1. Digital Research
…why we are here, what we have,
and what we can do for you
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities [and
social sciences] isn‟t an
isolated academic
phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary
changes are part of a larger
cultural shift, inside and
outside the academy, a
rapid cycle of emergence
and convergence in
technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of
the Digital Humanities (2013)
www.bl.uk
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3. Raging torrent of data
www.bl.uk
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4. Digital Research: Humanities
“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and
human capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less
make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of
computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are
working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were
valued and transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, „Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers‟ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk
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5. Digital Research: Social Sciences
• Reading the Riots (LSE, Guardian)
– How misinformation spread on
Twitter during a time of crisis
– 2.6 million tweets analysed
– Volunteers used to help
categorise data
– Images compared
– Sentiment analysis deployed
• Interdisciplinary, collaborative effort
– Proctor (Warwick), Vis (Sheffield),
Voss (St Andrews).
– Reading the riots on Twitter :
methodological innovation for the
analysis of big data (2013)
www.bl.uk
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6. Digital Research: Art
www.bl.uk
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7. Some background
www.bl.uk
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8. Some background
“Instead of quantitative researchers
trying to build fully automated methods
and qualitative researchers trying to
make do with traditional human-only
methods, now both are heading
toward using or developing
computer-assisted methods
that empower both groups”
Gary King, „Restructuring the
Social Sciences: Reflections from
Harvard's Institute for Quantitative
Social Science‟, PS: Political
Science & Politics (2014)
www.bl.uk
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9. Some background
www.bl.uk
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10. Why we are here
www.bl.uk
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11. “Reading individual works is
as irrelevant as describing
the architecture of a building
from a single brick, or the
layout of a city from a single
church”
Franco Moretti, Stanford
www.bl.uk
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12. Adam Crymble
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13. www.bl.uk
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14. www.bl.uk
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15. www.bl.uk
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17. www.bl.uk
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18. www.bl.uk
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19. New Tools
• Google Ngram Viewer
– Millions of books, billions of
words
– Granular trend analysis
• Metadata, tagging, search,
discovery…
• …mapping, connectivity,
embeddness
• Social media
• Build virtual environments,
digital art
www.bl.uk
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20. New Discoveries
• Off the Map
– Library collections can be
used for creative, novel
applications!
• Crowd is a source
– A phenomenon, a method?
– BL Flickr
• Personal digital archive
– Forensic analysis of behaviour
• prison *_NOUN
– New ways in, new contexts…
www.bl.uk
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21. New Discoveries
discipline
www.bl.uk
camp and
camps
sentence
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22. New Understanding
• Study of 11M social media posts
from China
– King, Pan, Roberts (2013)
– Chinese government is not
censoring speech but is censoring
“attempts at collective action,
whether for or against the
government
– Automated text analysis
• NSA, GCHQ, Big Data…
– Just because they use big data,
should we?
– What does/doesn‟t it represent?
– Ethics, use of technology
www.bl.uk
• Quantitative Analysis of Culture
Using Millions of Digitized Books
– New competition for telling stories
about change over time.
– Michel, Aiden et al (2010)
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23. What can we do for you?
– British Library Labs
• Events, data, and competitions at labs.bl.uk
– You can ask us about what we have
• digitalresearch@bl.uk
– Get involved in our events and activities
• Quarterly Digital Conversations programme.
– Next event 27 February on Data Visualisation
• Crowdsourcing of the #bl1million Flickr images
– Follow our activities
• on Twitter (#bldigital)
• on the Digital Scholarship blog
www.bl.uk
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24. Meet the Curators
– Endangered Archives
Programme
– News and Media
– UK Web Archive
– Personal Digital Archives
– British Library Labs
– Social Sciences
– Digital Maps
– Digital Research
– Music
– Europeana 1914-1918
www.bl.uk
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25. Some thoughts for the day…
– What does it mean to turn your sources into data?
– What can you do with data that you can‟t with non-digital
sources?
– What does a quantitative emphasis on the high velocity,
variety and volume data mean for other research?
– Do new ethical considerations apply to big data?
– How might computational methods change attitudes
towards collaborative research in the arts, humanities, and
social sciences?
www.bl.uk
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26. Thank you!
@j_w_baker
Follow the Digital Scholarship Blog:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Contact us at: digitalresearch@bl.uk
www.bl.uk
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27. Task Time!
– Groups of 5 or 6
• Jan-May here as groups 1-5
• June-Oct next door in Chaucer as 6-10
• Nov-Dec free agents
– Use the cards to come up with a potential project idea:
• Combination of tool cards and collection cards.
• Draws on what has been talked about this morning
• Uses the best of the skills and backgrounds your group can offer
– Feedback after lunch
• No more than 2 minutes
• I will be timing!
www.bl.uk
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