Since March 2016, the Digital Scholarship Reading Group at the British Library has discussed articles, videos, podcasts, blog posts and chapters that touch on digital scholarship in libraries. I've shared our readings up to May 2018 and taken a thematic look at our readings at the intersection of digital scholarship and anti-racism in July 2020.

As the Living with Machines project draws to an end this (northern) summer, I thought I'd give an updated list of our readings since June 2018. I started including more pieces on deep learning, machine learning, AI ('artificial intelligence'), big data, data science, digital history, digitised newspapers, and user experience design for digital collections when we began discussing what became Living with Machines in early 2017. This was partly a way for me to catch up with relevant topics, and partly to lay the groundwork for LwM across the organisation. You can see that reflected in our topics up to May 2018 and onward.

Of course, the group continued to cover other topics, and sessions were suggested and/or led by colleagues including Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Annabel Gallop, Graham Jevon, Jez Cope, Lucy Hinnie, Mary Stewart, Nora McGregor, Sarah Miles, Sarah Stewart and Stella Wisdom. Especial thanks to Rossitza Atanassova and Deirdre Sullivan who’ve been helping me run the group in recent years. In 2021 we started using the January session to invite colleagues across the Library to look around and pick topics for discussion in the year ahead.

So what did we discuss from June 2018 to the end of 2022?

