###Outreach and learning communities at British Library Digital Research: what we’ve done and what we can do for you and your students
Notes from a talk I gave at 'Digital Literacies: Building Learning Communities in the Humanities', HEA event at Liverpool John Moores, 2 April 2014
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2014/Seminars/AH/GEN913_LJMU
The following text represents my notes rather than precisely what was said on the day and should be taken in that spirit.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/2014-0331-ljmdigilitslides
S License.
####Intro
S Background of team, more than resource discovery, situate turn toward digital research within a response to external forces S deluge of data et al, libraries increasingly full of data as much as books S category of research we support, S new contexts for scholarship in HSS.
####Outreach - PGs
S Outreach: focus thus far on PGs, ECRs ... part of the future of humanities and social science, offering support to those who may not find expertise they need re digital research among supervisory group, or senior faculty.
Doctoral Open Days. Role across the programme - embedded element, talking about doing things with our collections. Our own day on Digital Research advertised to students across HSS.
Usual elements: talks that set the scene, meet the curators.
But central to the day was a prototyping task. For this each group had a flip-chart, some pens, and some cards. The cards represent hypothetical tools for digital research and hypothetical digital collections – though in both cases they resemble real things. On each card we specified the sorts of properties these tools and collections have (and some deliberately chosen pitfalls), and what each group was tasked with doing was to look at the cards and come up with a potential research project that might be possible (they had about a hour plus a lunch break for this). They then had two minute pitch their projects, followed by some Q&A, and a discussion of what might be needed to fill the gap between idea and reality (so training needs, tool development, team work, conceptual apparatus)
In setting it up this way, without computers, without data, I'm very much inspired by the great social historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who wrote in 1973 that for researchers:
What counts is not the machine but the problem. The machine is only interesting insofar as it allows one to tackle new questions, content and especially scale
So we urged the students to proceed with ideas of the novelty of questions, content and scale, as opposed to technology in and for itself. A line of thinking that came out, to some extent, of discussions had during a session I facilitated at the Digital Pedagogies THATCamp the HEA and UCL-DH put on in June 2013 http://digitalpedagogies2013.thatcamp.org/
Resources available to download on the BL Digital Scholarship Blog http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/01/prototyping-task-for-digital-research-novices.html
S Novelty also at the heart of BL Labs, a Mellon Funded project that encourages researcher of any kind, with perhaps a leaning towards postgraduates and early-career researchers, as well as software developers and folks from the GLAM sectors in its broadest sense, to experiment with our digital collections through competitions, hack events, workshops. Current competition, with the offer of a residency and a cash-prize, open until 22 April (nb: proposals around research/outreach ideas needing collaboration with us for the skills, technical expertise we have are most welcome)
Example of a previous winner (Pieter Francois):
####Outreach - more general
S BUT, of course work of the team, as Labs suggests, does go beyond PG communities.
In particular:
S Microsoft Live Books Search (2006-2008) ... 68k volumes from the BL digitised ... when packed in gave content to us and we dedicated it into the PD ... access solution through catalogue. PDFs of books.
Last year we, we here Digital Research Team and Mellon Funded BL Labs team, started investigating better modes of access to this content. We began wondering what else is in there apart from next? 1 million images in the OCR ... MechCurBot story - from playing (faces), to idea (exhibiting), to Tumblr (serendipitous publication). http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/
S Flickr story. Publishing for enhancement, reuse, discovery, research. http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary
- Not a project, rather we were working as 'skunks in the library', as Beth Nowviskie, Director of the University of Virginia's Scholars' Lab has called such research and research tech team: doing things that are risky, aren't normally done, shouldn't be done, and asking questions of our own systems (such as our ability to publish content via the BL website), in order to effect change - call it productive disruption if you like.
Flickr
Engagement & learning communities interaction: -S Wikimedia
- S Digital NZ
- S Nicola Demonte has been using the images in his art history - 'Memory Lane' - classes for students with memory loss, brain injuries and Alzheimer's today at Summerwood of Chanahssen, a senior living institution in Minnesota.
- S Michael Hancher, University of Minnesota (no relation to above, see 'Doing things with a million British Library book illustrations' http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mh/dh2/2014/01/doing-things-with-a-million-british-library-book-illustrations.html and exercise at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B08KKnzlfYMNRmVuMjl1SEFSdjA/edit ) Getting students to sample trove of book illustrations and assess the experience of coming up with informative tags for several dozen images. His instructions are as follows:
- For each image, he has asked them to be prepared to discuss the appropriateness of the tags and the questions that they raise. Such as, for this image:
- Do the buildings include churches?
- Seated man or seated woman? An adult, not a child? Evidence for that?
- What kind of hat?
- Is that really a sketch pad?
- What does the signature say?
- Does the text in this book relate in a significant way to this picture? This example neatly underlines the huge potential here then beyond the mere use, reuse of material in FE, HE teaching and learning.
- For each image, he has asked them to be prepared to discuss the appropriateness of the tags and the questions that they raise. Such as, for this image:
S And this can even go beyond interaction with to content to how it is delivered.
To sharing why we have done this - the internal disruption, how the work questions notion of 'publication', how institutions think of derived data, sets of content algorithmically derived. Masters students at City University taking the module 'Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society' were especially interested when I went to speak to them about all this in March http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/79550296266/future-libraries-considering-publishing-libraries
To describing what it means to be part of a research ecosystem where this sort of thing is begin done, where content of this kind is available at scale.
To discussing the fragmenting, blurring boundaries between communities invested in our shared past. Within our Flickr set, discovery very much driven by contribution from non-traditional domains, so not librarians, historains et al (one individual has exceeded 12,000 individual, hand typed tags - and not nonsense or generics, but latin names for plants, georeference points for buildings).
And maybe this then is something we are best positioned to offer: a focal point for connnecting, by way of our activities and digital collections, your students with wider communities interested in what we have and what we do, and how those communities, from Flickr to Wikipedia, are a key partner in knowledge creation and dissemination in the the digital age.
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