Digital scholarship blog

129 posts categorized "Research collaboration"

08 March 2023

Next in York - Join us at the University of York for the Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals

If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, this event is for you.

The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support GLAM organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories.

We had the first event in Edinburgh, in-person, hosted by the National Museums Scotland on 31 January. An online training event followed this on 8 March tailored on the basis of audience feedback in Edinburgh.

Our third training event will be in-person, the University of York will kindly host us in York on Thursday, 23 March 2023.

Photograph of rows of empty red chairs in an auditorium
Photograph by Jonas Kakaroto from Pexels

Who is this training for?

We invite everyone who are working in cultural heritage or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

What will you learn?

This one-day training session is designed as a starting point to a broader set of knowledge that will help you to:

  • Understand research landscape in cultural heritage organisations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.
  • Lay foundation for repository services including stakeholder engagement, policy development, technical overview and project planning.
  • Adopt common principles and frameworks, technical standards and requirements in establishing repository services in a cultural heritage organisation.
  • Explore basics of the scholarly communications ecosystem in the context of cultural heritage practices.

Prerequisites

No previous knowledge of the topic is required. However, an understanding of open access will maximise the benefit of the taught content for attendees.

Programme

10: 30  Welcome and introductions

11:00   Session 1 Opening up heritage research

This session covers the topics of understanding the research landscape in GLAM organisations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and frameworks.

11:45   Break time

12:00   Workshop

12:30   Lunch

13:30   Session 2 Getting started with heritage GLAM repositories

This session covers the topics on role of repository infrastructure in open access to heritage research and positioning research repositories in an organisation including policy and development.

14:15   Break time

14:30   Session 3: Realising and expanding the benefits

This module covers technical overview and requirements for running a cultural heritage repository including an overview of BL’s Shared Research Repository, platforms and software, content administration, technical features. 

15:15   Closing remarks

15:30   Closure

Book your place

In-person sessions are planned for a maximum of 35 people per event and registrants from cultural heritage institutions will be prioritised. Registration for the event is free. Please fill this form to book your place by 20th March. Confirmation and event details will be sent to the registered email address.

Members of the Research Infrastructure Services Team at the British Library will be delivering the training programme. The team has over ten years of broad experience and extensive knowledge in supporting open scholarship across the sector and with international partners. They also provide a Shared Research Repository Service for cultural heritage organisations.

Please contact openaccess@bl.uk if you have any questions or comments about this training programme.

28 February 2023

Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions Project Events at Yale

In January James Baker and I visited the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, who are the US partner of the Legacies of catalogue descriptions collaboration. The visit had to be postponed several times due to the pandemic, so we were delighted to finally meet in person with Cindy Roman, our counterpart at Yale. The main reason for the trip was to disseminate the findings of our project by running workshops on tools for computational analysis of catalogue data and delivering talks about Researching the Histories of Cataloguing to (Try to) Make Better Metadata. Two of these events were kindly hosted by Kayla Shipp, Programme Manager of the fabulous Franke Family Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab).

A photo of Cindy Roman, Rossitza Atanassova, James Baker and Kayla Shipp standing in a line in the middle of the Yale Digital Humanities Lab
(left to right) Cindy Roman, Rossitza Atanassova, James Baker and Kayla Shipp in the Yale Digital Humanities Lab

This was my first visit to Yale University campus, so I took the opportunity to explore its iconic library spaces, including the majestic Sterling Memorial Library building, a masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture, and the world renowned Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, whose glass tower inspired the Kings’ Library Tower at the British Library. As well as being amazing hubs for learning and research, the Library buildings and exhibition spaces are also open to public visitors. At the time of my visit I explored the early printed treasures on display at the Beinecke Library, the exhibit about Martin Luther King Jr’s connection with Yale and the splendid display of highlights from Yale’s Slavic collections, including Vladimir Nabokov’s CV for a job application to Yale and a family photo album that belonged to the Romanovs.

A selfie of Rossitza Atanassova with the building of the Stirling Memorial Library in the the background
Outside Yale's Stirling Memorial Library

A real highlight of my visit was the day I spent at the Lewis Walpole Library (LWP), located in Farmington, about 40 miles from the Yale campus. The LWP is a research centre of eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole. The collections including important holdings of British prints and drawings were donated to Yale by Wilmarth and Annie Lewis in 1970s, together with several eighteenth-century historic buildings and land.

