6. Experimenting for the sake of the
researcher:
British Library Labs - http://labs.bl.uk
(situated in the ‘Digital Scholarship’ dept.)
“Create, explore and foster new and innovative
ways to work with the British Library’s existing
digital content.”*
(*My paraphrasing)
7. Digital Research Team
• The Digital Research Team is a
cross-disciplinary mix of curators,
librarians and programmers
supporting the innovative use of
our digital collections.
• We explore how digital technologies
are re/shaping research and how this
informs how the library does its
business.
• We encourage and support
colleagues & scholars of all
disciplines to work innovatively with
and across the library’s diverse
digital content
8. Engaging with researchers
Informally (typically through direct questions):
“Can I work with all of the scanned books that
might be about 19th century European travel?”
“I like ‘distant reading’. I don’t know what it is
exactly, but it sounds useful. Does the library
offer that?”
9. Engaging with researchers
Formally (through our yearly ‘competitions’)
Researchers submit a proposal, entries are
shortlisted and two ‘winners’ are picked.
10. They win our time and effort
(and travel expenses and, so I’ve been told,
some actual money at the end of it.)
17. The *other* unifying themes to the
requests:
“I need tools to help me interpret the vast
amount of content you hold. You don’t provide
any but make it impossible for others to do so.”
“I want to work on broad sweeps of content,
rather than book-by-book.”
“API? what’s that? I don’t care. Just give me
the files.”
18. So, a challenge was born…
If a researcher was given direct file access to a
large amount of data, can it be useful?
One way to try it out, was to ‘eat our own
dogfood’
19. How has the depiction of
faces changed in books
over the 19th Century?
aka how well does modern photographic
face detection routines work on 19th C
illustrations?
22. 19C depictions of faces
• Likelyhood of detection:
• Female faces > Male
• Any common differences?
• Often drawn more symmetrically - male faces
were more likely to be exaggerated.
• Depiction is typically 'clean' and posed
• Fashion: beards, spectacles and hats -
different to the modern training data
23. There was something else though...
People on their way past would occasionally
pause and look over my shoulder.
Every day it dug up illustrations that surprised
me and the team around me.
So… I wonder if anyone else might be
surprised and intrigued by them too?
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/archive
24.
25.
26. Accessible?
• In theory, the books were accessible.
• In practice, it was a real challenge to find
anything viewable.
The chasm between digital and print:
http://samplegenerator.cloudapp.net
27. As this is all in the public domain
anyway...
What’s the harm in making it a bit more
accessible?
The Mechanical Curator twitter account has
only got a handful of people following it after
all. Maybe there isn’t much appetite for it?
28.
29.
30.
31. Creative Uses
• David Normal installation at Burning Man Festival
• “Moments” by Joe Bell
• Colouring-in Pages for Children
32.
33.
34. Research and Technology
• Mario Klingemann Pattern Recognition Software
• Collaborative PhD ‘A History of the Printed Image 1750-1850: Applying
Data Science Techniques to Printed Book Illustration’
• TSB Digitial Innovation Contest New tech for tracking Public Domain in
the Wild
37. Collaborations with Colleagues
• Inspired by Flickr, a Sound Archive series
• Maps will be fed into the next phase of the Georeferencer
38. Education
• Images included in Wikipedia Articles
• University of Minnesota English Literature Course Exercise on Tagging
• Art Therapy Courses
39. Impact:
Hard to measure!
Are image view stats really a good measure?
(163 million views as of 10/06/2014)
How about getting every image viewed once?
(done by 5/3/2014) at least 5 times? (only a
few hundred left 12/06/2014!)
40. What’s next?
Accessible is great, but can we make our data
more useful?
Not just images, but any of our researchable
digital content?
41. Microsoft Azure 4 Research award
This was awarded to British Library Labs at
the end of last year. Equivalent to $40,000 for
a years use!
This gave us capacity and storage for our
“unplanned” experiments.
Microsoft (and UCL) are joining in on a new
experiment...
42. The ‘British Library Big Data
Experiment’
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-
scholarship/2014/06/the-british-library-big-
data-experiment.html
“What can a group of UCL Big Data CS
students do when given access to cloud
computing, all of the book data and a focus
group of digital humanists?”
45. In summary
• Mechanical Curator is still tweeting, and
Flickr is still standing.
• We are experimenting with broader and
more direct access to our digital holdings.
• There is a demand for this content!
• Take the content to where people go.
– NB ‘where’ is entirely dependant on the current
culture of search and research. Right now, it’s
Google.
53. Image credits:
Title image: from https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11160768745
"Image taken from page 97 of 'The Mineral Baths of Bath. The Bathes of Bathe's Ayde in the reign of Charles 2nd as
illustrated by a drawing of the King's and Queen's Bath, signed 1675. Whereunto is annexed a Visit to Bath in the year
1675 by “A Person of Q" by The British Library (More from this book here:
https://www.flickr.com/search/?tags=sysnum000878624)
Slide 10 - Title: The costume of Yorkshire, Illustrator: "Walker, George; Havell, R & D (George Walker; R and D Havell)"
Provenance: London, 1814 Caption: Rape threshing https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/12459323374
Slide 11 - Image taken from page 3 of 'Worthy Workers. A monthly magazine for all, etc. [Edited and partly written by
Sarah Sutton.] no. 1. March 1886' https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11287891873
Slide 16 - Image taken from page 467 of '[The History of New South Wales, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson,
Pamaratta [sic], Sydney, and all its dependancies ... with the customs and manners of the natives, and an account of the
English colony, from its foundation https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11001417405
Slide 20 - Image from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/10/peeking-behind-the-curtain-of-the-
mechanical-curator.html
