Post on 19-Aug-2014
description
Surprising? It was an experiment, after all...
Ah, I’ve not said what ‘it’ is, have I?
Let’s start at the beginning...
[Insert clichéd time-travel effects here]
British Library Labsfunded by the Andrew K. Mellon foundation
(2013 - …)
⇒ Mahendra Mahey and Ben O’Steen
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)
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
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?”
Engaging with researchers
Formally (through our yearly ‘competitions’)
Researchers submit a proposal, entries are shortlisted and two ‘winners’ are picked.
They win our time and effort
(and travel expenses and, so I’ve been told, some actual money at the end of it.)
2013 Competition winnershttp://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs
Pieter Francois
2013 Competition winnershttp://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs
Dan Norton - “Mixing the Library. Information Interaction and the DJ”
Can a researcher record a session drawing from digital objects, in the same way a DJ does with music tracks?
The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests:
The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests:
Give us EVERYTHING!
Fetch!
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.”
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’
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?
Success? Not really.• Likelyhood of detection:
• Female faces > Male
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
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
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
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?
Creative Uses
• David Normal installation at Burning Man Festival• “Moments” by Joe Bell • Colouring-in Pages for Children
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
Crowdsourcing & Apps
• Metadata Games• Wikipedia Synoptic Index
Tutorials
• Using Photoshop to Up-res images• Converting images to vector graphics
Collaborations with Colleagues
• Inspired by Flickr, a Sound Archive series • Maps will be fed into the next phase of the Georeferencer
Education
• Images included in Wikipedia Articles• University of Minnesota English Literature Course Exercise on Tagging• Art Therapy Courses
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!)
What’s next?
Accessible is great, but can we make our data more useful?
Not just images, but any of our researchable digital content?
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...
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?”
“Playing with assurance”
Using concepts from party games like “Wits and Wagers” to validate and assure incoming tags.
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.
Now for one, final experiment…
Thank you!Questions?
Thank you for your time(Autographs by reception, £10 each)
[drops microphone]
[audience goes wild]
[this slide intentionally left blank]
Maybe just ending it with the useful details?
Contact:
ben.osteen@bl.uk@benosteen
Links:http://labs.bl.ukhttp://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com http://flickr.com/photos/britishlibraryhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
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