British Library Labs Presentation at the Open Cultural Data Symposium - Birkbeck

1 #bbkculturaldata @BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol #bldigital https://goo.gl/

British Library LabsOpening up the British Library’s Cultural Heritage DataMahendra Mahey

1445 – 1500, 24-25 November 2016,Open Cultural Data SymposiumVasari Research Centre for Art and Technology & Birkbeck Centre for Technology and PublishingBirkbeck University of London, Keynes Library,43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

https://goo.gl/

http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labsFunded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Collections – not just books!> 180* million items

> 0.8* m serial titles

> 8* m stamps

> 14* m books

> 3* m sound recordings> 4* m maps

> 1.6* m musical scores

> 0.3* m manuscripts

> 60* m patents

King’s Library *Estimates

#bldigital1-2 %* digitised

* estimate

Digitisation

Partnerships Commercial & Other Organisations

Amountincreasing rapidly

Bias in digitisation

http://goo.gl/bR9UJL Sample Generator

digitalData all around us!

Knowledge Quarter London55 knowledge organisations within 1 mile radius of Kings Cross, http://www.knowledgequarter.london

https://goo.gl/pGO7QY

digitalData all around us!

Curators / Researchers

Access & Reuse Group

Developers/ Technical

Project Board

Universities & wider

The World

ResearchersBL Labs

British Library

Digital Scholarship

DigitalContent

United Kingdom

Advisory Board

Digital Research

Stakeholders involved in Labs

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

Playbills, Books, Newspapers (includes OCR)

Digital collections and Datasets

British National Bibliography

http://bnb.data.bl.uk

http://sounds.bl.ukhttp://dml.city.ac.uk/

Music (Recordings & Sheet) & Soundshttp://goo.gl/frSMJtBroadcast News (TV and Radio)

http://goo.gl/cwThHw

http://goo.gl/pBkisZhttp://goo.gl/E8aRyQ

Usage dataImages, Manuscripts & Maps

http://www.qdl.qa/ Qatar Digital Library

http://idp.bl.uk/International Dunhuang

Project

Mapshttp://www.bl.uk/maps/

Hebrew Manuscriptshttp://goo.gl/4sbCp9

Flickr & Wikimedia Commons

https://goo.gl/LZRmaZ

only in Reading

Rooms due to ©

only on site due to

not online / available –

various storage devices,

personal data

online and open

British Library

online behind paywall

Challenges of Digital access at the Library

The Story of the Collection!

Collection

Curator

Who paid for the digitisation?

Who did the digitisation?Technology used

Born digital?

Published

Unpublished

Where is it?

Can it still be accessed?

Generates income

Reputational RiskLegalities

Political

Ego SurprisesMetadata

Old format not supported

What media was the digitisation done from?

Documentation

No Metadata

Messy Metadata

Still there?

Sometimes it’s complicatedBetter to know as much as possibleIf you want to open it up!

Finding Open Digital Collections• Curated?

Learn the story behind a collection!Is there a human who knows the ‘story’ about the collection, who wants it used, are there any surprises lurking?

• Where is it, is it accessible?

• Licensing?Internal Access and Reuse and Licensing Group (Risk assessment group – Strategic, Commercial, Copyright, Curatorial, Technical)

• Metadata available? What state is it and does it need cleaning?

https://goo.gl/Qjeqo1

https://goo.gl/Kfc4qc

Access & Reuse Group

Open Licensed Digital Content?

15% Openly Licensed

Working through

Breakdown by collection*Manuscripts 59%Books 9%Maps and Views 7%Newspapers 3%Archives and Records 3%Paintings, Prints and Drawings 2%

*Based on digitisation projects

Largest proportion of fundingPublic / Private Partnership

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 https://data.bl.uk

Launched November 7, 2016

Discussion list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CULTURAL-HERITAGE-DATASETS

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

Labs Engagement 2016• 18 institutions visited

• 5000 miles travelled

• 50 presentations & 25 workshops

• 900 researchers / artists/ entrepreneurs / educators

• 400 expressions of interest

• 40 researchers, artists, entrepreneurs & educators supported

• 60TB of data via post

• 9TB of data via data.bl.uk (Nov 16)

• Over half a billion views on BL Flickr Commons since launch in Dec 2013

It’s hard work!

Why and how 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…

only in Reading

Rooms due to ©

only on site due to

not online / available –

various storage devices,

personal data

online and open

British Library

online behind paywall

Digital access at the Library

Labs Residency Modelhttps://goo.gl/tvNVRB

http://goo.gl/ii0XHG

Some Lessons Learned and Challenges so far…• Everything starts from a conversation (external and internal)!

• Need to have several conversations with several stakeholders and tap into their tacit knowledge that isn’t always written down (esp. internal).

• It’s hard work at the beginning!

• Expectations change when researchers actually 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!

Some Lessons Learned and Challenges 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 (sometimes).

