digital research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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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

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Page 1: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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

Page 3: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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

Page 4: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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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

Page 5: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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discipline camp and

camps sentence

Ngram Viewer ©

Google

Page 6: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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‘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)

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© Michael Takeo Magruder

Page 8: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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© Kari Kraus

Kari Kraus (Maryland), Signal & Noise: ENF as part of the sound archivist's

toolkit, Digital Humanities 2014

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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)

Page 14: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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Page 17: Digital Research – why we are here, what we have, what we can do for you

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© Figshare

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A Web of Rights, British Library, 19 February 2015 http://bldigicon7.eventbrite.co.uk/

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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!