Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Screenshots from the 10 BL Labs shortlisted entries for the Public Awards 2020

After much deliberation and intense discussion with key people from the BL Labs Advisory board and British Library we have come up with a fantastic shortlist for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020.

The official announcement of who has been awarded prizes for the Awards in each category (Research, Artistic, Educational and Community) will take place tomorrow between 1400-1700 (GMT), Tuesday 15 December 2020 at the online BL Labs Symposium 2020. We will also announce our Staff Awards there too.

There are still a few places available - so hurry and BOOK NOW to find out if the project you voted for won! Also, learn more about some of the amazing projects that were submitted this year and listen and be inspired by our fantastic range of speakers in our packed programme.

In this strange, difficult and remarkable pandemic year, we decided to do something really special.

We we want you, the public, to choose which shortlisted entry will be crowned overall the 'BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020'. It's going to be difficult as the projects this year are so diverse and difficult to compare. Also, you only have today and tomorrow to decide (voting will close around 1615 GMT tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020).

The winner will be announced near the end of the BL Labs Symposium 2020 tomorrow, Tuesday 15 December 2020, just before 1700 GMT.

How to vote for the BL Labs People's Choice for the Public Awards 2020?

It's really simple:

1. Read the descriptions below and follow the links to learn more about each entry.
2. Vote for your favourite (you can only chose one!) using our VOTING FORM which is now live.
3. You will be asked if you wish to have the results emailed to you after you have voted. If you choose this option, all you will be able to see are the number of people who have voted.
4. The form will remain open from 1100 GMT Monday 14 December to 1615 GMT Tuesday 15 December 2020 (that's just over 30 hours).
5. The winner will be announced around 1655 GMT tomorrow on 15 December 2020 near the end this year's online BL Labs Symposium 2020.

Only have 5 minutes to look through the entries and vote?

No problem! We have created a BL Labs Public Awards YouTube shortlist 2020 which contains ten 30-second promotional videos for each shortlisted entry to give you their 'essence'. It's just over 5 minutes and then you can VOTE!

You can also ownload a .zip file with all the submissions for this year's BL Labs Public Awards 2020 (all entries) if you prefer.

The shortlisted entries for the BL Labs Public Awards 2020 this year are (in alphabetical title order):

1. Afrobits
   An interactive installation of African music and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade .
   by Javier Pereda (Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Illustration and Researcher in the Experimental Technologies Lab, Liverpool John Moores University), Patricia Murrieta Flores (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University), Nicholas Radburn (Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World 1500 – 1800, Co-Editor of the Slave Voyages Research Project, Lancaster University), Lois South (History Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University) and Christian Monaghan, Graphic Design and Illustration Graduate, Liverpool John Moores University.
   
   Links: Short video, longer video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
2. Afro Hair And Its Heritage
   A celebration of Black Heritage through Black Afro Hair.
   by Roslyn Henry (self-taught surface pattern designer, from Les Belles Bêtes, France)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details(1) and (2)
   
   
3. Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians
   16 Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
   by Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia) and Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
4. Beyond the Rubric: Collaborating with the Cultural Heritage Sector in Higher Education Teaching and Research
   A project-based, research-led collaboration between the British Library and students of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University.
   by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details
   