• Huge appetite to use digital content & data (e.g. Flickr Commons stats).

• Start small and simple, but think big!

• Create and embrace serendipity, stimulate the imagination, work fast, give it energy.

• Letting go of the emotional and psychological connection to “my” collection

• If digitised collections are not used, what is the point of digitising them?

• Fail faster (don’t be afraid), small experiments, reject perfectionism.

What did people

actually do?

Machine Learning / Reading

• Analogies to how humans read

• Machines acquire knowledge

• Use that knowledge to make sense of new situations

• Not well understood area…

The smell of soup!

Thanks to Memo Akten (@memotv on twitter) for the inspiration!

https://goo.gl/toq4Bo Nasreddin, 13th Century Turkish Sufi

http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/reading/smell1.htm

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

Mrs Folly

http://victorianhumour.tubmblr.com

Victorian Meme Machine (2014)

https://goo.gl/HMqDt3

Bob Nicholson

http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/Bob Nicholson interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Making History Programme:

http://goo.gl/fmV9ep

And telling jokes to the public:http://goo.gl/xIDRhz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0

Rob Walker, Victorian Mother-in-law Jokes

Victorian Comedy Night, 7 Nov 2016

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

Chartists Re-enactment London

Black Abolitionist Performances & their Presence in Britain (2016) – Hannah-Rose Murray

FrederickDouglass

EllenCraft

JosiahHenson

Ida B Wells

A Performance by Joe Williams &

Martelle Edinborough

http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/

Data-mining verse in 18th Century newspapersBL Labs Project 16-17, Jennifer Batt

https://goo.gl/5Akthd

The Magic of Openness!

• By opening collections up we are creating the possibility to have them used in ways only restricted by human imagination.

• Need to work hard to tell people about our Digital Collections and Data especially if not easy to find, creating serendipity and opportunities for use!

• Give plenty of examples to inspire use!

• Support and celebrate the use!

What can 65,000books tell us?

Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin

Just one open digital collection

Worked better for female faces than men’s

http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.comPosts image every 30 minutes

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

1,020,418 imagesneed tagging!

Creative uses of images

Face recognition

Mechanical Curator

http://goo.gl/qPPgxX

Flickr

Snipping out imagesfrom 65,000 Digitised Books*

>600,000,000 views

>15,500,000 tags

https://goo.gl/FgZ4HM

Work @ BL by Ben O’Steen, Labs

and Digital Research Team*Matt Prior - http://goo.gl/j29Tnx

Since Dec 2013

Tagging a million imagesIterative Crowdsourcing

http://goo.gl/j6fxac

Cardiff University’sLost Visions Project

http://www.metadatagames.org/

Metadata Games

James Heald

Mario Klingemann

Chico 45

Use computational methods

Human Tagger

Top British Library Flickr Commons Taggers

http://goo.gl/8SkfM1

Machine LearningSearch Engine

& Google Imagesearch

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

Adam Crymble (2015)Crowdsource Arcade

What if crowd sourcing

looked like this?

http://goo.gl/LBfJ4W

http://goo.gl/OH9pOZ

https://goo.gl/7z0j8p

30 mins talkLabs Symposium (2015)

https://goo.gl/SSRsdd

5 min interview (2015)

http://goo.gl/0APpE8

Game Jam

SherlockNet: Competition Winner 2016Karen Wang, Luda Zhao and Brian Do

Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Automatically Tag and Caption the British Library Flickr Commons 1 million Image Collection

Classify into one of 12 categories

>15 million tags added (total now 15.5 million overall)>100,000 experimental captions

bit.ly/sherlocknet

Pooled surrounding Optical Character Recognised

text on page from similar images

Used various publically available sources training sets.

Tags Captions

Artistic / Creative Works

http://goo.gl/dM8ieA

Mario Klingeman (2015)

http://www.crossroadsofcuriosity.com

David Normal 2014 and 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GRgj7Q5OM0

Rob Walker 2014

http://goo.gl/bNxGZZ

Kris Hoffman (2016)

https://goo.gl/QilqqT

Jiayi Chong 2016Ling Low 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcOP1E5bRE0https://www.facebook.com/RealmlandStory/

Paul Rand Pierce 2016

A Hat on the GroundSpells trouble

Tragic Looking Women44 Men who Look 44

(Notice the direction faces)

Mario Klingemann 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnxnmqnR7YGoogle Arts and Culture Lab – Experiments with Machine Learning

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/

Imaginary Cities – BL Labs Project 16-17Michael Takeo Magruder

https://goo.gl/4ARwTy

An artistic exploration seeking to create provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age from the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps

More ideas for inspiration!

http://labs.bl.uk/Ideas+for+Labs http://labs.bl.uk/Other+Uses+of+Collections

Contact us

Mahendra MaheyManager of BL Labs

mahendra.mahey@bl.uklabs@bl.uk

British Library Labs Presentation at the Open Cultural Data Symposium - Birkbeck

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