How to find 50,000 maps in a haystack of 1,000,000 images; geolocate them, and categorise them ... on a budget of no or not many euros. The 1,000,000 image collection extracted by the British Library from 19th-century books is a wonderful resource — but one Wikimedia Commons felt it could not accept, other than through exhaustive hand-uploading, because without good metadata about the subject of the image at the image level, the images could not be made categorisable and so would simply not be discoverable. This talk describes a joint BL/Wikimedia initiative to systematically go through the images, which discovered 50,000 maps in eight weeks. Geo-location of these map images then makes it possible to use automated tools to help group them and organise them and categorise them in different ways, the key step to making them valuable and reusable. (5-minute "ignite" talk, given at the start of Europeana Tech 2015)

1. Case Study: Mapping the Maps
How to find 50,000 maps in a haystack of 1,000,000 images;
geolocate them, and categorise them
... on a budget of no not many euros.
James Heald,
Wikimedia volunteer
@heald_j
Kimberly Kowal,
British Library
Kimberly.Kowal@bl.uk

2. 1,000,000 images
Fantastic, but …

3. Very limited metadata
Wikimedia said no bulk upload

4. Volunteer response…
Create a subject index by book…

5. … encouraging images to be uploaded by the book
(20,000 so far – mostly by one man)

6. … however, manual categorisation of images is
very very time-consuming.

7. Could anything be done more automatically…

8. Maps: natural classification, given co-ordinates
Could anything be done more automatically…

9. So: find the maps on Flickr,
and tag them…

10. … using the index to drive the process
31 Oct

11. … using the index to drive the process
31 Oct

12. … using the index to drive the process
31 Oct

13. … using the index to drive the process
03 Nov

14. … using the index to drive the process
17 Dec

15. … using the index to drive the process
19 Dec

16. But how many maps were there ?
Oct 31

17. But how many maps were there ?
Oct 31

18. But how many maps were there ?
Nov 2

19. But how many maps were there ?
Nov 7

20. But how many maps were there ?
Nov 14

21. But how many maps were there ?
Dec 1

22. But how many maps were there ?
Dec 10

23. But how many maps were there ?
Dec 17

24. But how many maps were there ?
Dec 28

25. -- including 20,000 found independently by @Quasimondo,
machine-assisted using his own pattern recognition methods
50,000 maps in all:
classmark detailed
totals index index
------ ---------- -----------
misc 16074 14091 1983
Europe 13136 6254 6882
British Isles 7191 269 6922
North America 6758 1524 5234
USA 5782 1209 4573
Asia 2736 1280 1456
Africa 2300 1075 1225
South America 895 659 236

26. Geo-location,
using the Klokan/BL Georeferencer
(Free alternatives are also available)
Next step:

27. 10x more images than
the BL has ever attempted before
Next step:

28. Success allows the old map to be laid over
the top of a modern one

29. Pilot run of 3,000 completed

30. Now characterised by location …
Pilot run of 3,000 completed

31. ... and scale

32. All that is needed to
identify individual continents …

33. … countries …

34. … nation …
… nations …

35. … cities …

36. … and beyond
… and beyond.

37. Ready to be uploaded to Wikimedia

38. Ready to be uploaded to Wikimedia
…. using Europeana’s GlamWiki Uploader

39. Ready to be uploaded to Wikimedia
…. using Europeana’s GlamWiki Uploader
THANK YOU, Europeana!