   
5. Faint Signals
   Interactive artwork that generates an imagined Yorkshire forest, densely populated with sounds of nature from the British Library's archive.
   by the Invisible Flock team who are Ben Eaton (Technical Director), Victoria Pratt (Creative Director),  Klavs Kurpnieks (Studio Manager), Catherine Baxendale (Executive Producer), Amy Balderston (General Manager) and Simon Fletcher (Interactions Engineer).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
6. Flickr Georeferencing completed
   Volunteer georeferencers have added coordinates to all the images of over 50,000 maps from the British Library's Flickr Commons site.
   by 'Volunteer geo-referencers' nominated by Gethen Rees, Digital Mapping Curator, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, Full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
7. Inspiring computationally-driven research with the BL’s collections: a GLAM Notebooks approach
   Enabling cultural heritage institutions and (digital) humanities researchers to experiment with Collections as Data and GLAM notebooks by showcasing practical implementations from a wide range of GLAM institutions and digital collections. 
   by Gustavo Candela, Pilar Escobar, María Dolores Sáez and Manuel Marco-Such  from the Research Libraries Team, Department of Software and Computing Systems, the University of Alicante, Spain
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
8. In the Spotlight volunteers
   Since 2017, thousands of volunteers have helped bring the British Library's historic playbills collection to life through the In the Spotlight crowdsourcing project.
   by 'In the Spotlight volunteers' nominated by Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
9. Mapping the Reparto de Tierras in Michoacán, Mexico (1868 - 1929)
   Research in 19th-century Mexican sources and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based approaches underpinning the creation of an interactive web map that enables users to spatially explore the British Library's recently digitized Libros de Hijuelas collection.
   by John Erard (Undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA).
   
   Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details.
   
   
10. Unlocking our Sound Heritage - Artist in Residence 2019-2020: The Unearthed Odyssey
    Research project culminating in two performances, a genre-bending conceptual Afrofuturist album using 19 samples from the Sound Archive, three comprehensive blogs and work with three youth groups to unpack the themes and content.
    by AWATE (Awate Suleiman - rapper and multimedia artist, England)
    
    Links: Short video, full BL Labs awards' entry and further details

What happens to the projects not shortlisted?

Though we have criteria to decide which projects should be shortlisted it was still incredibly difficult to choose which ones should be. Judging can be so subjective! Remember it's a point in time with a specific group of people in a particular mood and set of lenses. At a different time, with another group of people I am sure they would probably come up with another selection.

So if you were not chosen this year, please do not be disheartened. The whole point of the BL Labs Awards is to shine a light and showcase uses of our digital collections through innovative projects and activities. These projects have often gone on to be developed further such as someone happened to have come across it and connected with individuals involved and ended up collaborating with them. Many projects have also inspired others to develop their own using the British Library's as well as other institution's cultural heritage digitised and born digital collections.

Details of all the projects entered this year are contained in the BL Labs Digital Projects Archive.

BL Labs can promote your work through our various communication channels (if we haven't already!). Who knows where that might lead? For some of these entrants, I would definitely recommend that they re-submit next year when the projects have been developed further and have had a chance to have further impact.

So for now, a quick thank you to the following people who took the time enter (we have also provided links for those who would like to read further about these entries), we really, really appreciate it:

1. Drawings inspired by the British Library's Sound Archive of Wildlife Recordings by Viv Youell (England)
2. Curatr: A Data Interface for the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus by University College Dublin's Insight team and Centre for Cultural Analytics, Ireland
3. Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1768-1833 by Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
4. Surfacing the impact of doctoral research: working with the EThOS collection by Catherine Montgomery, Craig Stewart, Tom Roberts, Sharon Riddle and Jinjie Huang from Durham University, England
5. Baking in Better Catalogue Data by Sara Wingate Gray, University College London, England
6. The Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Labelling Archives) holographic search and browsing interface for cultural heritage photogrammetry models by Martyn Harris (Birkbeck) and Mark Levene (University College London), England
7. Visualizing Space by Tara McDarby, United Kingdom
8. The Interpreter and You Are Not An Island by Noriko Okaku, England (2 entries)
9. Librorum: the British Library Edition by Janet Luk (Australian National University (ANU), Man-Ting Hsu (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra, Australia), Billy Nam Cheng (ANU), Jingyi Lai (Haiwan Middle School (Shenzhen, China), Mengfei Liu (Access Canberra (Canberra, Australia) and Xiaohan Jiang (China Maritime Museum (Shanghai, China))
10. BL Illuminated Glyphs CAPS: Typographic System of Illuminated Manuscript Letterings by Michelle Devlin , England

I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow at the BL Labs Awards Symposium 2020 and seasons greetings to you all, Mahendra.