Digital Curator Mia Ridge writes: in this guest post, Dr Giles Bergel describes some experiments with the Library's digitised images...

The University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group has been working with a number of British Library curators to apply computer vision technology to their collections. On April 5 of this year I was invited by BL Digital Curator Dr. Mia Ridge to St. Pancras to showcase some of this work and to give curators the opportunity to try the tools out for themselves.  

Visual Geometry’s VISE tool matching two identical images from separate books digitised for the British Library’s Two Centuries of Indian Print project.

Computer vision - the extraction of meaning from images - has made considerable strides in recent years, particularly through the application of so-called ‘deep learning’ to large datasets. Cultural collections provide some of the most interesting test-cases for computer vision researchers, due to their complexity; the intensity of interest that researchers bring to them; and to their importance for human well-being. Can computers see collections as humans do? Computer vision is perhaps better regarded as a powerful lens rather than as a substitute for human curation. A computer can search a large collection of images far more quickly than can a single picture researcher: while it will not bring the same contextual understanding to bear on an image, it has the advantage of speed and comprehensiveness. Sometimes, a computer vision system can surprise the researcher by suggesting similarities that weren’t readily apparent.

As a relatively new technology, computer vision attracts legitimate concerns about privacy, ethics and fairness. By making its state of the art tools freely available, Visual Geometry hope to encourage experimentation and responsible use, and to enlist users to help determine what they can and cannot do. Cultural collections provide a searching test-case for the state of the art, due to their diversity as media (prints, paintings, stamped images, photographs, film and more) each of which invite different responses. One BL curator made a telling point by searching the BBC News collection with the term 'football': the system was presented with images previously tagged with that word that related to American, Gaelic, Rugby and Association football. Although inconclusive due to lack of sufficiently specific training data, the test asked whether a computer could (or should) pick the most popular instances; attempt to generalise across multiple meanings; or discern separate usages. Despite increases in processing power and in software methods, computers' ability to generalise; to extract semantic meaning from images or texts; and to cope with overlapping or ambiguous concepts remains very basic.  

Other tests with BL images have been more immediately successful. Visual Geometry's Traherne tool, developed originally to detect differences in typesetting in early printed books, worked well with many materials that exhibit small differences, such as postage stamps or doctored photographs. Visual Geometry's Image Search Engine (VISE) has shown itself capable of retrieving matching illustrations in books digitised for the Library's Indian Print project, as well as certain bookbinding features, or popular printed ballads. Some years ago Visual Geometry produced a search interface for the Library's 1 Million Images release. A collaboration between the Library's Endangered Archives programme and Oxford researcher David Zeitlyn on the archive of Cameroonian studio photographer Jacques Toussele employed facial recognition as well as pattern detection. VGG's facial recognition software works on video (BBC News, for example) as well as still photographs and art, and is soon to be freely released to join other tools under the banner of the Seebibyte Project.    

I'll be returning to the Library in June to help curators explore using the tools with their own images. For more information on the work of Visual Geometry on cultural collections, subscribe to the project's Google Group or contact Giles Bergel.      

Dr. Giles Bergel is a digital humanist based in the Visual Geometry Group in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.  

The event was supported by the Seebibyte project under an EPSRC Programme Grant EP/M013774/1

 

As part of our Digital Conversations series, we invite you to join us for an evening discussing how Indigenous communities are using new technologies to preserve and promote their culture; this takes place on Tuesday 22 May, 18:30 - 20:30, in the British Library Knowledge Centre, to book a ticket go here.

Various topics and examples of how digital platforms are used by communities across the world will be covered. Including crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, apps, Etsy, videogames and social media.  Chaired by Niamh Moore our panel includes the following speakers:

 

• Robin Llwyd ab Owain, Wikimedia UK Wales Manager, will speak about the work done by the Wikipedia community supporting Celtic and Indigenous Languages, including the Celtic Knot Wikipedia language conferences 

 

• Gloria O’Neill, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cook Inlet Tribal Council and Upper One Games, the first indigenous-owned video game developer and publisher in the United States, is here in person to discuss BAFTA winning game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), which shares Alaska Native culture and values with the world at large

 

• Felicity Wright who has over twenty years experience in working with non-profit Aboriginal-owned social enterprises. Currently she works for Injalak Arts in Gunbalanya, Australia, who sell their art and craft work to global audiences from their Etsy store. This will be a recorded presentation introduced by Jo Pilcher, University of Brighton, whose PhD research is about Aboriginal Australian textile production in the Northern Terrority

 

• Michael Wynne, Digital Applications Librarian, will give an overview of Mukurtu, a free, mobile, and open source content management system platform, which is built with indigenous communities

We are looking forward to a fascinating and lively discussion, so please prepare your questions for the panel! If you can't attend in person, please follow #BLdigital for the twitter stream during the event.

