digital scholarship at the british library (9 september 2014)
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Talk delivered at the CREST Summer School visit to the British Library, 9 October 2014TRANSCRIPT
Digital Scholarship
at the British Library
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
CREST Summer School visit, British Library, 9 October 2014
www.bl.uk 2
More than resource discovery…
“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 (2014)
www.bl.uk 3
Pieter Francois: Winner of British Library Labs 2013 Bob Nicholson: Winner of British Library Labs 2014
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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
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“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
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discipline camp and
camps sentence
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‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’ Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)
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‘[...] en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui
compte, ce n’est pas la machine, mais le
problème. La machine n’a d’intérêt que dans
la mesure où elle permet d’aborder des
questions neuves, originales par les
méthodes, les contenus et surtout l’ampleur’
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
‘L’historien et l’ordinateur’, Le
territoire de l’historien (Paris 1973)
‘In history, as elsewhere, what
counts is not the machine, but
the problem. The machine is only
interesting insofar as it allows to tackle
new questions that are original
because of their methods, content and
especially scale’
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Michael Hancher: blog, exercise
www.bl.uk 18
© Nicola
Demonte
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© David
Normal
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Thank you! @j_w_baker
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://slidesha.re/1pKYYkv