4. http://labs.bl.uk 4
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Competition
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content, work in
residence from June – Oct with our support (technical and other)
Awards
Show us what you have already done with our digital content
Projects
Talk to us about working on potential ideas
6. http://labs.bl.uk 6
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Library learning…
•who is using and would like to use our
digital content and data and why
•how it is and should be supporting
those who want to use it for the future
•to have a space to experiment and fail fast
7. http://labs.bl.uk 7
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Competition
• Deadline 11 April 2016
• Road-show between Feb and March around the UK
• Winners announced late May 2016
• Residency between June – October
• Showcase at Labs Symposium Monday 7th
of November
9. http://labs.bl.uk 9
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Adam Crymble (2015)
Mechanical Curator Arcade
What if crowd sourcing
looked like this?
http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W
Drawing on downtime
Drawing on scarcity of access
Drawing on energy reserved
for ‘play’
http://itch.io/jam/britishlibrary
30 minute talk at BL Labs Symposium 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MtNgc8-SmE
10. http://labs.bl.uk 10
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Awards
• Categories: Artistic, Commercial, Research and possibly
Learning and Teaching
• Deadline 5 September 2016
• Winners announced Monday 7th
of November
• To learn who has already been using our digital content in
interesting and innovative ways
11. http://labs.bl.uk 11
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Artistic
Mario Klingeman - Quasimondo
Talk at BL Labs Symposium 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyDFMT2t0uk
Talk at Curious Images Event – Dec 2014
https://youtu.be/6wglRwBbg48
13. http://labs.bl.uk 13
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/spatialhum.wordpress/
Presentation at Labs Symposium: https://youtu.be/kbmpORX_AgY
Research
Spatial Humanities: Lancaster University
Combining Text and Geographic
Analysis
Investigating the representation of
disease in nineteenth-century
newspapers
15. http://labs.bl.uk 15
@BL_Labs #bldigital labs@bl.uk
Finally…
•There is an appetite to use our digital content
and data
•Identify and bridge gaps
•Consider entering the Competition and Awards!
•Know anyone used / using or wants to use our
digital content?
– labs@bl.uk
Hinweis der Redaktion
My name is Mahendra Mahey and I work on a project called British Library Labs together with Ben O’Steen, Hana Lewis and Adam Farquhar. We are based at the British Library in London, in the Digital Scholarship department. We work closely with the Digital Research team there. It’s been running for three years now and is funded until Dec 2016 by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In a nutshell the project encourages researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, teachers and anyone else who wants to, to ‘experiment’ with our digital collections and data. We are particularly interested in those researchers who have questions which focus on the potential to find new things that wouldn’t have been possible without getting access to the digital content we are providing, for example asking a question across thousands of digitised books or newspapers.
Of course we all know the British Library has a lot of physical items, estimated , however only a small proportion of those has been digitised and other content is increasingly being stored as ‘born’ digital. We estimate this is around 2% of all our content, but no one really knows exactly how much. Through our new digital scholarship pages we have created collection guides detailing some of these digital collections. In the near future, we hope to develop http://data.bl.uk which will be the place where people can go to learn more about and access some of the digital collections we have available.
So ‘how’ do we try and engage those who might be interested in BL’s digital collections and data?
We do this three ways. Tell, show and talk.
Why are we doing this? Well there are many reasons, but essentially it is about the
This is the fourth annual competition, although it is focussed primarily on the UK it is open to the world.
It will be launched next week and then we are going on a road-show around the UK, visiting over a dozen universities (mostly)
The winners will be announced in late May and we will then choose two entries to work with in residence between June and October, where they will get technical, and other types of support including a stipend of over £3000.
The winners will showcase their work and receive their prizes at our fourth annual symposium on Monday 7th of November, held in this Auditorium.
So here are a couple of examples of our winners from 2015, both from the University of Hertfordshire.
Dr Katrina Navickas is a historian particularly interested in the Chartist Movement. They were a group who were campaigning for the vote for working people. She wanted to use a combination of manual and computational methods to explore our Digitised Newspapers from 1840, to find out when and where they met and plot them on map. Katrina was trying to bring a forgotten History to life through her research, and in the photo on the right you can see a Historical re-enactment of a Chartist Meeting that took place in the Red Lion pub not far from here that was part of a walking tour of forgotten places where the chartists met, which she organised as part of her research. You can learn more by following the links on the slides.
Dr Adam Crymble also from Hertfordshire, lectures in Digital History. He wanted to harness the power of crowdsourcing and arcade machines to develop games that could be used to help the Library tag many of the images it has released onto the Flickr that still need identifying. The idea is that whilst people are playing specially designed games they will help the Library tag images. For example in Art Treachery, you are an art thief where you are given a mission to steal a picture of a ‘thing’ e.g. ‘Portrait’ whilst being chased around by robot guards. We are planning on taking the arcade machine and the games that were built for this project around the UK to see what kind of participation we get and see if there is potential in this idea. For further information, follow the links on the slide.
Now on to the Awards, which recognise work *already* carried out using our digital content. Last year’s categories were Artistic, Entrepreneurial and Research. The deadline for this year is the 5 September and the winners will be announced on Monday 7th of November, each winning £500.
This year’s artistic winner was Mario Klingemann AKA Quasimondo who tries to use computers to generate art or do clever and interesting things such as find images. He worked a lot on our Flickr collection of undescribed images, You can see a picture of a 44 men who look around 44 he found in the collection, notice how the eyes of the faces change from left to right, by the way he did this for his 44th birthday. Bottom left is an attempt for a computer to find images of ‘sad looking women’ and above is an attempt to create computer art by snipping bits of images together computationally. There are links on these slides to talks he has given at the BL.
This was the winner of Commercial category. Dina made handmade and bespoke bow ties inspired by a small digitised fragment of an illustration from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground manuscript https://www.etsy.com/shop/DinaMalkova . This was a commercial venture in response to the Redesign Alice competition by Etsy UK and the British Library to mark 150th anniversary of the Alice manuscript. I believe you can buy the bow ties and cufflinks in the Alice pop up shop and of course online.
The research winner was a Spatial Humanities group of researchers from the university of Lancaster who focussed on exploring digitised newspapers to establish when and where diseases were occurring and plotting them on a map.
Labs has been involved in countless other projects outside the competition and awards, sadly I haven’t got time to go into the details, but I mention briefly, the 1 million undescribed images snipped from digitised books, putting them on the Mechanical Curator and Flickr Commons , David Normal’s art installation in the Poet’s circle at St P, Kestrel Moon’s attempt to animate some of the our images, the Victorian Meme Machine and finding over 50,000 maps from our Flickr collection through crowdsourcing and beginning to georeference them.
Finally, we have learned many lessons but most of all we have learned that there is a tremendous appetite from researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and others who want to use our digital content/data and we are also learning what we are doing right and what we will still need to do to support them in the future and of course identifying where the gaps are and how we might bridge them.
Please help us make our fourth competition and awards a success by getting the word out! We will be launching both next week, so look out for publicity internally and externally.
If you know of anyone who has used, is using and wants to use our digital content and data to get in contact with us at @labs
And we hope we will bring you good news if we are able to secure funding for another phase of Labs work hopefully starting in 2017.
Thanks.
