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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