Prior to my arrival James had conducted archival research with the catalogues of the LWP satirical prints collections, a case study for our project. As well as visiting the modern reading room to take a look at the printed card catalogues many in hand of Mrs Lewis, we were given a tour of Mr and Mrs Lewis’ house which is now used for classes, workshops and meetings. I enjoyed meeting the LWP staff and learned much about the history of the place, the collectors' lives and LWP current initiatives.

One of the historic buildings on the Lewis Walpole Library site - The Roots House, a white Georgian-style building with a terrace, used to house visiting fellows and guests
The Root House which houses residential fellows

 

One of the historic buildings on the Lewis Walpole Library site - a red-coloured building surrounded by trees
Thomas Curricomp House

 

The main house, a white Georgian-style house, seen from the side, with the entrance to the Library on the left
The Cowles House, where Mr and Mrs Lewis lived

 

The two project events I was involved with took place at the Yale DH Lab. During the interactive workshop, Yale Library, faculty and students worked through the training materials on using AntConc for computational analysis and performed a number of tasks with the LWP satirical prints descriptions. There were discussions about the different ways of querying the data and the suitability of this tool for use with non-European languages and scripts. It was great to hear that this approach could prove useful for querying and promoting Yale’s own open access metadata.

 

James talking to a group of people seated at a table, with a screen behind him showing some text data
James presenting at the workshop about AntConc
Rossitza standing next to a screen with a slide about her talk facing the audience
Rossitza presenting her research with incunabula catalogue descriptions

 

The talks addressed the questions around cataloguing labour and curatorial voices, the extent to which computational analysis enables new research questions and can assist practitioners with remedial work involving collections metadata. I spoke about my current RLUK fellowship project with the British Library incunabula descriptions and in particular the history of cataloguing, the process to output text data and some hypotheses to be tested through computational analysis. The following discussion raised questions about the effort that goes into this type of work and the need to balance a greater user access to library and archival collections with the very important considerations about the quality and provenance of metadata.

During my visit I had many interesting conversations with Yale Library staff, Nicole Bouché, Daniel Lovins, Daniel Dollar, and caught up with folks I had met at the 2022 IIIF Conference, Tripp Kirkpatrick, Jon Manton and Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass. I was curious to learn about recent organisational changes aimed to unify the Yale special collections and enhance digital access via IIIF metadata; the new roles of Director of Computational Data and Methods in charge of the DH Lab and Cultural Heritage Data Engineer to transform Yale data into LOUD.

This has been a truly informative and enjoyable visit and my special thanks go to Cindy Roman and Kayla Shipp who hosted my visit and project events at the start of a busy term and to James for the opportunity to work with him on this project.

This blogpost is by Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator for Digitisation, British Library. She is on Twitter @RossiAtanassova  and Mastodon @ratanass@glammr.us

22 February 2023

Repository Training for Cultural Heritage Professionals

If you work in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector and want to learn more about research repositories, then save Wednesday 8 March in your diaries and register for an online repository training session for cultural heritage professionals.

This is the second event in the British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals, which is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support GLAM organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the development of this training programme in an earlier blog post.

Our first event was delivered in-person, in Edinburgh hosted by the National Museum of Scotland on 31 January 2023. This provided the audience with a starting point to a broader set of knowledge in the areas of open scholarship. Attendees had diverse backgrounds and roles such as library manager, collections manager, research manager, research coordinator, repository staff, curatorial staff and collaborative PhD students in cultural heritage organisations. The event created a forum to discuss different aspects of research activities, challenges and opportunities to build openness in GLAM research and sharing research outputs.  

Photograph of a group of people standing together at an event
Group photo from The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals, National Museum of Scotland, 31 January 2023.

Our upcoming online session on 8 March is designed as a follow up from the initial in-person event to explore some of the topics further, identified by the attendees in Edinburgh. Topics include but are not limited to research activities in GLAM, benefits of research repositories, persistent identifiers, research data management, copyright and rights management. It is intended for those who are working in cultural heritage or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

The event will take place from 14:00 to 17:00 on Wednesday 8 March. Please register at this link to receive your access details for this online session, the programme will be displayed on the booking form. 

Photograph of a group of people standing together at an event looking at post-it-notes on a wall

Many post-it-notes stuck on a wall near a drawing of a ship
Photos taken at an earlier workshop for The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals, National Museum of Scotland, 31 January 2023.