Game play scene from Never Alone featuring the owl man

This event is sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. It will include a combination of in-person, Skype and pre-recorded presentations. This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom, on twitter as @miss_wisdom.

Dr Mia Ridge writes: in 2017, we made XML and image files from a four-year, AHRC-funded project: The Italian Academies 1525-1700 available through the Library's open data portal. The original data structure was quite complex, so we would be curious to hear feedback from anyone reusing the converted form for research or visualisations.

In this post, Dr Lisa Sampson, Reader in Early Modern Italian Studies at UCL, and Dr Jane Everson, Emeritus Professor of Italian literature, RHUL, provide further information about the project...

New research opportunities for students of Renaissance and Baroque culture! The Italian Academies database is now available for download. It's in a format called XML which represents the original structure of the database.

This dedicated database results from an eight-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, and provides a wealth of information on the Italian learned academies. Around 800 such institutions flourished across the peninsula over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, making major contributions to the cultural and scientific debates and innovations of the period, as well as forming intellectual networks across Europe. This database lists a total of 587 Academies from Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Siena, Rome, Naples, and towns and cities in southern Italy and Sicily active in the period 1525-1700. Also listed are more than 7,000 members of one or more academies (including major figures like Galileo, as well as women and artists), and almost 1,000 printed works connected with academies held in the British Library. The database therefore provides an essential starting point for research into early modern culture in Italy and beyond. It is also an invitation to further scholarship and data collection, as these totals constitute only a fraction of the data relating to the Academies.

Laura Terracina, nicknamed Febea, of the Accademia degli Incogniti, Naples

The database is designed to permit searches from many different perspectives and to allow easy searching across categories. In addition to the three principal fields – Academies, People, Books – searches can be conducted by title keyword, printer, illustrator, dedicatee, censor, language, gender, nationality among others. The database also lists and illustrates the mottoes and emblems of the Academies (where known) and similarly of individual academy members. Illustrations from the books entered in the database include frontispieces, colophons, and images from within texts.

Emblem of the Accademia degli Intronati, Siena

The database thus aims to promote research on the Italian Academies in disciplines ranging from literature and history, through art, science, astronomy, mathematics, printing and publishing, censorship, politics, religion and philosophy.

The Italian Academies project which created this database began in 2006 as a collaboration between the British Library and Royal Holloway University of London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council and led by Jane Everson. The objective was the creation of a dedicated resource on the publications and membership of the Italian learned Academies active in the period between 1525 and 1700. The software for the database was designed in-house by the British Library and the first tranche of data was completed in 2009 listing information for academies in four cities (Naples, Siena, Bologna and Padua). A second phase, listing information for many more cities, including in southern Italy and Sicily, developed the database further, between 2010 and 2014, with a major research grant from the AHRC and collaboration with the University of Reading.

The exciting possibilities now opened up by the British Library’s digital data strategy look set to stimulate new research and collaborations by making the records even more widely available, and easily downloadable, in line with Open Access goals. The Italian Academies team is now working to develop the project further with the addition of new data, and the incorporation into a hub of similar resources.

The Academies Project at the Italian Academy Columbia team members welcome feedback on the records and on the adoption of the database for new research.

The original database remains accessible at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/ItalianAcademies/Default.aspx 

An introduction to the database, its aims, contents and objectives is available both at this site and at the new digital data site: https://data.bl.uk/iad/

Jane E. Everson, Royal Holloway University of London

Lisa Sampson, University College, London

 

(This post was updated to correct a broken link on 11 July 2022)

They're all topics we've discussed in the British Library's Digital Scholarship Reading Group. Digital Curator Mia Ridge explains...

A few months after I submitted my PhD and joined the Library's Digital Scholarship team, I realised that it'd be hard to keep up with trends in digital scholarship unless I made a special effort. I also figured I couldn't be the only person in that situation. I've always loved a reading group, so a Digital Scholarship Reading Group seemed a good way to read and discuss at least one topical article a month and meet other people in the Library at the same time.

