james baker bronte 11.10pptx
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Research…why we are here, what we have, and what we can do for you
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
www.bl.uk 2
More than resource discovery…
“The emergence of the new digital humanities [and social sciences] 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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Raging torrent of data
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Digital Research: Humanities
“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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Digital Research: Social Sciences
• Reading the Riots (LSE, Guardian)– How misinformation spread on Tw
itter during a time of crisis– 2.6 million tweets analysed– Volunteers used to help
categorise data– Images compared– Sentiment analysis deployed
• Interdisciplinary, collaborative effort– Proctor (Warwick), Vis (Sheffield),
Voss (St Andrews).– Reading the riots on Twitter :
methodological innovation for the analysis of big data (2013)
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Digital Research: Art
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Some background
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Some background
“Instead of quantitative researchers trying to build fully automated methods and qualitative researchers trying to make do with traditional human-only
methods, now both are heading toward using or developing computer-assisted methods that empower both groups”
Gary King, ‘Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science’, PS: Political Science & Politics (2014)
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Some background
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Why we are here
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“Reading individual works is as irrelevant as describing the architecture of a building from a single brick, or the layout of a city from a single church”
Franco Moretti, Stanford
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New Tools
• Google Ngram Viewer– Millions of books, billions of
words– Granular trend analysis
• Metadata, tagging, search, discovery…
• …mapping, connectivity, embeddness
• Social media
• Build virtual environments, digital art
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New Discoveries
• Off the Map– Library collections can be
used for creative, novel applications!
• Crowd is a source– A phenomenon, a method?– BL Flickr
• Personal digital archive– Forensic analysis of behaviour
• prison *_NOUN– New ways in, new contexts…
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New Discoveries
disciplinecamp and camps sentence
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New Understanding• Study of 11M social media posts
from China– King, Pan, Roberts (2013)– Chinese government is not
censoring speech but is censoring “attempts at collective action, whether for or against the government
– Automated text analysis
• Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
– New competition for telling stories about change over time.
– Michel, Aiden et al (2010)
• NSA, GCHQ, Big Data…– Just because they use big data,
should we?– What does/doesn’t it represent?– Ethics, use of technology
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What can we do for you?
– British Library Labs• Events, data, and competitions at labs.bl.uk
– You can ask us about what we have• [email protected]
– Get involved in our events and activities• Quarterly Digital Conversations programme.
– Next event 27 February on Data Visualisation• Crowdsourcing of the #bl1million Flickr images
– Follow our activities• on Twitter (#bldigital)• on the Digital Scholarship blog
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Meet the Curators
– Endangered Archives Programme
– UK Web Archive
– British Library Labs
– Digital Maps
– Music
– News and Media
– Personal Digital Archives
– Social Sciences
– Digital Research
– Europeana 1914-1918
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Some thoughts for the day…
– What does it mean to turn your sources into data?
– What can you do with data that you can’t with non-digital sources?
– What does a quantitative emphasis on the high velocity, variety and volume data mean for other research?
– Do new ethical considerations apply to big data?
– How might computational methods change attitudes towards collaborative research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences?
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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
Follow the Digital Scholarship Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Contact us at: [email protected]
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Task Time!
– Groups of 5 or 6• Jan-May here as groups 1-5• June-Oct next door in Chaucer as 6-10• Nov-Dec free agents
– Use the cards to come up with a potential project idea:• Combination of tool cards and collection cards.• Draws on what has been talked about this morning• Uses the best of the skills and backgrounds your group can offer
– Feedback after lunch• No more than 2 minutes• I will be timing!