from digital images to digital research

From Digital Images to Digital Research

Dr James BakerCurator, Digital Research

@j_w_baker

www.bl.uk 2

Some admin…

You are free to:– Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix– Photograph, film, or broadcast– Blog, live-blog, or post video of;

this presentation provided that:– You attribute the work to its author

and respect the rights and licences associated with its components

– You distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one

Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013) http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless stated otherwise.

www.bl.uk 3

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 4

www.bl.uk 5

www.bl.uk 6

“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

www.bl.uk 7

‘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)

www.bl.uk 8

disciplinecamp and camps sentence

www.bl.uk 9

(c) Associated Newspapers Ltd. / Solo Syndication, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, Mac [Stan McMurtry], Daily Mail, 13 July 1973.

Request

Problem

Processing

Analysis

Results

www.bl.uk 10

Left: instances of the words 'strikes’ and ‘unions’ for titles and any associated text in date order between 1960 and 1980.

Right: instances of the words ‘strikes’ and ‘unions’ for titles only in date order between 1960 and 1980.

.

www.bl.uk 11

Piet Mondrian vs. Mark Rothko

X-axis: brightness mean

Y-axis: saturation mean

(c) Lev Manovich, 2010

www.bl.uk 12

www.bl.uk 13

www.bl.uk 14

www.bl.uk 15

www.bl.uk 16

‘Overall, the identity of the data creator is less important than expected [...] Content found on online sites is tested against a set of finely-tuned ideas about the normal range of documents rather than the authority of the digitiser’

Mia Ridge, 'Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources' (19 March 2014)

www.bl.uk 17

Michael Hancher: blog, exercise

www.bl.uk 18

‘[T]he very phrase ‘digital history’ suggests separateness from, or the existence of, ‘non-digital’ historical

practice. This seems highly problematic though. Both the idea that ‘digital history’ constitutes a specific sub-discipline, existing next to other historical sub-disciplines such as cultural, social, political or gender history, as well as the idea that it should essentially be seen as an auxiliary

science of history, feed into the myth that historical practice in general can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological, developments and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasise strongly enough, it is not.’

Gerben Zaagsma, ‘On Digital History’, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 128:4 (2013)

www.bl.uk 19

Thank you!@j_w_bakerjames.baker@bl.ukhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

Slides: http://slidesha.re/1juAjUf Notes: http://bit.ly/1lDW3d9