It'd be boring if it was just members of the Digital Scholarship team violently agreeing with each other, so after a few pilot sessions, I organised posters for staff notice boards to help make it clear that all were welcome, regardless of job title or seniority. After a year or so, we changed the time to allow for more people who work set shifts to attend.

There's a bit of admin each month  - whoever's coordinating the group for that month will update the standing calendar entry, post upcoming topics on our internal staff network, and sometimes ask the Internal Communications team to include them in newsletters.

We usually have eight to ten people turn up, but our last session had over 20 people! This may have been because we had a special guest speaker (thank you, Jane Winters!), because it was about digital humanities rather than digital scholarship, or the result of working with the Internal Comms team to send an all-staff email invitation to attend. The discussion is richest when we have people from a range of different departments and disciplines. A nice side-effect of encouraging attendance from across the Library is learning a little more about people's roles in other departments.

I've experimented with different ways of selecting articles - an internal poll seemed to work well - and I love it when an attendee suggests a topic from their field, especially as quite a few Library staff are working towards formal degrees outside work. Other discussions are inspired by topics in the news or questions we've been asked as digital curators. I've experimented with length and tone, from academic, peer-reviewed articles to news or magazine articles and videos. Providing a few options for a particular topic seems to work well, as when we had a TED talk, scholarly article or peer-reviewed technical article on the same topic of bias in algorithms.

We usually meet on the first Tuesday of each month.Thanks to everyone who's added to the conversation, suggested a topic or article, or coordinated the discussion - I hope you've all enjoyed it as much as I have! Get in touch (@mia_out or via bl.uk/digital) if you'd like to know more or to suggest a topic or article.

Here's what we've met to discuss so far:

Allington, Daniel, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia, ‘Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities’, Los Angeles Review of Books <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/>

Boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon’, Information, Communication & Society, 15 (2012), 662–79 <https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878>

Brügger, Niels, ‘Digital Humanities in the 21st Century: Digital Material as a Driving Force’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 010 (2016)

Buolamwini, Joy, ‘How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms’ <https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithms>

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru, ‘Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification’, 15

Deloit, Corine, Neil Wilson, Luca Costabello, and Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche, ‘The British National Bibliography: Who Uses Our Linked Data?’ (presented at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016) <http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2016/paper/viewFile/420/471>

Digital Humanities Research, Teaching and Practice in the UK Landscape Report, 2017

Dinsman, Melissa, ‘The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Bethany Nowviskie - Los Angeles Review of Books’, Los Angeles Review of Books <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-bethany-nowviskie/>

Drucker, Johanna, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’, 5 (2011) <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html>

Earhart, Amy E., and Toniesha L. Taylor, ‘Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/72>

Elford, Jana Smith, ‘Recovering Women’s History with Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Fabian News’, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 6 (2016), 191–213 <https://doi.org/10.5325/jmodeperistud.6.2.0191>

Evans, Meredith R., ‘Modern Special Collections: Embracing the Future While Taking Care of the Past’, New Review of Academic Librarianship, 21 (2015), 116–28 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2015.1040926>

Gilliland, Anne, and Andrew Flinn, ‘Community Archives: What Are We Really Talking About?’, in Keynote Speech Delivered at the CIRN Prato Community Informatics Conference, 2013 <http://ccnr.infotech.monash.edu/assets/docs/prato2013_papers/gilliland_flinn_keynote.pdf>

Graham, Shawn, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart, ‘Putting Big Data to Good Use: Historical Case Studies’, in The Historian’s Macroscope: Big Digital History, 2014 <http://www.themacroscope.org/?page_id=599>

Grimmelmann, James, ‘The Virtues of Moderation’, TECHNOLOGY Vol., 17 (2015), 68

Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 1990, 30–78 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/650933>

LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, ‘Deep Learning’, Nature, 521 (2015), 436–44 <https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539>

Lohr, Steve, ‘Facial Recognition Is Accurate, If You’re a White Guy’, The New York Times, 14 February 2018, section Technology <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html>

Moravec, Michelle, ‘Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives’, Australian Feminist Studies, 32 (2017), 186–201 <https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357006>

Prescott, Andrew, ‘Searching for Dr. Johnson: The Digitisation of the Burney Newspaper Collection’, 2018, 49–71 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004362871_004>

