101 this is digital scholarship staff training
TRANSCRIPT
101 This is Digital Scholarship
Nora McGregorCurator, Digital Research
@ndalyrose
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10:00 A Brief Intro to the Digital Research Team
10:15 Digital Scholarship in Practice: Tools of the Trade
11:00 How the DRT supports Digital Scholarship practice
12:15 Group Activity & Discussion
13:00 Close
Timetable
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• Defining Digital Scholarship from the BL perspective
• Understand some of the tools of the trade
• Text, Data Mining & Data Visualisation• Georeferencing & Digital Mapping• Crowdsourcing & Collaboration
• Consider how this impacts the Library’s work
Today’s Main Agenda
A Brief Intro to the Digital Research Team
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• The Digital Research Team is
a cross-disciplinary mix of curators, researchers, 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.
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We work with colleagues across the library to get content into digital form and online.
We engage deeply with the digital research community to raise their awareness about the materials that we can make available….as well as improve our understanding of their emerging practices and needs.
We strive to increase the capacity of the library by
providing training and support for our colleagues.
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Using computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms…. Geotagging
Data Visualisation
Data Mining
Georeferencing
Digital Mapping
Crowdsourcing
Text mining
Collaboration
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"The production, use and integration of digital content, services and tools to facilitate scholarship and research.
Allow research areas to be investigated in new ways, using new tools, leading to new discoveries and analysis to generate new understanding."
Adam Farquhar Head of Digital ScholarshipBritish Library
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Example: Mapping the Republic of Letters & Video
https://youtu.be/nw0oS-AOIPE?t=8s
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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)
Digital Scholarship In Practice: Tools of the Trade
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Text, Data Mining & Data Visualisation
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Text & Data Mining
• Deriving information from and finding patterns in texts and large datasets.
Data Visualization
• '…showing quantitative and qualitative information so that a viewer can see patterns, trends, or anomalies, constancy or variation, in ways that other forms – text and tables – do not allow.' (Michael Friendly)
• '…interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition' (Card et al)
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What does this mean for the Library?• We have millions of texts, pages and bibliographic records….what can
they tell us? Today's scholars have the ability to realistically answer that question….if we help them!
• GLAM records often contain uncertainty and fuzziness (e.g. date ranges, multiple values, uncertain or unavailable information)—We often have the unique expertise in deciphering this and need to bring this knowledge to bear.
• Keeping our data clean, at the point of creation, and having the skills to align it with other datasets is important to enabling its widespread research use. Crowdsourcing can also help here for historical stuff.
• Making it more accessible by providing it in machine readable formats scholars can use and negotiating open licensing.
Courses: 107 Data Visualisation ,118 Cleaning Up Data and 109 Information Integration
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Trends in publishing of printed music in 16th & 17th Centuries
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Georeferencing & Digital Mapping
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Georeferencing & Digital Mapping
• Georeferencing relates information (documents, datasets, maps, images) to geographic locations through place names and place codes or geospatial referencing (longitude and latitude coordinates).
• Digital Mapping is creating a front end interface to display data associated with a geographic location, data which is typically stored in a geographic information system (GIS).
“Digital maps [can] contain, in addition to quantitative data, photographs, video, audio, archival records, even relevant bibliographies….[can] synthesize material from various disciplines, reveal patterns and relationships in both time and space, and provide a dynamic new way to conduct and share research”.
(Humanities Gone Spatial)
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What does this mean for the Library?
• We can provide tools for georeferencing our material and ensuring our objects have proper place names & geospatial coordinates.
• Every object its location!
• If we provide this data in a way that others may make easy use of them we’ll greatly increase access and awareness to our collections.
Course: 108 Georeferencing and Digital Mapping
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Crowdsourcing & Collaboration
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Crowdsourcing & Collaboration
• 'The act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of peple in the form of an open call' Wired, 2006
• Or, using cognitive surplus: 'the spare processing of millions of human brains'.
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• It can be a mechanism for us to create new collections relevant to our researchers, to turn our existing collections into useful datasets.
• The Library operates at a huge scale as business as usual, crowdsourcing helps us tackle some of this work in order to be more strategic about applying our limited resources to the more difficult stuff.
• Enhances discoverability of our digital collections while creating engaging experiences for the public, meaningful form of participation.
• Allows us to build relationships with external specialist expertise, and be an avenue for sharing our own (Wikipedia)!
Course: 105 Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums & Archives
What does this mean for the Library?
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• BL Example:
How the DRT supports Digital Scholarship practice
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We work with colleagues across the library to get content
into digital form and online.
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We engage deeply with the research community to raise their awareness about the materials that we can make available....
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….as well as improve our understanding of the emerging practices in the digital research community.
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….as well as improve our understanding of the emerging practices in the digital research community.
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We strive to increase the capacity of the library by
providing training and support for our colleagues.
Group Activity: Where do WE ALL fit into the Digital Research process?
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Some considerations
• We’re essentially in the business of unifying the human cultural record and providing the best possible access to it.
• What we choose to collect, preserve, digitise and how we choose to
provide access has an impact on their value to researchers.
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Question 1: In what ways might my work link in with/impact that of a digital researcher?
Question 2: In what ways could the area I work support/improve the experience for digital researchers?
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Thank you!
Twitter:@ndalyrose
Team Email:[email protected]
Team Blog:http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/