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British Library Labs Roadshow, Liverpool John Moores University, 22 March 2017

British Library Labs Roadshow, Liverpool John Moores University, 22 March 2017

Live notes, so an incomplete, partial record of what actually happened.

Tags: historyukdig

My asides in {}

Stream/Deck:


Mahendra Mahey, What are the British Library Labs?

Deck

BL partly solved external access issue via use of a Citrix server .. data.bl.uk work to be ramped up later this year .. embracing a philosophy of not being perfect


James Baker, Who is the Digital Historian?

My deck


BL Labs Projects

Dr Bob Nicholson ‘Remixing Digital Archives: The Victorian Joke Database’

{on collection - here jokes - that are evade traditional categorisation}

How do we separate things we are interested in from wider contexts?

Jokes are really difficult to find with both our conventional methods: browsing and search.

How do we extract from digital archives?

Working with Labs exposed Bob to the kinds of challenges he had no idea existed.

How can crowdsourcing be ethical?

Dr Jennifer Batt 'Datamining for verse in eighteenth-century newspapers'

Poems in newspapers underused by literary historians ... by 1750 at least 100 poems a month appearing in the newspaper press .. identifying poems by their shape on the page .. identifying prose by the % of capital letters at the start of a line: but let down by the OCR being rubbish at capital letters and adding rouge punctuation (so move to looking at whether first or second character a capital letter)


Joanna Taylor, Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities

@lakesdeepmap project: history, eng lit, corpus linguistics .. projects combines GIS and corpus linguistics to figure out how they might work together and in the service of close reading.

Two things: 1) approach 2) opportunities approach has created

Deep mapping is the topic of the next paper by @JoTayl0r0.How can we create maps that show social&cultural histories of place? #historyukdig

— History UK (@history_uk) March 22, 2017
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Geospatial Innovation project is more interested in lit than history (the latter of which was the focus of the Spatial Humanities project) .. on the Lake District, 80 texts, 1622-1900, 36k place names found via geoparsing (using Edinburgh geoparser) then custom made gazeteer to find coordinates (just over 60% accuracy) .. collocation 25 words either side .. non-standardised place names a MASSIVE issue: eg 19 variations of Lodore (a waterfall) ..

Challenges of historical place names. Not standardised. 19 versions of Lodore #historyukdig pic.twitter.com/P7tQ3BR1Pt

— Helen Rogers (@helenrogers19c) March 22, 2017
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

.. how does sound make place? R. Murray Schafer, sound studies scholar, water is important (especially pre-the combustion engine, main loud noise people heard) .. distinguishing between people talking about sound and noise, broadly speaking in terms of sound collocates: noise bad, sound good.

GIS map emphasises distant reading which close reading allows us to follow up on in more detail. Reading the poem reminds us of the necessity of looking closely when we start with macro-analysis.


Some admin...

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