BL Labs Presentation to the Chinese Academy of Social Sceinces

British Library LabsWorking with the British Library’sDigital Content and Data

Monday 29th June 2015

Mahendra MaheyManager of British Library LabsPresentation to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

http://labs.bl.uk 2#bl_labs [email protected]

180 Million Items

http://labs.bl.uk 3#bl_labs [email protected]

Digitisation at the British Library

http://labs.bl.uk 4#bl_labs [email protected]

Growth of the digital library

http://labs.bl.uk 5#bl_labs [email protected]

UK Web Archive

http://labs.bl.uk 6#bl_labs [email protected]

Digital is changing research

Data broken downrecombined and

duplicatedImage: Tower of Babble, Book Sculpture by Brian Dettmer

http://labs.bl.uk 7#bl_labs [email protected]

Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Knowledge Quarter

• Partners include Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, University College London, Warwick

• Initially funded at £42m over 5 years

• Headquartered @ British Library

• Part of Knowledge Quarter

http://labs.bl.uk 8#bl_labs [email protected]

http://labs.bl.uk 9#bl_labs [email protected]

British National BibliographyUK Web Archive Data19th Century Books

Environmental SoundsText-mining of

electronic journals

Book ordering and anonymised reader

data

Resonance FM10 year CommunityArts Radio Show

Datasets, Books / Text, Images / Music, Maps, Sounds, Multimedia

http://labs.bl.uk/Digital+Collections

http://labs.bl.uk 10#bl_labs [email protected]

CompetitionTell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content

AwardsShow us what you have done with our digital content

ProjectsTalk to us about working on collaborative projects

http://labs.bl.uk 11#bl_labs [email protected]

Mahendra MaheyManager of British Library Labs

https://goo.gl/lLsiaY/@mahendra_mahey

http://labs.bl.uk 12#bl_labs [email protected]

Ben O’SteenTechnical Lead ofBritish Library Labs@benosteen

http://labs.bl.uk 13#bl_labs [email protected]

Hana LewisProject OfficerBritish Library Labs

http://labs.bl.uk 14#bl_labs [email protected]

Example Digital research methods

http://labs.bl.uk/Launch+Event (has some examples from researchers)

Corpus analysis toolsText Mining

Visualisations

Location based searching

Geotagging

Annotation

Crowdsourcing / Human Computation

Natural Language Processing

Using Application Programming Interfaces for datasets e.g. Metadata, Images

Transcribing

http://labs.bl.uk 15#bl_labs [email protected]

Story of just *one* digital collection

What can 68,000books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

http://labs.bl.uk 16#bl_labs [email protected]

Snipping out imagesfrom 65,000 Digitised Books

Face recognition

Mechanical Curator

Flickr

Worked better for female faces than men’s

Press

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com> 260,000,000 views

> 380,000 tags

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

1,020,418 imagesneed tagging!

Creative uses of imageshttp://goo.gl/qPPgxX

http://labs.bl.uk 17#bl_labs [email protected]

Tagging a million imagesHarnessing Crowdsourcing

http://www.metadatagames.org/

http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’sLost Visions ProjectAdam Crymble

BL Labs 2015 Competition Winner

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’

James Heald

Mario Klingemann

Chico 45

Use computational methods

Human Tagger

Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

http://labs.bl.uk 18#bl_labs [email protected]

Crowdsourcing Flickr and OtherDigitised Maps

http://www.bl.uk/maps/

http://labs.bl.uk 19#bl_labs [email protected]

Political Meetings MapperBL Labs Competition Winner 2015

Katrina Navickas

http://labs.bl.uk 20#bl_labs [email protected]

Victorian Meme MachineBL Labs 2014 Competition Winner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK95lzaPNp0Bob Nicholson

http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/

http://labs.bl.uk 21#bl_labs [email protected]

Burning Man 2014 – David NormalCrossroads of Curiosity

http://labs.bl.uk 22#bl_labs [email protected]

David Normal Interview

https://youtu.be/Q3SBxO34Zlc

http://labs.bl.uk 23#bl_labs [email protected]

Crossroads of Curiosity at the British Library until Nov 8 2015

http://labs.bl.uk 24#bl_labs [email protected]

What stories can other digital

collections tell us?

http://labs.bl.uk 25#bl_labs [email protected]

Anna Gerber and Desmond Schmidt:Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4bjZSJ4cY&feature=youtu.be

http://labs.bl.uk 26#bl_labs [email protected]

Working with Students

• Worked on clearing access to digital content, specifically Chinese Maps