Nominate a British Library staff member or a team that has done something exciting, innovative and cool with the British Library’s digital collections or data.

The 2018 British Library Labs Staff Award, now in its third year, gives recognition to current British Library staff who have created something brilliant using the Library’s digital collections or data. 

Perhaps you know of a project that developed new forms of knowledge, or an activity that delivered commercial value to the library. Did the person or team create an artistic work that inspired, stimulated, amazed and provoked? Do you know of a project developed by the Library where quality learning experiences were generated using the Library’s digital content? 

You may nominate a current member of British Library staff, a team, or yourself, for the Staff Award using this form.

The deadline for submission is 12:00 (BST), Friday 12 October 2018.

Nominees will be highlighted on Monday 12 November 2018 at the British Library Labs Annual Symposium where some (winners and runners-up) will also be asked to talk about their projects.

You can see the projects submitted by members of staff for the last two years' awards in our online archive, as well as blogs for last year's winners and runners-up.

The Staff Award complements the British Library Labs Awards, introduced in 2015, which recognise outstanding work that has been done in the broader community. Last year’s winners in the public competition drew attention to artistic, research, teaching & learning, and commercial activities that used our digital collections.

British Library Labs is a project within the Digital Scholarship department at the British Library that supports and inspires the use of the Library's digital collections and data in exciting and innovative ways. It is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

@bl_labs #bldigital @bl_digischol

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott is a PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth studying the presentation of nineteenth-century magicians in biographies, literature, and the popular press. She is currently a research placement student on the British Library’s In the Spotlight project, cleaning and contextualising the crowdsourced playbills data. She can be found on Twitter at @beeashlell and you can join the In the Spotlight project at playbills.libcrowds.com.

In this blogpost I discuss the data crowdsourced so far by the In the Spotlight project – which has already thrown out quite a few surprises along the way! As for my first post, Crowdsourcing comedy: date and genre results from In the Spotlight, the data which I discuss was cleaned using OpenRefine, and I have organised some terms (like genre) into categories. In this second post, I cover the most notable results to come out of the titles tasks, and my own research into the playwrights behind the most popular plays.

Titles

To me, these results were some of the most exciting of all. Titles had their own difficulties though – many feature ‘scenes’ from plays, and the question as to whether these count as performances or not is one which has cropped up frequently. In the end I decided to include all of them to show a wider variety and made a simple chart of the top ten most popular plays, then posted it to the project forum to see if any contributors were surprised by the results. Speaking for myself, there are a couple in the top ten that are no surprise: Shakespeares, Black-Eyed Susan, Aladdin etc., but the top five are definitely the most interesting!

What I find most notable of all is the fact that plays such as Kenilworth: Or, England's Golden Days are practically unheard of today and have little documentation even from the contemporary time period, yet clearly enjoyed a high degree of popularity, at least among the site's volumes. One of the most interesting aspects of this project for me is trying to find out why some plays have lasted in terms of performance popularity more than others, and looking at this titles data seemed to be the best place to start. The most popular play from this sample was Tom & Jerry: Or, Life in London, which as a contributor helpfully added on Twitter was also apparently very popular in America, so a trans-Atlantic success!

A graph of the most popular play titles

This chart was, however, made before I’d carried out the task I focus on in the next section – finding playwrights for all of the plays. That process helped to sort out which were ‘real’ plays and which were just events or random words highlighted by the contributors on the site. So for instance, 'The Coronation' which appears in the top ten is a prime example of something that's 'not a title' -- denoting some other kind of 'coronation' performance instead.

After realising that I was having to slog through a lot of playbills containing the word ‘love’, I created a Wordcloud of the most used words in the play titles  As expected, 'love' is up there as one of the big ones, but a lot of the focus is on similar but slightly more domestic themes, such as 'man' and 'wife'. I'd like to think that this gives us a bit of an insight into the hottest topics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries!

