Digital Research

Aquiles Alencar-Brayner, Digital Curator

@aquilesbrayner

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

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More than resource discovery…

• Libraries and archives have spent the last two decades making digital assets and harvesting born-digital objects.

• We can now do much more than use technology to discover these digital objects and embrace the opportunities afforded by an intellectual turn toward digitally-driven research

• So digital research is about:– New tools– New discoveries– New understanding

“The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture”

Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2013)

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Scalability: how to filter, find and analyse the information I need?

• How many data is generated in ONE day?

1. Twitter: 7 TB

2. Facebook: 10 TB

• By 2020 we will have approximately 35 ZB (1.1 Trillion GB) of Data available

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British Library Resources

• Digitised content:

• http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts

• Born-digital collections

• http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

• http://sounds.bl.uk/

• Collaborative projects:

• http://www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu/

• Google Books (250,000 1700-1870 publications)

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Some BL digital platforms

• Shakespeare quartos

• http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html

• Crowdsourcing:

• http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/maplisten.html

• Codex Sinaiticus

• http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/

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Exploring BL collections

• BL Labs: http://labs.bl.uk/home

eg. British Library Mechanical CuratorUnlocking design

• Social Media:Wikimedia Commons

Pinterest

Google Maps

Flickr

HistoryPin

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Curation e-Manuscripts

• Extracting and archiving digital content from personal devices

• Assist with capture, management, description, and preservation of personal digital collections to facilitate access and content analysis

• Data analysis beyond documents

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Advancing research: aggregation, content sharing, annotation, transcription & analysis

• Discovery: Online catalogues

Copac: http://copac.ac.uk/

Worldcat: http://www.worldcat.org/

• Annotation: iiif (International Image Interoperability Framework) – Stanford University / BL / BnF and others

• Transcription: Transcribe Bentham

• Analysis and visualisation: Mapping metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus (University of Glasgow): http://bit.ly/1igGO9D

• http://news.ls.wisc.edu/humanities-the-arts/collaborative-project-pushes-discovery-in-humanities-computer-sciences/

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New Tools, New Discoveries

• Google Books N gramNew ways in to extract information from textual databases

• Off the MapCreativity using BL digital collection

• Open Access Software for Research: http://sourceforge.net/

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Other projects of interest

• Literary networks

• http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf

• Georeferencing texts

• http://ulysses.bc.edu/

• Other examples

• http://litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=13

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Task time

For the next 15 minutes, break into groups (of 6-10) and consider one or all of the following questions:

– What analytical tools(s) would you like to use/develop for your research?

– What are the ethical considerations when using digital data? – Should all research in Humanities be published openly? – How might computational methods change the nature of

collaboration in Humanities?

Be prepared to offer a short response which captures the thoughts of your group!

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Thank you!

@AquilesBrayner

Follow the Digital Scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/