Slides from a talk I gave at 'Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library', College of Charleston, 21 June 2014

1. Digital Scholarship
at the British Library
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. www.bl.uk 2
Some admin…
You are free to:
– Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix
– Photograph, film, or broadcast
– Blog, live-blog, or post video of;
this presentation provided that:
– You attribute the work to its author
and respect the rights and licences
associated with its components
– You distribute the resulting work only
under the same or similar license to
this one
Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
unless stated otherwise.

3. www.bl.uk 3
More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities 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 (2014)

4. www.bl.uk 4

5. www.bl.uk 5
“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

6. www.bl.uk 6
‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs of
their reading in the form of fingerprints
in the margins. The darkness of
their fingerprints correlates
to the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer -- a
machine that measures the darkness
of a reflecting surface -- can reveal
which texts a reader favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books:
Quantifying Patterns of Use in
Medieval Manuscripts Using a
Densitometer’, Journal of Historians
of Nederlandish Art (2010)

7. www.bl.uk 7
discipline
camp and
camps sentence

8. www.bl.uk 8

9. www.bl.uk 9

10. www.bl.uk 10
Pieter Francois: Winner of British Library Labs 2013 Bob Nicholson: Winner of British Library Labs 2014

11. www.bl.uk 11

12. www.bl.uk 12

13. www.bl.uk 13
Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: slideshare.net/drjwbaker http://slidesha.re/1oKLmMk