A Wordcloud showing the most popular words in the titles

Playwrights

The next step was to create a spreadsheet matching the plays to their original playwrights. At the moment, I'm focusing on adding to this sheet by finding links to reviews of individual performances and digitised copies of the plays. To create the initial playwrights draft dataset I used sources including Archive.org, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Victorian Popular Culture, Worldcat, Miranda, Open Library, the John Johnson collection, Google Books and Allardyce Nicoll’s brilliant tomes A History of English Drama, 1660-1900 (Cambridge: University Press, 1952) and A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800-1850 (Cambridge: University Press, 1930). As I thought the best results would come from me manually researching each title using these sources, you can imagine it's been quite time-consuming! The results hopefully, however, provide a good basis for us to compare future titles to and so won’t have to be done in such a large batch again, as a lot of the same playwrights and plays reoccur throughout the century. I've made a few charts of the most prolific playwrights, and am planning blogs on the more 'interesting' characters, as some of them certainly had exciting lives! It was also great to see some (very minor!) variety in a female playwright -- Elizabeth Inchbald (née Simpson) -- making the top ten.

A graph showing the top twenty playwrights

Having finished sorting out which of the remaining ‘mystery’ titles were not actually plays at all, and so would have no playwright, I’m left with about ten titles that I've not been able to crack yet, so I’m sharing them on the In the Spotlight forum and Twitter in the hopes that someone out there will have some more information.

Another point to make about the experience of researching each of the play's dramatists is that some of the more tricky ones to find have often actually turned out to be by famous/popular playwrights in the end, rather than obscure figures. Perhaps contemporary audiences would have been automatically assumed to know which playwright had done which play, and so it was unnecessary to announce it on the playbill? I also made a (very simple!) visualisation of with the portraits of the top ten playwrights, to help put a face to a name in eighteenth century style!

Portraits of the top ten most popular playwrights

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into research into reviews of the performances listed in the volumes, especially as these are often of great contemporary comedy value. For instance, the newly added Portsmouth volumes focus on a theatre once described by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) as containing 'bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors [...] ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind, - all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched' (p. 281) -- hopefully there will be slightly more generous reactions out there somewhere!

How can you help?

If these posts have piqued your interest, you can help the In the Spotlight project in a few different ways, depending on your interest. You can mark out and transcribe dates, play titles and genres at http://playbills.libcrowds.com, or join in the conversations about playwrights, titles and more on the project forum, https://community.libcrowds.com/t/in-the-spotlight.

Members of the Two Centuries of Indian Print team have just returned from a fascinating trip to Delhi where we took part in a packed programme of activities organised as part of the Association for Asian Studies conference.

We spent most of the week with a group of archivists brought together from a variety of academic and cultural institutions across India and as far away as Cambodia and Australia. What united us was a shared passion for preserving South Asian heritage. As part of the program we led a workshop on Digitisation Standards as practiced by the British Library which also considered the key challenges organisations face when digitising cultural heritage material, including everything from selecting material and scanning, through to post-processing, online display and user engagement. The workshop also featured a paper on the IFLA guidelines for digitisation and (what we hope) was fun activity in which archivists were presented with different case studies of archival collections and asked to consider a digitisation strategy. It certainly sparked a lot of conversation! See photo below

 

Workshop participants taking part in a group activity

 

Undeterred by the inhospitable weather occupying Delhi, we ventured out and were fortunate enough to receive some very thorough and illuminating tours of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, Centre for Art and Archaeology, The National Archives, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Sangeet Natak Akademi where we learned about their respective collections, conservation facilities and digitisation projects.

 

Taking part in a tour of the audiovisual lab at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology 

 

This marked the end of a trip which has connected us with inspiring professionals who we hope to collaborate on more events in the near future.

Our thanks go out to the organisers of what turned out to be a very engaging week of activities, to the American Institute of Indian Studies, to Ashoka University, and to the hosts of our workshop, the India International Centre.

 

This a guest post is by Carol Butler, who is doing a collaborative PhD research project with the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University of London and the British Library on the topic of  new technologies challenging author and reader roles. There is an introduction to her project in this previous post, and you can follow her on twitter as @fantomascarol.

The cold weather back in March seems a distant memory with all the warm weather we've been having recently. However, earlier in the year I braved the snow with my Doc Martens and woolly hat to visit New Brunswick, NJ, for the annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), hosted this year by Rutgers University.

An intimate and welcoming conference with circa 130 attendees, CHIIR (pronounced ‘cheer’) attracts academics and industry professionals from the fields of Library and Information Science and Human Computer Interaction. I went to present early findings from my PhD study at their Doctoral Consortium, from which I have my first ever academic publication and where I gained helpful feedback and insight from a group of senior academics and fellow PhD students. Most notable was the help of Hideo Joho from the University of Tsukuba, who kindly shared his time for a one-to-one mentoring session.