• 'Big Data' and Digital Collections – pick one or more of pdf, CHISpaper.pdf, Digital archives as Big data.pdf, 1461444816661553.pdf
• Access & Management for Meaningful Collections - Machine Learning & Crowdsourcing – take a look at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/secrets-of-rebel-slaves-in-barbados-will-finally-be-revealed; https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2022/02/behind-the-scenes-at-the-british-library-graham-jevon-cataloguer-for-the-endangered-archives-program.html; https://blogs.bl.uk/endangeredarchives/2021/07/help-trace-the-stories-of-enslaved-people-in-the-caribbean-using-colonial-newspapers.html
• Becoming a Desk(top) Profession: Digital Photography and the Changing Landscape of Archival Research
• Cancel Culture, Social Media & the Importance of Forgetting - listen, read or watch whatever you are able to, or just come along for the discussion! Podcast (20 mins) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08ybt8d; Short article - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527476420918828; Video (10 mins) - https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/emma-smith-forgetting-digital-age
• Citation Capture: Enhancing Understanding of the Use of Unique and Distinct Collections within Academic Research.
• Climate Change and the Digital Humanities – watch Jo Walton’s Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (appx. 6 minutes long, 24:00-30:00); Helen Hardy’s Collections & Climate (appx. 7 minutes long, 42:24-51:00). Also Digital Humanities Climate Change Manifesto – mentioned in Jo Walton’s talk; Mobilising museums for climate action toolkit – In a nutshell, pp. 4-5; UKRI targets net zero computing blog post; Communicating Climate Risk, a Toolkit – Executive summary and key messages
• Cultural Analytics - Data Cultures, Culture as Data, https://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2127/10.22148/16.035.
• Data science or data humanities? Opportunities, barriers, and rewards in digitally-led analysis of history, culture and society (in-person excursion to the Turing lecture by Melissa Terras)
• Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence
• Deepfakes and Misinformation – pick one of 'Deepfakes & Misinformation: How dangerous are deepfakes?' - a blog post from the Dutch AV museum; 'Snapshot Paper - Deepfakes and Audiovisual Disinformation'; 'How do we work together to detect AI-manipulated media?' from the Witness Media Lab
• Digital Art History and the Computational Imagination
• Digitisation & Data Sovereignty - the CARE Principles (PDF summary); The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, http://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2240/10.5334/dsj-2020-043; Working with the CARE principles: operationalising Indigenous data governance
• Digitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History
• Emerging Formats Research and Collecting - Interactive Storytelling, https://eresources.remote.bl.uk:2127/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_27
• Emerging Formats: Complex digital media and its impact on the UK Legal Deposit Libraries
• Engaging in Collaboration from Trading Zones of Digital History
• Enhanced Curation and Contextual Collections - Berendse, Z, 2020. Browsing History: Archiving Video Game Context; also Newman, J (2011) '(Not) playing games: player-produced walkthroughs as archival documents of digital gameplay'; blog post by Shu-Wen Lin: Level Up: Playing to Document and Preserve Video Games.
• Exploring the Bloodaxe Archive: a creative and critical dialogue
• George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online
• Ground Truth: In the Archives That Train Machine Learning – online excursion to a lecture at the National Archives by Kate Crawford
• How NOT to create a digital media scholarship platform: the history of the Sophie 2.0 project
• Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
• Is Santa Claus Real?
• Language Preservation & Discoverability - Bugis manuscripts and Batak manuscripts (and provenance). Also check out Equitable Access: Using Metadata to Level the Playing Field in a Multilingual Country (video, from 0:00-11:40); Challenging legacies slidedeck (Arlis 13 May 2022) – Alan Danskin, Collection Metadata Standards Manager, BL
• New Scholarship in the Digital Age: Making, Publishing, Maintaining, and Preserving Non-Traditional Scholarly Objects and Library of Congress Digital Scholarship Working Group Report
• Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers
• Open Access in Digital Scholarship - Open Humanities: Why Open Science in the Humanities is not Enough
• Oral History & COVID Collection – pick from Charlie Morgan’s Oral History Society blog post on the rapid response approach to collecting tricky remote interviews: https://www.ohs.org.uk/general-interest/when-the-crisis-fades-what-gets-left-behind/; references the excellent Eira Tansey blog post: https://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/. “First, Do No Harm”: Tread Carefully Where Oral History, Trauma, and Current Crises Intersect, Jennifer A. Cramer, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2020.1793679; collecting during COVID in this short blog post: https://oralhistoryreview.org/current-events/nhs-70-covid-19/ (Stephanie Snow and Angela Whitecross)
• Participation in heritage crowdsourcing
• Practical AI Ethics – pick one of Lessons from archives: strategies for collecting sociocultural data in machine learning or Managing Bias When Library Collections Become Data
• Queer Criticalities, Instagram, and the Ethics of Museum Display
• Reviews in Digital Humanities – pick an article that matches your interests
• Serving researchers in a self-service world
• Slow librarianship – pick one of https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2021/10/18/what-is-slow-librarianship/ or http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/the-innovation-fetish-and-slow-librarianship-what-librarians-can-learn-from-the-juicero/
• Strategies for the Curiosity‐Driven Museum Visitor
• The Consequences of Framing Digital Humanities Tools as Easy to Use
• The Equivalence of “Close” And “Distant” Reading; Or, toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History
• The Nightmare of Surveillance Capitalism
• Towards a User-Centric Evaluation of UK Non-Print Legal Deposit: A Digital Library Futures White Paper
• Triggers, Decontextualisation & Digitised Collections - pick one of On Trigger Warnings: https://www.aaup.org/report/trigger-warnings; Labeling and Rating Systems: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/labelingrating; What to Know When Watching Gone With the Wind (4 minutes 25 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DF2FKRToiQ; Digitization Selection Criteria as Anti-Racist Action: https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/14667
• User experience design for libraries – pick one of slides for 'UX, ethnography and possibilities: for Libraries, Museums and Archives' by Ned Potter https://www.slideshare.net/thewikiman/ux-ethnography-and-possibilities-for-libraries-museums-and-archives; a short overview article: 'User Experience (UX) in Libraries: Let’s Get Physical (and Digital)' by Leo Appleton https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.317/
• Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms
• Web 3 and Commercialisation of the Web. Take a look at: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/what; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3; NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This by Anil Dash https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/; Web3 Is Headed Our Way. Are Cultural Institutions On Board? https://jingculturecrypto.com/we-are-museums-wac-fellowship-web3/
• What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction? by Jo Guldi
• What is Digital Humanities? Read Ain't No Way Around It: Why We Need to Be Clear About What We Mean By “Digital Humanities” and have a look through the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences
• Where are we now? A review of research on the history of women's soccer in Ireland
• Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original ‘Superman’ Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
• You and AI – Just An Engineer: The Politics of AI (video)