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Digital Research
Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
Digital Curator
@AquilesBrayner
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
www.bl.uk 2
Digital Scholarship at British Library
“The production, use and integration of digital content, services and tools to facilitate scholarship and research. It allows research areas to be investigated in new ways, using new tools, leading to new discoveries and analysis to generate new understanding”
-Adam Farquhar Head of Digital Scholarship
Created in 2010, the department works to enable….
• production of digital content• sharing and integration of digital content• wider collaboration and
contribution around digital content• complex analysis & facilitation of
new discoveries
www.bl.uk 3
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 [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)
www.bl.uk 4
Digital Libraries: 10 “in” rules1.Integrity: access to digital object as it has been created2.Integration: different contents and file formats available from a single platform3.Interoperability: different programmes and operating systems compatible with each other4.Instant access: unrestricted access to material, especially from mobile devices5.Interaction: catalogues that provide Web 2.0 features (blogs, wikis, tags, content sharing, etc)6.Information: comprehensive metadata for fast and reliable retrieval of content7.Ingest of content: constant upload of new digital content
8. Interpretation: digital content placed in relation to other items in the collection
9.Innovation: material to be presented in innovative ways10.Indefinite access: digital objects to be preserved for posterity
www.bl.uk 5
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
www.bl.uk 6
Analysis of digital content
• Ngram Viewer applied to Web Archive collections
• Visualisation: Tag Cloud
• BL Georeferencer
www.bl.uk 7
Personal Digital Archive (PDA)
• 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
www.bl.uk 8
BL Labs
• BL Labs
• British Library Mechanical Curator
• Digital Music Labs
• Off the Map
www.bl.uk 9
“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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Projects: some examples
• Corpus del Español
• French Oral Narrative Corpus
• Spatial History Project: Machado de Assis
• Transcriptorium
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Web Based Tools: some examples• Wordle tool for generating “word clouds” from text
that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
• Google Trends Look at search trends in Google. Browse by date, or look at top searches in different categories to see how it trended over time and location.
• Google Public Data Explorer search through databases from around the world, including the World Bank, OECD, Eurostat and the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Google Ngram Viewer search keywords in millions of books over the span of half a millennium, a useful tool for finding trends over time. Ngram Viewer also has advanced options, such as searching for particular keywords as specific parts of speech or combining keywords
www.bl.uk 13
discipline camp and camps sentence
www.bl.uk 14
Music Ngram ViewerPeachnote http://www.peachnote.comCreated by Vladimir Viro
Ngram - Music
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DIRT: Digital Research Tools
• he DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software http://dirtdirectory.org/
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New Tools, New Discoveries
• Crowd as a source– UK Sound Map
• Open Access Software for Research:
• http://sourceforge.net/
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Task timeDuring your break, find a flip-chart and consider one
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 Humanities research be published openly? – How might computational methods change the nature of
collaboration in Humanities?
