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Teaching and Learning
Mahendra Mahey
BL Labs Manager

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Previous winners…
2016
2017
2018

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets
Tim Brookes https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/
As of 08/11/19
97 Alphabets covered

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
The Other Voice: Postgraduate elective at the
Royal College of Art (RCA)
Audio collage and
photography
© Giulia Brancati.
Memory Foam
© Karthika Sakthivel
Meditations in Clay, video montage
© James Roadnight and David Sappa.
Soundscape and image
© Raf Martins.
Interviewee Donald Palmer wearing a
virtual reality headset, exploring the virtual
reality space
© Alex Remoleux

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Travel Literature: A Data-Oriented Journey Through the British Library's
18th-19th Century Books – UCL BA/BSc Arts and Sciences -
https://imgur.com/a/C04nUtD
Project/Module lead/tutor: Sara Wingate Gray (Information through the Ages)
Travel team student members: Ruby Harrop; Chase McDonald; Xuan Nai Lim; Felix Byng

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Reclaiming the Library Desk in a Digital Age
with Augmented Reality
Anrick Bregman https://vimeo.com/359738333
http://anrk.co/convict-story

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
A convict story by Anrick Bregman - http://anrk.co/convict-story

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
The runner up is…

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Travel Literature: A Data-Oriented Journey Through the British Library's
18th-19th Century Books – UCL BA/BSc Arts and Sciences -
https://imgur.com/a/C04nUtD
Project/Module lead/tutor: Sara Wingate Gray (Information through the Ages)
Travel team student members: Ruby Harrop; Chase McDonald; Xuan Nai Lim; Felix Byng

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/9458013789/in/album-72157634975233898/

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Microsoft Books
Collection:
65,000 digitised 19th
Century books
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/digitised-printed-books

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CHASE MCDONALD, BRANDON LIM, FELIX BYNG,
RUBY HARROP
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilike/2641678134/

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Project Goals:
•To produce a dataset that would be useful to researchers of travel
–Literary scholars
–Historians
–Geographers
•Add enough supplementary details for these researchers to use as
indexes
–‘Travel’ term used
–Cities/Countries/Continents visited

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Process – Extraction
• Python script used to detect ‘travel’-related terms in titles and extract these indexes into a
separate .csv file
• Terms like ‘travel’, ‘trip’, ‘voyage’, ‘expedition’ used
• Python package called Vocabulary used to receive above terms as inputs and return a list of
synonyms
• Python library called “Word Forms” used on resulting list to return conjugations – ‘travel’ 
‘travellers’, ‘traveling’, ‘travels’

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Process – Cleaning
• Inconsistencies in data: eg. ‘london’ and ‘London’
• Superfluous symbols included under “date”, “datefield”, “corporate”, “authors”, “shelfmarks”,
“pdf”, and “imgs” columns
• Such errors replaced and cleaned using OpenRefine
• Inclusion of synonyms resulted in the extraction of unrelated titles
– “The Stupid Boy an Instructive Story, etc. in Verse”
– “Aunt Betsy’s Training”
• Words like ‘voyage’ and ‘tour’ returned French results - such titles cleaned manually as much as
possible

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Process – Supplementary Data
• Place names extracted and allocated under separate columns
–Continents, Countries, States, Cities, Capitals
• Individual words in titles compared to lists of world countries, states in the US, cities and
capitals downloaded from the internet
• If a word was present in the lists, it would be allocated under the column of the
respective category

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Research Insights

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
@sarawingategray /
@librarian
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/people/academic-staff/sara-wingate-gray
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/study/current-students/degree-core/interdisciplinary-elective/information-
through-ages
Comments / Questions /
Feedback?
Sara Wingate Gray
uczcswi@ucl.ac.uk

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
The winner is…

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
The Other Voice: Postgraduate elective at the
Royal College of Art (RCA)
Audio collage and
photography
© Giulia Brancati.
Memory Foam
© Karthika Sakthivel
Meditations in Clay, video montage
© James Roadnight and David Sappa.
Soundscape and image
© Raf Martins.
Interviewee Donald Palmer wearing a
virtual reality headset, exploring the virtual
reality space
© Alex Remoleux

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Royal College of Art Postgraduate elective
Giulia Brancati, Raf Martins,
Alexia Remoleux, James Roadnight,
Karthika Sakthivel, David Sappa and Kingsley Tao
Eleanor Dare
(Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction)
Matt Lewis (RCA Tutor and Sound Artist)

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
• Exciting new partnership new collaboration between Eleanor
Dare and Matt Lewis (RCA) and Mary Stewart, British Library Oral
History Curator
• Bringing ‘new ears’ to British Library material focus on eleven
specially curated British Library oral history interviews
• Engaging new audiences two-day student-curated showcase at
the British Library.

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
• Enhancing technical skills digital editing, recording of
soundscapes and visual media, holographic construction, virtual
reality, physical computing, installation design and constructing
high quality acoustic environments.
• Provoking ethical and theoretical reflections nuanced in-depth
reading on narrative, audience, experiential listening and
ethics, to inform and challenge.
• Developing new creative practice challenge to “think through
sound”. Experimenting with deep-listening, sonification, field-
recording and in-depth ethnographic research.

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
BL collection item: Irene Elliot interviewed by Dvora
Liberman, Crown Court Clerks Life Story Interviews,
C1674/05
Audio: Memories of a mother’s hard
work in 1950s Preston
Sonic quilt
Illustrated with objects drawn from
Irene's memories, each square of the
patchwork quilt encased conductive
fabric that triggered audio clips.
Upon touching each square, the
corresponding story would play.
Karthika Sakthivel
Memory Foam

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
BL collection item: Irene Elliot interviewed by
Dvora Liberman, Crown Court Clerks Life Story Interviews,
C1674/05
Immersive installation
Featured two audio points; one
with excerpts of the testimony
and another an audio collage.
Two old-fashioned telephones
played the audio, which the
listener absorbed while curled up
in an arm chair in a fictional front
room.
Giulia Brancati
On the way back

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
Inspired by oral history with a ceramicist.
Travelled to Cornwall recorded new oral
histories.
Film combines interviews conducted at the
Bernard Leach pottery with audio-visual
documentation of the St Ives studio and its
rugged Cornish surroundings.
Selection of ‘listening pots’, when held to the
ear played excerpts of the oral history
interviews.
James Roadnight and David Sappa
Meditations in Clay

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
BL collection item: Jonathan Blake interviewed by Margot
Farnham, 1991, Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive, C456/104
Audio: testimony of one of the
first people in the UK to be
diagnosed with HIV
Audio soundscape of
environmental sounds and
excerpts from the interview.
Played alongside a projected 3D
hologram based on the cellular
structure of the HIV virus.
Hologram changed form and
shape when activated by the
audio.
Raf Martins
Beyond Form

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol @GLAM_labs #bldigital
BL collection item: Donald Palmer interviewed by Paul Merchant,
An Oral History of British Science, C1379/102
Audio: warm description of the front room of interviewee’s Jamaican-born parents which
was ‘kept for best’ in 1970s London.
Virtual reality tour of the reimagined space, where the viewer could point to various objects
in the virtual space and launch the corresponding snippet of audio.
Alexia Remoleux
Donald in Wonderland
Kingsley Tao
Stiff Upper Lip
Short film exploring sexuality, identity and
reactions to health and sickness including
clips of the interview.