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www.llgc.org.uk/research

NLW RESEARCH PROGRAMME IN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

Prof Lorna HughesDr Owain RobertsRhian James

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Aims of the NLW Research Programme

UNDERSTANDING USE

Understand use of existing digital content

ENHANCING CONTENT

Identify ways of making existing digital content more useful for

research, teaching or community

engagement

DEVELOPING NEW DIGITAL CONTENT

develop new digital content that addresses

specific research or education needs, in

partnership with academics and other

key stakeholders

Bringing Digital Humanities to the Digital Library

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What is Digital Humanities?

o Enables ‘Digital Transformations’ - significant new type of ‘disruption’

– New modes of collaboration and communication

– Changes new paradigms of understanding and creates new knowledge by:

• Enabling research that would otherwise be impossible: addressing research questions that would have been impossible to resolve without digital

• Asking new research questions i.e. questions that are driven by insights that were only achievable through the use of new tools and methods

• Facilitating and enhancing existing research, by making research processes easier via the use of computational tools and methods

o Adds value to digital collections

– Digital collections that are used for scholarship are more likely to be sustained

o Involves extended communities of practice

– Stakeholders include: researchers across the arts and humanities and scientific disciplines, librarians, archivists, cultural heritage staff, funders, technical experts, data scientists….

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Digital humanities: a collaborative workspace

• Digital collections and project with digital outputs

• Researchers demand high-quality content

• Freely accessible content enables greater use and re-use

CONTENT

• “Scholarly primitives” to gain new knowledge: discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing digital content

METHODS

• Software to gather, analyze and/or process data

• To enable existing research processes to be conducted better and/or faster

• To enable researchers to ask, and answer, completely new research questions

TOOLS

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Research Programme in Digital Collections: Implementation

A collaborative research programme

• Around existing and emerging digital resources

• Engagement with academic communities, nationally and internationally, and existing and emerging communities of practice in Digital Humanities

• A focus for digital humanities in Wales

Building sustainable digital resources that have an impact on scholarship

• Develop strategic digitization initiatives addressing specific research needs

• Foster interoperability and re-use of collections

• Increasing value and impact of digital collections through use for research

Fostering engagement with the public

• Education, training and culture around NLW collections

• Knowledge exchange: digitization, digital asset management and use

Activities

• Research on digital collections development, use and discovery

• Project development, obtaining funding, developing new initiatives

• Collaborations with partners in Wales and beyond

• Outreach, dissemination and publications

• 4 x PhD students in collaboration with Universities in Wales

Develop an understanding of the use, value and impact of digital collections:

for research, education and public engagement

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Activities: NLW Research Programme in Digital Collections

PhD students developed in partnership with HEIs and based at NLW

Funded projects and activities with national and international collaborators

New projects in development, and funding applications

National and international networks

Programme of workshop, publications and activities around digital collections and research

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A brief history of the programme

January 2011 Programme Established withappointment of Chair in Digital Collections

October 20111st PhD students

recruited February 2012 JISC funds WW1 digitisation project

May 2013Appointment of 2 full-time

digital collections staff

Development of more significant collaborative projects

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Developing new research: PhD Studentships

• Partnership with HEI partners via collaborative doctoral awards

• All have focus on digital collections and digital humanities research methods

• PhD programme enables NLW collaboration on in-depth research into key collections, the digital dissemination of research outputs

• Opportunity for Library experts to collaborate and be involved in student research

• Recent AHRC block grants with CAWCS, and Wales/SW England consortium

2011-2014

Lloyd Roderick Aberystwyth University, KESS studentship'Kyffin Williams Online: presenting and interpreting traditional art in new contexts'Supervisors: Robert Meryck and Colin Cruise, Aberystwyth University; Lorna Hughes and Avril Jones, NLW

Callista WilliamsOpen University, AHRC studentship‘John Ballinger and the establishment of National Libraries’Supervisors: Paul Lawrence, Open Univeristy University; Lorna Hughes, NLW