A single-track conference, I was able to attend the majority of talks. In the main, presentations looked at better understanding how people search for information using digital tools and catalogues, and how we can improve their experience beyond offering the standard ’10 blue links’ we have come to expect from search results. Examples included early-stage research into search interfaces that understand vocal, ‘conversational’ enquiries and the new challenges this may present, and concepts such as VR goggles that can show us useful information about the world around us.

As well as seeking to better connect people with useful new information, talks also detailed how people re-find information they’ve already seen, for example in emails; on Twitter; or from their entire browsing history and file directory. There were also fascinating discussions about how people search in different languages, whether switching between languages fluidly if bilingual, or through viewing search results in different languages, side by side.

How people learn from the information they find was an important and tricky issue raised by a number of speakers, reminding us that finding information is not, in fact, the end goal. All in all, it was a very thought-provoking and enjoyable conference, and I am thankful to the organisers (ACM SIGIR), who awarded me a student travel grant to enable me to attend. Next year’s conference is considerably closer to home, in Glasgow, for more details check out http://sigir.org/chiir2019 – I very much hope to go again, and maybe I'll see some of you there!

Not all UX problems are digital : I concluded my journey with a fascinating chat with the conductor on the train home, who shared top secret info about how he and his colleagues workaround usability problems with their paper ticketing process

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott is a PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth studying the presentation of nineteenth-century magicians in biographies, literature, and the popular press. She is currently a research placement student on the British Library’s In the Spotlight project, cleaning and contextualising the crowdsourced playbills data. She can be found on Twitter at @beeashlell and you can join the In the Spotlight project at playbills.libcrowds.com.

In this blog post I discuss the data created so far by In the Spotlight volunteers via crowdsourcing – which has already thrown out quite a few surprises along the way! All of the data which I discuss was cleaned using Open Refine, with some manual intervention by me to group categories such as genre. My first post below highlights the most notable results to come out of the date and genre tasks so far, and a second post will present similar findings for play titles and playwrights.

Dates

I started off by analysing the dates generated by the projects as, to be honest, it seemed easiest! One of the problems we’ve encountered with the date tasks, however, is that a number of the playbills do not show a full date.  This is notable in itself but unsurprising – why would a playbill in the eighteenth or nineteenth century need a full date when they weren’t expected to last two hundred years into the future? With that in mind, this is by no means an exhaustive data set.

After creating a simple graph of the most popular dates, it became clear that we had a huge spike in the number of performances in 1825. Was something relevant to theatre history happening during this year, or were the sources of the playbill collections just unusually pro-active in 1825 after taking some time off? Was the paper stock quality better, so more playbills have lasted? The outside influence of the original collector or owner of these playbills is also something to consider, for instance, maybe he was more interested in one type of performance than others, had more time to collect playbills in certain years or in certain places, and so on. A final potential factor is that this data also only comes from the volumes added to the site projects so far, and so isn’t indicative of the Library’s playbills as a whole.

Aside from source or collector influence, some other possible explanations do present themselves. Britain in general was growing exponentially, with London in particular becoming one of the biggest cities in the world, and this era also saw the birth of railways and the extravagant influence of figures such as George IV. As this is coming off the back of what seems to be a very slow year in 1824, however, perhaps it is best just to chalk this up to the activity of the collectors. We also have another noticeable spike in 1829, but by no means as dramatic as that of 1825. I’ve spent a bit of time comparing the number of performances seen in the volumes with other online performance date tools, such as UMass's Adelphi calendar and Godwin’s Diary to compare numbers, but would love to hear any further insights into this!

A graph showing the most popular performance dates

Genre

The main issue I faced in working with the genre data was the wide variety of descriptors used on the playbills themselves. For instance, I encountered burlesque, burletta and burlesque burletta – which of the first two categories would the last one go under? When I went back to the playbills themselves, it was also clear that many of the ‘genres’ generated were more like comments from theatre managers or just descriptions e.g. ‘an amusing sketch’. With this in mind, genre was the dataset which I ‘interfered’ with the most from a cleaning point of view.

