Digital Research at
the British Library Why we are here, what we
have, what we can do for you
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
www.bl.uk 2
www.bl.uk 3
“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
www.bl.uk 4
Reading the Riots (LSE, Guardian)
– How misinformation spread on
Twitter during a time of crisis
– 2.6 million tweets analysed
– Volunteers used to help
categorise data
– Images compared
– Sentiment analysis deployed
Interdisciplinary, collaborative effort
– Proctor (Warwick), Vis
(Sheffield), Voss (St Andrews).
– Reading the riots on Twitter :
methodological innovation for the
analysis of big data (2013)
© Guardian
www.bl.uk 5
discipline camp and
camps sentence
Ngram Viewer ©
www.bl.uk 6
‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’ Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)
www.bl.uk 7
© Michael Takeo Magruder
www.bl.uk 8
© Kari Kraus
Kari Kraus (Maryland), Signal & Noise: ENF as part of the sound archivist's
toolkit, Digital Humanities 2014
www.bl.uk 10
Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.
www.bl.uk 11
www.bl.uk 12
www.bl.uk 13
“The emergence of the new digital
humanities isn’t an isolated academic
phenomenon. The institutional and
disciplinary changes are part of a
larger cultural shift, inside and outside
the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence
and convergence in technology and
culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital
Humanities (2014)
www.bl.uk 14
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www.bl.uk 19
A Web of Rights, British Library, 19 February 2015 http://bldigicon7.eventbrite.co.uk/
www.bl.uk 20
www.bl.uk 21
Thank you! @j_w_baker
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/
www.bl.uk 22
Prototype Digital Research project task
– Get into groups
• 6 groups arranged by birthday
• Jan/Feb = Group 1; Mar/April = Group 2; et cetera.
• Find the flip chart that represents your group number
– Use the cards to come up with a potential project idea
that is:
• A combination of tool cards and collection cards (you all have different ones!)
• Draws on what has been talked about this morning
• Uses the best of the skills and backgrounds your group can offer
• Thinks big rather
– Feedback after lunch
• No more than 2 minutes – including challenges you may face
• I will be timing!
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