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British Library Labs, Ideas and ProjectsMahendra Mahey
1300 – 1320, Wednesday, 26th October 2016British Library Labs, Ideas and ProjectsWellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
https://goo.gl/gy1IU4
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http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labsFunded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
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Cultural Heritage DatasetsDatasets about our collections Bibliographic datasets relating to our published and archival holdings
Datasets for content mining Content suitable for use in text and data mining research
Datasets for image analysisImage collections suitable for large-scale image-analysis-based research
Datasets from UK Web ArchiveData and API services available for accessing UK Web Archive
Digital mapping Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital aerial photography and scanned historic map materials http://data.bl.uk
Official launch November 7, 2016
Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS
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Competition
Awards
Projects
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content
Show us what you have already done with our digital content in research, artistic, commercial and learning and teaching
categories
Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
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2016 • 18 institutions visited
• 5000 miles travelled
• 50 presentations & 25 workshops
• 730 researchers
• 250 expressions of interest
• 40 researchers, artists, entrepreneurs & educators supported
• 60TB of data via post
• 9TB of data via data.bl.uk (Nov 16)
• Nearly half a billion views on BL Flickr Commons since launch in Dec 2013
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Wider…not just Researches
Researchershttps://goo.gl/WutNyi
Artistshttp://goo.gl/nNKhQ2
LibrariansCurators
https://goo.gl/9NWZUW
Software Developershttps://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf
Archivistshttps://goo.gl/x7b4tg Educators
https://goo.gl/qh01Mi
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Why are doing this?
• Working closely with and listening to those who want use our digital collections and data for their work and helping to build services, tools and processes to support them
• We can learn how we are and should be supporting them.– Is the access to digital collections we provide sufficient?– Do we have the right tools?– Do we provide the right support?– Where are the gaps between what they want and what we can
give?– How do we build the bridges to overcome them?– Many more reasons…
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Some Lessons Learned so far…
• Everything starts from an idea and conversation!
• Need to have several conversations with several stakeholders and tap into their tacit knowledge that isn’t always written down.
• Expectations change when researchers see the data, systems and experience the ‘culture’ of the organisation
• We tend to work with researchers who can be ‘flexible’ with their research questions and are willing to embrace challenges
• Often misunderstandings because of jargon & different meaning of words
• Embrace dirty data, it may never be perfect!
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Some Lessons Learned so far…(2)
• Many researchers have the domain knowledge but lack the technical skills to use Digital Research methods. Should they be teamed up with those that have problems that need solving (Computing) or get trained?
• Identifying / bridging gaps for researchers to use data, help them navigate through the Library to get the data they want
• Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats)
• Start small and simple, but think big!
• Embrace serendipity, work fast, give it energy.
• Learn the lessons, tell the positive stories and move on!
• Fail faster (don’t be afraid), small experiments, reject perfectionism
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Ideas?
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Finding things in messy data
Mrs Folly• Clean up manually• Get ‘ground truth’• Write code to find things
reliably in it automatically• Try code on messy content• Tweak if necessary
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Victorian Meme Machine (2014)
https://goo.gl/HMqDt3
Bob Nicholson
http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/
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Katrina Navickas (2015) Political Meetings Mapper
http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.ukhttps://goo.gl/Qq78Oa
Labs Symposium 2015
https://goo.gl/BSA3be
Interview 2015
The Chartist Newspaperhttp://goo.gl/vOLSnH
Chartist Monster Meeting
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Finalists 2016
Hannah-Rose MurrayPhD student, University of NottinghamBlack Abolitionist Performances and their Presence in Britain
Luda Karen Brian
Hannah-Rose
Luda Zhao, Karen Wang (Masters Students at Stanford University), Brian Do (Harvard Medicine and PhD student)SherlockNet: Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Tag and Caption the British Library Collection
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Runners up 2016 – Nov 16 – Mar 17
Michael Takeo MagruderExploring the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create provocative fictional cityscapes for
the Information Age
Data-mining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers
Jennifer BattUniversity of Bristol
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Artistic / Creative Works
http://goo.gl/dM8ieA
Mario Klingeman
http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com
David Normal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0
Rob Walker
http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ
Kris Hoffman
https://goo.gl/QilqqT
Jiayi Chong
Ling Low
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/
Paul Rand Pierce
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Commercial (2015)Etsy project by Dina Malkova
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DinaMalkova
https://goo.gl/OfJujM
Labs Symposium 2015http://goo.gl/pbxZUv
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Commercial (2015) Runner UpSarah Wingate-Gray and Kate Lomax
http://goo.gl/s1dVSC
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Special Jury’s Prize (2015)James Heald – Wikimedia and Map work
https://goo.gl/WYZCB2
http://goo.gl/HNQq5e
https://goo.gl/VPgffL
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
https://goo.gl/djtm1b
Labs Symposium (2015)Geotagging maps
54,000 Maps
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More BL Labs ideas for inspiration!
http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs http://labs.bl.uk/Other+Uses+of+Collections
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Labs Symposium 2016
• Monday 7 November 2016, 0930 - 1730
• St Pancras, Conference Centre
• FREE, book now!
https://goo.gl/2twnr5
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Other Labs connected events in 2016
• 7 November – We Are Amused! A Night of Victorian Humour
– https://goo.gl/QASR6K• 12 November – The Way Ahead? Map Making and Digital Skills for
Geography Teaching
– https://goo.gl/f014YR• 26 November – Walking Tour
– https://goo.gl/ix1zl2