Some of the calls I made were to group anything cited as ‘dramatic ___’ with drama more widely, unless it had a notable second qualifier, such as pantomime, Romance or sketch. I also grouped anything mentioning ‘historical’ together, as from a research point of view this is probably the most prominent aspect, grouped harlequinades with pantomimes (although I know this might be controversial!) and grouped anything which involved a large organisation, such as military, Masonic or national performances, under ‘organisational’. Some were difficult to separate – I did wonder about grouping variety and vaudeville together, but as there were so few of each it seemed better to leave them be.

With these qualifications in mind, by far the most popular genre in the collections was farce, which I kept distinct from comedy, clocking up 537 performances from the projects. This was closely followed by comedy more generally with 527 performances, with the drama (197), melodrama (150) and tragedy (135) trailing afterwards. Once again, it could purely be that the original collectors of these volumes had more of a taste for comedy than drama, but there is such a wide gap in popularity from the volumes so far that it seems fair to conclude that the regional theatre-going public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries preferred to be cheered rather than saddened by their entertainment.

A graph showing the most popular genres in records transcribed to date

You can contribute to this research

The more contributions we receive, the more accurate the titles, genre and dates results will be, so whether you’re looking out for your local theatre or interested in the more unusual performances which crop up, get involved with the project today at playbills.libcrowds.com. In the Spotlight is well on the way to hitting 100,000 contributions – make sure that you’re one of them!

On the previous Friday the 13^th in April, I blogged about the Gaming the Gothic conference, at the University of Sheffield and also shared news that the British Library’s Digital Scholarship team is collaborating on a Gothic Novel Jam with online reading group Read Watch Play during July. Well we are now almost two weeks into the jam and it is great to see people working on their entries by following #GothNovJam and checking the itch.io submission feed.

tweet by @CinereusDarrow

If you would like to make an entry for the jam, you still have 19 days left to create something amazing! As the deadline for uploading submissions to the site is the end of 31st July 2018.

As a reminder, it’s an online creative challenge with a gothic novel theme and it’s open to anyone around the world to participate in. Participants are encouraged to create a whole variety of works on their own or as part of a team. Even though the theme is the gothic novel, you don’t have to limit yourselves to a written submission. Writers, musicians, game makers, artists, crafters, makers of all ages and abilities have signed up from around the world and we are anticipating contributions in all of these areas. Furthermore, submissions don’t have to be limited to these forms. Let your imagination go wild. If you want to bake a cake that looks like a Hound of the Baskerville – go for it! Or you want to make an origami Frankenstein – go for it! Or maybe even a knitted map of Transylvania – go for it! Contribute in whatever way you want to. All we ask is that you have something that you can upload to the official host page at itch.io. Digital works can be uploaded and for physical objects, such as a cake, you could take a photo or video and upload this to the site instead. You’ll retain the copyright of anything you upload. If you haven’t signed up yet, don’t worry you can sign up until the last day.

Tweet by @HazelRaah about an entry made with twine

As we mentioned, the main theme is the gothic novel, but there is also a sub-theme “The monster within”, which was selected from a shortlist of themes suggested and voted on by the jam participants.

We would love participants to use images from the British Library Flickr account as inspiration for submissions. They’re freely available for anyone to use and the following albums may be particularly inspiring:

Ghosts and Ghoulish scenes

Architecture

Castles

Children's Book illustrations

However, don't feel limited to using just those images, the full list of albums can be found here. There are also the Off the Map Gothic Collections of images on Wikimedia Commons and sounds on SoundCloud, which you are free to use. If you want to learn more about the gothic genre and it's authors, check out this hugely informative section of the Discovering Literature website.

If all this talk of jams has whetted your appetite for writing interactive fiction, then you may be interested in attending the Infinite Journeys: Interactive Fiction Summer School booking details are here.  It runs for five days, beginning Monday 23 July and ending on Friday 27 July. 

Also later in the year, on 10-11 November, we are delighted to be hosting the popular Narrative Games Convention AdventureX for International Games Week in Libraries. They currently have a call, which invites people to apply to speak, demo their narrative games, or volunteer. So if you have made an epic #GothNovJam narrative game, then do consider applying to showcase it at AdventureX. Good luck!

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) and Gary Green (@ggnewed) from Surrey Libraries.