2012-2015

Andrew Cusworth Open University, AHRC studentship‘Welsh Traditional Music: performance and reception as cultural history’Supervisors: Trevor Herbert, Open University; Lorna Hughes, NLW

Rhian James University of Wales studentship‘Digital humanities representations of Welsh wills online’

Supervisors: Lorna Hughes, NLW; David Parsons, University of Wales

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AHRC funded research projects at the University of Wales with digital humanities components at NLW

PI: David Parsons

• King’s College, London Department of Digital Humanities will develop KILN XML platform for digital scholarly edition of digital manuscripts

• NLW will host, implement and sustain the edition

• NLW will digitise medieval Saints manuscripts from our collection

• Output: a transferrable tool for creating online editions of NLW manuscripts as part of NLW Digital Library

The Cult of Saints in Wales: Medieval Welsh-language sources and their transmission

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Photospectral imaging of the Hengwrt Chaucer at NLW by team from Yale Computer Science Department

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http://ydc2.yale.edu/research-support/digitally-enabled-scholarship-medieval-manuscripts

Digitally enabled scholarship of medieval manuscripts: Using Photospectral images in the “Canvas Viewer”

http://manifests.ydc2.yale.edu/viewer.html

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Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig

Welsh experience of World War One

cymruww1.llgc.org.uk (Project Blog)

@CymruWW1

www.cymru1914.org

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www.walesatwar.org

Funded by

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Cymru 1900 / Wales 1900

Developing a a gazetteer of Welsh place names from OS 6 inch maps using a platform developed by Galaxy Zoo – launched October 2013

Crowdsourcing

Sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call: e.g., to help capture, systematize or analyse large amounts of data (“citizen science”)

cymru1900wales.org

@cymru1900wales

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In development: New technologies and collaborations to enhance existing digital content

• Welsh Wills Online - Collaborative bid to

AHRC to develop transcriptions and user

search interface for Welsh wills at NLW

• Ran workshop to gather input from

stakeholders Nov. 2011

• Investigating crowdsourcing for transcription

and semantic tagging of content for

representation and analysis

• Combination of AHRC research grant and

HLF funding to support community

transcription project

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‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’

Building new collaborations and partnerships around digital research:

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Europeana Cloud

Working with 26 European Partners, led by the European Library

@europeana_cloud #eu_cloud

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NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities

What?

To examine the practice of, and evidence

for, advanced ICT methods in the arts

and humanities

How?

Will develop activities and publications

around use of digital collections, ICT

tools and methods; foster collaboration

and engage researchers

Support from 13 Member Organizations:

• Bulgarian Academy of Science, Bulgaria• The Danish Council for Independent Research –

Humanities (FKK), Denmark• The Academy of Finland – Research Council for

Culture and Society• The National Foundation of Science, Higher

Education and Technological Development of the Republic of Croatia (NZZ), Croatia

• TGE ADONIS – National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany• Irish Research Council for the Humanities (IRCHSS),

Ireland• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

(NWO), Netherlands• Research Council of Norway (NCR), Norway• Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT),

Portugal• Swedish Research Council (VR), Sweden• Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), Switzerland• UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC),

United Kingdom

Chairs Lorna Hughes, UK (Chair)Fotis Jannidis, GermanySusan Schreibman, Ireland

@NeDiMAH

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Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH)

@DARIAHeu

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Digital Scholarship at NLW

• The programme has collaborated on successful applications of over £7,000,000 in grant funding, of which over £900,000 has been generated for the Library and over £2,000,000 (FEC) for University of Wales

• Need to move beyond project-itis, and embed outputs into the NLW Digital Library

• We need to better understand use of digital content by Library users to inform development of digital content

• Demonstrate how digital scholarship adds value to digital content

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www.llgc.org.uk/research

NLW RESEARCH PROGRAMME IN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

Prof Lorna HughesDr Owain RobertsRhian James