Rawson, Katie, and Trevor Muñoz, ‘Against Cleaning’, 2016 <http://www.curatingmenus.org/articles/against-cleaning/>

 

Self, Will, and William Watkins, ‘There Will Be Blood’, Times Higher Education (THE), 14 July 2016 <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/digital-editions/14-july-2016-digital-edition>

 

Standing, Susan, and Craig Standing, ‘The Ethical Use of Crowdsourcing’, Business Ethics: A European Review, n/a-n/a <https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12173>

Verwayen, Harry, Julia Fallon, Julia Schellenberg, and Panagiotis Kyrou, Impact Playbook for Museums, Libraries and Archives (Europeana Foundation, 2017)

Winner, Langdon, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus, 1980, 121–136 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652>

Witmore, Michael, ‘Latour, the Digital Humanities, and the Divided Kingdom of Knowledge’, New Literary History, 47 (2016), 353–75 <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0018>

Hello all! My name is Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, and I’m the new Digital Curator for Asian and African collections at the British Library. One of the core remits of the Digital Scholarship team is to enable and encourage the reuse of the Library’s digital collections. When it comes to Asian and African collections, there are always interesting projects and initiatives going on. One is the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, which just started a second phase in March 2018 – a project with a strong Digital Humanities strand led by Digital Curator Tom Derrick. Another example is a collaborative transcription project, supporting the transcription of handwritten historical Arabic scientific works for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) research with the help of volunteers.

To give a bit of a background about myself and how I got to the Library: I’m an archaeologist and heritage professional by education and practice, with a PhD in Heritage Studies from University College London (2013). As a field archaeologist I used to record large quantities of excavation-related data – all manually, on paper. This was probably the first time I saw the potential of applying digital tools and technologies to record, manage and share archaeological data.

My first meaningful engagement with archaeological data and digital technologies started in 2005, when I joined the Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group (IPAWG) to create a database of all archaeological sites surveyed or excavated by Israel in the West Bank since its occupation in 1967, and its linking with a Geographic Information System (GIS), enabling the spatial visualisation and querying of this data for the first time. The research potential of this GIS-linked database proved so great, that I’ve decided to further explore it in a PhD dissertation. My dissertation focused on archaeological databases covering the occupied West Bank, and I was especially interested in the nature of archaeological records and the way they reflect particular research interests and heritage management priorities, as well as variability in data quality, coverage, accuracy and reliability.

Following my PhD I stayed at UCL Institute of Archaeology as a post-doctoral research associate, and participated in a project called MicroPasts, a UCL-British Museum collaboration. This project used web-based, crowdsourcing methods to allow traditional academics and other communities in archaeology to co-produce innovative open datasets. The MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform provided a great variety of projects through which people could contribute – from transcribing British Museum card catalogues, through tagging videos on the Roman Empire, to photomasking images in preparation for 3D modelling of museum objects.

With the main phase of the MicroPasts project coming to an end, I joined the British Library as Digital Curator (Polonsky Fellow) for the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project. This role allowed me to create and implement a digital strategy for engaging, accessing and promoting a specific digitised collection, working closely with curators and the Digital Scholarship team. My work included making the collection digitally accessible (on data.bl.uk, working with British Library Labs) and encouraging open licensing, creating a website, promoting the collection in different ways, researching available digital methods to explore and exploit collections in novel ways, and implementing tools such as an online catalogue records viewer (TEI XML), OpenRefine, and 3D modelling.

Add. MS 4709 by British Library on Sketchfab

A 6-months backpacking trip to Asia unexpectedly prepared me for my new role at the Library. I was delighted to join – or re-join – the Library’s Digital Research team, this time as Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections. I find these collections especially intriguing due to their diversity, richness and uniqueness. These include mostly manuscripts, printed books, periodicals, newspapers, photographs and e-resources from Africa, the Middle East (including Qatar Digital Library), Central Asia, East Asia (including the International Dunhuang Project), South Asia, SE Asia – as well as the Visual Arts materials.

I’m very excited to join the Library’s Digital Research team work alongside Neil Fitzgerald, Nora McGregor, Mia Ridge and Stella Wisdom and learn from their rich experience. Feel free to get in touch with us via [email protected] or Twitter - @BL_AdiKS for me, or @BL_DigiSchol for the Digital Scholarship team.