2. Digital Scholarship at British Library
“The production, use and
integration of digital content,
services and tools to facilitate
scholarship and research. It
allows research areas to be
investigated in new ways,
using new tools, leading to
new discoveries and analysis
to generate new
understanding”
Created in 2010, the department
works to enable….
• production of digital content
• sharing and integration of
digital content
• wider collaboration and
contribution around digital content
• complex analysis & facilitation of
new discoveries
-Adam Farquhar
Head of Digital Scholarship
www.bl.uk
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3. More than resource discovery…
• Libraries and archives have spent the
last two decades making digital assets
and harvesting born-digital objects.
• We can now do much more than use
technology to discover these digital
objects and embrace the opportunities
afforded by an intellectual turn toward
digitally-driven research
• So digital research is about:
– New tools
– New discoveries
– New understanding
www.bl.uk
“The emergence of the new
digital humanities [and
social sciences] 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 (2013)
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4. Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules
1.Integrity: access to digital
object as it has been created
2.Integration: different contents
and file formats available from a
single platform
3.Interoperability: different
programmes and operating
systems compatible with each
other
4.Instant access: unrestricted
access to material, especially
from mobile devices
5.Interaction: catalogues that
provide Web 2.0 features (blogs,
wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)
6.Information: comprehensive
metadata for fast and reliable
retrieval of content
7.Ingest of content: constant
upload of new digital content
www.bl.uk
8. Interpretation: digital content placed in
relation to other items in the collection
9.Innovation: material to be presented in
innovative ways
10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be
preserved for posterity
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5. Scalability: how to filter, find and analyse
the information I need?
• How many data is generated in
ONE day?
1. Twitter: 7 TB
2. Facebook: 10 TB
• By 2020 we will have
approximately 35 ZB (1.1 Trillion
GB) of Data available
www.bl.uk
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6. New Discoveries
• British Library Mechanical
Curator
• Extracting specific information
from large datasets: 65,000
digitise titles - 1,019,270
separate images or an average
of 15.8 per volume, needing just
over half a terabyte for storage.
Currently, 614,000 of these have
already been uploaded to Flickr
www.bl.uk
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7. Analysis of born digital content
• Ngram Viewer applied to
Web Archive collections
• Visualisation: Tag Cloud
www.bl.uk
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8. Personal Digital Archive (PDA)
• Extracting and archiving digital content
from personal devices
• Assist with capture, management,
description, and preservation of
personal digital collections to facilitate
access and content analysis
• Data analysis beyond documents
www.bl.uk
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9. Web Based Tools: some examples
• Wordle tool for generating “word clouds” from text
that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence
to words that appear more frequently in the source
text.
• Google Trends
Look at search trends in
Google. Browse by date, or look at top searches in
different categories to see how it trended over time and
location.
• Google Public Data Explorer
search
through databases from around the world, including
the World Bank, OECD, Eurostat and the U.S. Census
Bureau.
• Google Ngram Viewer
search keywords in
millions of books over the span of half a millennium, a
useful tool for finding trends over time. Ngram Viewer
also has advanced options, such as searching for
particular keywords as specific parts of speech or
combining keywords
www.bl.uk
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10. New Discoveries
• Crowd as a source
– UK Sound Map
• Open Access Software for
Research:
• http://sourceforge.net/
www.bl.uk
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11. Task time
During your break, find a flip-chart and consider one
of the following questions:
– What analytical tools(s) would you like to use/develop for your
research? (Bronte Room / Jan – March)
– What are the ethical considerations when using digital data?
(Dickens Room / April – June)
– Should all social science research be published openly? (Eliot
Room / July – Sept)
– How might computational methods change the nature of
collaboration in the social sciences? (Chaucer Room / Oct –
Dec)
Be prepared to offer a short response which captures the thoughts of your group!
www.bl.uk
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