Our next in-person event will be held on Thursday 23 March in York, hosted by the University of York. It will be an update and re-run of the first face-to-face event in Edinburgh. More information about the programme will be provided in a couple of weeks but registration is open for those who would like to join us there.

Please contact openaccess@bl.uk if you have any questions or comments about this training programme.

20 February 2023

Reading Along with Readers Reading Digital Comics

This is a guest post by Linda Berube, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and City, University of London. If you would like to know more about Linda's research, please email her at Linda.Berube.2@city.ac.uk.

In my last blog post, I spoke of my PhD research into UK digital comics creation to consumption practices. I have interviewed comics creators about the creative process and the extent to which digital technology has informed it, as well as with publishers who discussed the impact of digital technology on workflows producing both print and digital.  

I also talked about a UK comics mapping exercise that revealed “the visibility of digital comics across sectors including health, economics, education [for example Figure 1 on legal deposit], literacy, and even the hard sciences”, as well as autobiography (see Figure 2), superheroes, horror, and science fiction.

Comic drawing of two people surrounded by lots of comics and zines
Figure 1: Panel from 'The Legal Deposit and You', by Olivia Hicks (British Library, 2018). Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

 

In publisher and creator interviews for this research, it has to be admitted that print comics loomed large in discussions. This attachment to print even extended to some webcomics creators who, while firmly grounded in the digital environment, harboured aspirations of print versions somewhere down the line.

Still, one webcomic creator interviewed presented a rather balanced view:

“There are things digital can do that print can't do…Hyper linking I think is interesting. There's different things that you can do with page layouts and the way that information is presented on the page. Where it's something that goes in a new direction or different direction from print, I think that's interesting, there's strong potential there”.

 

Comic drawing of two people, one is examing the other person's scalp
Figure 2: Archive capture of 'Our Super Adventure' by Sarah Graley. Retrieved from https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20170828084711/http://www.oursuperadventure.com/

 

Readers Reading Digital Comics

What kind of impact do different page layouts and hypertext have on readers reading digital comics? To understand whether these “new directions” are truly unique affordances that only digital comics can provide requires extending the research to the another major participant in the creation to consumption process: the consumer or digital comics reader.

For the third phase of data collection, UK-based digital comics readers will be consulted through semi-structured interviews, reading observations and think aloud sessions. Emphasis will be placed on determining not just how readers find and consume comics, but what their response is, how it can be defined, from passive to transactional to performative.  Aims and objectives include:

  • To understand the reader role in the publishing and communication process of UK digital comics, their response to digital comics, and how that response contributes to digital comics narratives.
  • To learn about how readers discover new comics and share their reading preferences and experiences with others.
  • To understand how comics portals, devices etc. contribute to the reader’s experience of and response to the text.
  • To use HCI/HII methods and understand the value of these approaches in collecting data about readers of digital comics.

It is important to note that the research is not about assessing the useability of digital comics platforms (although readers will not be discouraged from talking about them), but how readers read digital comics, which can include the devices they use, the platforms they use to read from, and their transactional behaviour with the texts themselves.

Calling All UK-Based Digital Comics Readers

Of course, in order to achieve these aims, I need readers to talk to me about their reading. If you are a UK-based digital comics reader, I’d like to speak to you whether you read comics via apps or web platforms on your phone, laptop, tablet etc., or even through PDF downloads. I would also like to hear about how you learn about new comics and share the comics you love with others.

Right now, I am looking for expressions of interest. If you would like to participate in this research, please contact me at linda.berube.2@city.ac.uk.

16 January 2023

Join us at the National Museum of Scotland for the Repository Training Programme for Cultural Heritage Professionals

First of five training events will kick off with an in-person session at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on Tuesday 31 January.

The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support cultural heritage organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the development of this training programme in this blog post.

What will you learn?

This one-day training session is designed as a starting point to a broader set of knowledge that will help you to:

  • Understand research landscape in cultural heritage organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.
  • Lay foundation for repository services including stakeholder engagement, policy development, technical overview and project planning.
  • Adopt common principles and frameworks, technical standards and requirements in establishing repository services in a cultural heritage organisation.
  • Explore basics of scholarly communications ecosystem in the context of cultural heritage practices.

Who is this training for?

This programme is intended for those who are working in GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), specifically a cultural heritage institution or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

Prerequisites

No previous knowledge of topics is required. However, an understanding of open access will maximise the benefit of the taught content for attendees. We will provide pre-readings for the basics prior to the event.

