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Doing Digital Research @ British Library An intro to the Digital Research Team Pre-1600 Doctoral Open Day 2017
Doing Digital Research@ British Library
An intro to the Digital Research Team
Pre-1600 Doctoral Open Day 2017
www.bl.uk 2
Defining Digital Research
Using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms…. Geotagging
Data Visualisation
Data Mining
Georeferencing
Digital MappingCrowdsourcing
Text mining
Collaboration
www.bl.uk 3
The Digital Research Team is a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, librarians and programmers supporting the creation and innovative use of British Library's digital collections.
http://bl.uk/digital
@BL_DigiSchol
Meet the Digital Scholarship Team
www.bl.uk 4
The Digital Research Team
We support researchers in the innovative use of British Library's digital collections and data by:
• Offering digital research training and guidance
• Supporting collaborative projects
• Running events, competitions, and awards
• Behind the scenes work to get content digitised and online
www.bl.uk 5
Discovering Digitised Content
• Digitised Manuscripts www.bl.uk/manuscripts
• Collection Guides www.bl.uk/collection-guides
• Subject pages www.bl.uk/subjects
• Flickr www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary
• Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Collections_of_the_British_Library
www.bl.uk 6
Discovering Digitised Content
www.bl.uk 7
Discovering Datasets
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Unique Digital Projects
International Dunhuang Project (IDP) http://idp.bl.uk/ A ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet.
Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) http://eap.bl.uk/ Preserves at-risk archives in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. The archival material relates to a pre-modern period of a society's history, typically any period before industrialisation, digital collections include newspapers, periodicals, audio and audio-visual material, photographs and rare printed books.
Hebrew Manuscripts Project 3000 digitised manuscripts spanning 1000 years. Digital Curator, Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, explored 3D modelling, annotations, data visualisations, image processing, spatial representations
www.bl.uk 9
Handwritten text recognition
www.bl.uk 10
Case studies
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Big Data History of Music
How can vast amounts of bibliographic data held by research libraries be unlocked for music researchers to analyse?
Can this data be interrogated in ways that challenge the traditional narratives of music history?
Analyses and visualisations exposed previously uncharted patterns in the history of music, for instance the rise and fall of music printing in 16th- and 17th-century Europe (huge dips in output in Venice were down to plague and war).
www.bl.uk 13
Political Meetings Mapper
Video: https://youtu.be/XabsuyNkD5s
www.bl.uk 14
“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, BL Labs Winner 2015
Political Meetings Mapper
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Combining Text Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the representation of disease in nineteenth-century newspapersGoal: analyse the geographies in large corpora while remaining sensitive to the subtleties and nuances within the texts (over 377 million words from the London based newspaper The Era, 1838–1900)
Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places at Lancaster University, with Paul Atkinson (historian), Ian Gregory (digital humanities), Andrew Hardie (linguistics), Daniel Kershaw (computer science), Amelia Joulain-Jay (linguistics), Catherine Porter (geography) and Paul Rayson (computer science).
www.bl.uk 16
Digital/computational techniques
Combining techniques from Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and corpus linguistics to create a set of techniques they call Geographical Text Analysis (GTA).
GIS is effectively a mapping and database technology that is typically used with quantitative sources.
Corpus linguistics is concerned with analysing large textual collections using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Collocation effectively asks what words are found near to a search-term, allowing us to understand what themes are associated with other themes.
Geoparsing allows us to identify place-names in the text and allocate them with coordinates.
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Virtual Mappa used the DM image annotation software. Simple markup tools applicable to almost any visual-textual document.
- Cotton Tiberius B V, f.56v- Royal 14 C, f.1v-2r- Harley 3667, f.8v- Add 28681, f.9r
Maps transcribed and translated, through annotations linked to roll-over markers on map images. Full text searchable. Multiple manuscripts from different repositories in one view.
Virtual Mappa Project: Online, Annotated Medieval Mappaemundi
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Pelagios: Enabling Linked Ancient Geodata
Collaborative project to transcribe & map Classical and Medieval placenames from digital texts and manuscript images. Allows for visualisation of place and space in historical documents.
BL contributed >350 digitised images of medieval materials, plus one digital paleographer!
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Find out more
• Humanist mailing list http://dhhumanist.org/
• IHR Digital History Seminar http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/
• Digital Classicist mailing list, events http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
• BL Labs Awards http://labs.bl.uk/British+Library+Labs+Awards
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Digital Scholarship bloghttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/
digital-scholarship/
