Visions Project

http://www.metadatagames.org/

Metadata Games

James Heald

Mario Klingemann

Chico 45

Use computational methods

Human Tagger

Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

http://goo.gl/8SkfM1

Machine LearningSearch Engine

& Google Imagesearch

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Special Jury’s Prize (2015)James Heald – Wikimedia and Map work

https://goo.gl/WYZCB2

http://goo.gl/HNQq5e

https://goo.gl/VPgffL

https://commons.wikimedia.org/

https://goo.gl/djtm1b

Labs Symposium (2015)Geotagging maps

54,000 Maps

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Adam Crymble (2015)Crowdsource Arcade

What if crowd sourcing

looked like this?

http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W

http://goo.gl/OH9pOZ

https://goo.gl/7z0j8p

30 mins talkLabs Symposium (2015)

https://goo.gl/SSRsdd

5 min interview (2015)

http://goo.gl/0APpE8

Game Jam

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SherlockNet: Competition Winner 2016Karen Wang, Luda Zhao and Brian Do

Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Tag and Caption the British Library Flickr Commons 1 million Image Collection

Classify into one of 12 categories

>15 million tags added (total now 15.5 million overall)>100,000 experimental captions

bit.ly/sherlocknet

Pooled surrounding Optical Character Recognised

text on page from similar images

Used Microsoft COCO (photographs) & British Museum Prints and Drawings

collections as training sets.

Tags Captions

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Artistic / Creative Works

http://goo.gl/dM8ieA

Mario Klingeman (2015)

http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com

David Normal 2014 and 2015

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

Rob Walker 2014

http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ

Kris Hoffman (2016)

https://goo.gl/QilqqT

Jiayi Chong 2016Ling Low 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/

Paul Rand Pierce 2016

A Hat on the GroundSpells trouble

Tragic Looking Women44 Men who Look 44

(Notice the direction faces)

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Mario Klingemann 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnxnmqnR7YGoogle Arts and Culture Lab – Experiments with Machine Learning

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/

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More BL Labs ideas for inspiration!

http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs http://labs.bl.uk/Other+Uses+of+Collections

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Contact us

Mahendra MaheyManager of BL Labs

mahendra.mahey@bl.uklabs@bl.uk

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Imaginary Cities – BL Labs Project 16-17Michael Takeo Magruder

https://goo.gl/4ARwTy