Training outline

Trainers will cover topics of following four modules through a mixture of regular presentations, recorded/online content, engaging activities, breakout sessions and self-directed learning materials.

Module 1 Opening up heritage research
This module covers the topics of understanding research landscape in GLAM organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.

Module 2 Getting started with heritage GLAM repositories
This module covers the topics of stakeholder engagement, policy development, project planning and technical overview of research repositories

Module 3: Realising and expanding the benefits
This module covers the topics of adopting common principles and frameworks, compliance with publisher policies, types of research objects and outputs in cultural heritage, rights management, technical requirements, and engagement with researchers, usage and reporting.

Module 4: Exploring the scholarly communications system
This module provides an overview on the topics of scholarly publishing, research data management, persistent identifiers, rights management and copyright, responsible research, and digital preservation accompanied with a breakout activity to discuss challenges and prioritize topics for an online follow up session.

Duration and programme

This is a one-day programme takes place from 10:30 to 15:30 GMT with a lunch break for an hour. A detailed programme will be provided to the attendees prior to the event.

10:30 – 12:30 Module 1 and 2 with 10 min. break

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

13:30 – 15:30 Module 3 and 4 with 10 min. break

Members of Research Infrastructure Services Team at the British Library will be delivering the training programme. The team has over ten years of broad experience and extensive knowledge in supporting open scholarship across the sector and with international partners. They also provide a Shared Research Repository Service for the cultural heritage organisations.    

Book your place

In-person sessions are planned for a maximum of 35 people per event and registrants from cultural heritage institutions will be prioritised. Registration for the event is free. Please fill this form to book your place by 25 January. Confirmation and event details will be sent to the registered email address.

Further face-to-face sessions will be held before July 2023 in York and Wales. We will be providing more information about upcoming events in the coming months. 

Please contact openaccess@bl.uk if you have any question or comments about this training programme.

30 November 2022

Skills and Training Needs to Open Heritage Research Through Repositories: Scoping report and Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals

Do you think the repository landscape is mature enough in the heritage sector? Are the policies, infrastructure and skills in place to open up heritage research through digital repositories? Our brief analysis shows that research activity in GLAMs needs better acknowledgement, established digital repositories for dissemination of outputs and empowered staff to make use of repository services. At the British Library, we published a report called Scoping Skills and Developing Training Programme for Managing Repository Services in Cultural Heritage Organisations. We looked at the roles and people involved in the research workflow in GLAMs, and their skills needs to share heritage research openly through digital repositories in order to develop a training program for cultural heritage professionals.

 

Making heritage research openly available

Making research openly available to everyone increases the reach and impact of the work, driving increased value for money in research investment, and helps to make research reusable for everyone. ‘Open’ in this context is not only about making research freely accessible but also about ensuring the research is shared with rich metadata, licensed for reuse, including persistent identifiers, and is discoverable. Communicating research in GLAM contexts goes beyond journal articles. Digital scholarship, practice-based and computational research approaches generate a wide range of complex objects that need to be shared, reused to inform practice, policy and future research, and cannot necessarily be assessed with common metrics and rankings of academia.

The array of research activity in GLAMs needs to be addressed in the context of research repositories. If you look at OpenDOAR and Re3data, the global directories of open repositories, the number of repositories in the cultural heritage sector is still small compared to academic institutions. There is an increasing need to establish repositories for heritage research and to empower cultural heritage professionals to make use of repository services. Staff who are involved in supporting research activities, managing digital collections, and providing research infrastructure in GLAM organisations must be supported with capacity development programmes to establish open scholarship activities and share their research outputs through research repositories.

 

Who is involved in the research activities and repository services?

This question is important considering that staff may not be explicitly research-active, yet research is regularly conducted in addition to day-to-day jobs in GLAMs. In addition, organisations are not primarily driven by a research agenda in the heritage sector. The study we undertook as part of an AHRC funded repository infrastructure project showed us that cultural heritage professionals are challenged by the invisibility of forms of research conducted in their day-to-day jobs as well as lack of dedicated time and staff to work around open scholarship.

In order to bring clarity to the personas involved in research activities and link them to competencies and training needs later on for the purpose of this work, we defined five profiles that carry out and contribute to research in cultural heritage organisations. These five profiles illustrate the researcher as a core player, alongside four other profiles involved in making research happen, and ensuring it can be published, shared, communicated and preserved.

 

A 5 column chart showing 'researchers', 'curators and content creators', 'infomediaries', 'infrastructure architects', and 'policy makers' as the key personas identified.
Figure 1. Profiles identified in the cultural heritage institutions to conduct, facilitate, and support research workflow.

 

 

Consultation on training needs for repository services

We explored the skill gaps and training needs of GLAM professionals from curation to rights management, and open scholarship to management of repository services. In addition to scanning the training landscape for competency frameworks, existing programmes and resources, we conducted interviews to explore training requirements relevant to repository services. Finally, we validated initial findings in a consultative workshop with cultural heritage professionals, to hear their experience and get input to a competency framework and training curriculum.

Interviews highlighted that there is a lack of knowledge and support in cultural heritage organisations, where institutional support and training is not guaranteed for research communication or open scholarship. In terms of types of research activities, the workshop brought interesting discussions about what constitutes ‘research’ in the cultural heritage context and what makes it different to research in a university context. The event underlined the fact that cultural heritage staff profiles for producing, supporting, and communicating the research are different to the higher education landscape at many levels.

 

Discussion board showing virtual post its stuck to a canvas with a river in the background, identifying three key areas: 'What skills and knowledge do we already have?', 'What training elements are required?', and 'What skills and knowledge do we need?' (with the second question acting as a metaphorical bridge over the river).
Figure 2: Discussion board from the Skills and Training Breakout Session in virtual Consultative Workshop held on 28/04/2022.

 

The interviews and the consultative workshop highlighted that the ways of research conducted and communicated in the cultural heritage sector (as opposed to academia) should be taken into account in identifying skills needed and developing training programmes in the areas of open scholarship.

 

Competency framework and curriculum for repository training programme

There is a wealth of information, valuable project outputs, and a number of good analytical works available to identify gaps and gain new skills, particularly in the areas of open science, scholarly communications and research data management. However, adjusting and adopting these works to the context of cultural heritage organisations and relevant professionals will increase their relevance and uptake. Derived from our desk research and workshop analysis, we developed a competency framework that sets out the knowledge and skills required to support open scholarship for the personas present in GLAM organisations. Topic clusters used in the framework are as follows:

  1. Repository Service management
  2. Curation & data stewardship
  3. Metadata management
  4. Preservation
  5. Scholarly publishing
  6. Assessment and impact
  7. Advocacy and communication
  8. Capacity development

The proposed curriculum was designed by considering the pathways to develop, accelerate and manage a repository service. It contains only the areas that we identify as a priority to deliver the most value to cultural heritage organisations. Five teaching modules are considered in this preliminary work: 

  1. Opening up heritage research
  2. Getting started with GLAM repositories
  3. Realising and expanding the benefits
  4. Exploring the scholarly communications ecosystem
  5. Topics for future development

A complete version of the competency framework and the curriculum can be found in the report and is also available as a Google spreadsheet. They will drive increased uptake and use of repositories across AHRC’s investments, increasing value for money from both research funding and infrastructure funding.

 

What is next?

From January to July2023, we, at the British Library, will prepare a core set of materials based on this curriculum and deliver training events in a combination of online and in-person workshops. Training events are being planned to take place in Scotland, North England, Wales in person in addition to several online sessions. Both the framework and the training curriculum will be refined as we receive feedback and input from the participants of these events throughout next year. Event details will be announced in collaboration with host institutions in this blog as well as on our social media channels. Watch this space for more information.

If you have any feedback or questions, please contact us at openaccess@bl.uk.

29 November 2022

My AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship: Four months on

In August 2022 I started work on a project to investigate the legacies of curatorial voice in the descriptions of incunabula collections at the British Library and their future reuse. My research is funded by the collaborative AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship Scheme for academic and research libraries which launched in 2021. As part of the first cohort of ten Fellows I embraced this opportunity to engage in practitioner research that benefits my institution and the wider sector, and to promote the role of library professionals as important research partners.

The overall aim of my Fellowship is to demonstrate new ways of working with digitised catalogues that would also improve the discoverability and usability of the collections they describe. The focus of my research is the Catalogue of books printed in the 15th century now at the British Museum (or BMC) published between 1908 and 2007 which describes over 12,700 volumes from the British Library incunabula collection. By using computational approaches and tools with the data derived from the catalogue I will gain new insights into and interpretations of this valuable resource and enable its reuse in contemporary online resources. 

Titlepage to volume 2 of the Catalogue of books printed in the fifteenth century now in the British Museum, part 2, Germany, Eltvil-Trier
BMC volume 2 titlepage


This research idea was inspired by a recent collaboration with Dr James Baker, who is also my mentor for this Fellowship, and was further developed in conversations with Dr Karen Limper-Herz, Lead Curator for Incunabula, Adrian Edwards, Head of Printed Heritage Collections, and Alan Danskin, Collections Metadata Standards Manager, who support my research at the Library.

My Fellowship runs until July 2023 with Fridays being my main research days. I began by studying the history of the catalogue, its arrangement and the structure of the item descriptions and their relationship with different online resources. Overall, the main focus of this first phase has been on generating the text data required for the computational analysis and investigations into curatorial and cataloguing practice. This work involved new digitisation of the catalogue and a lot of experimentation using the Transkribus AI-empowered platform that proved best-suited for improving the layout and text recognition for the digitised images. During the last two months I have hugely benefited from the expertise of my colleague Tom Derrick, as we worked together on creating the training data and building structure models for the incunabula catalogue images.

An image from Transkribus Lite showing a page from the catalogue with separate regions drawn around columns 1 and 2, and the text baselines highlighted in purple
Layout recognition output for pages with only two columns, including text baselines, viewed on Transkribus Lite

 

An image from Transkribus Lite showing a page from the catalogue alongside the text lines
Text recognition output after applying the model trained with annotations for 2 columns on the page, viewed on Transkribus Lite

 

An image from Transkribus Lite showing a page from the catalogue with separate regions drawn around 4 columns of text separated by a single text block
Layout recognition output for pages with mixed layout of single text block and text in columns, viewed on Transkribus Lite

Whilst the data preparation phase has taken longer than I had planned due to the varied layout of the catalogue, this has been an important part of the process as the project outcomes are dependent on using the best quality text data for the incunabula descriptions. The next phase of the research will involve the segmentation of the records and extraction of relevant information to use with a range of computational tools. I will report on the progress with this work and the next steps early next year. Watch this space and do get in touch if you would like to learn more about my research.

This blogpost is by Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator for Digitisation, British Library. She is on Twitter @RossiAtanassova  and Mastodon @ratanass@glammr.us

28 October 2022

Learn more about Living with Machines at events this winter

Digital Curator, and Living with Machines Co-Investigator Dr Mia Ridge writes…

The Living with Machines research project is a collaboration between the British Library, The Alan Turing Institute and various partner universities. Our free exhibition at Leeds City Museum, Living with Machines: Human stories from the industrial age, opened at the end of July. Read on for information about adult events around the exhibition…

Museum Late: Living with Machines, Thursday 24 November, 2022

6 - 10pm Leeds City Museum • £5, booking essential https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19101

The first ever Museum Late at Leeds City Museum! Come along to experience the museum after hours with music, pub quiz, weaving, informal workshops, chats with curators, and a quiz. Local food and drinks in the main hall.

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/museum-late-living-with-machines/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19101

Study Day: Living with Machines, Friday December 2, 2022

10:00 am - 4:00 pm Online • Free but booking essential: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/18775

A unique opportunity to hear experts in the field illuminate key themes from the exhibition and learn how exhibition co-curators found stories and objects to represent research work in AI and digital history. This study day is online via Zoom so that you can attend from anywhere.

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/living-with-machines-study-day/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/18775

Living with Machines Wikithon, Saturday January 7, 2023

1 – 4:30pm Leeds City Museum • Free but booking essential: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19104

Ever wanted to try editing Wikipedia, but haven't known where to start? Join us for a session with our brilliant Wikipedian-in-residence to help improve Wikipedia’s coverage of local lives and topics at an editathon themed around our exhibition. 

Everyone is welcome. You won’t require any previous Wiki experience but please bring your own laptop for this event. Find out more, including how you can prepare, in my blog post on the Living with Machines site, Help fill gaps in Wikipedia: our Leeds editathon.

The exhibition closes the next day, so it really is your last chance to see it!

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/living-with-machines-wikithon-exploring-the-margins/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19104

If you just want to try out something more hands on with textiles inspired by the exhibition, there's also a Peg Loom Weaving Workshop, and not one but two Christmas Wreath Workshops.

You can find out more about our exhibition on the Living with Machines website.

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