A quick 10 minute intro and useful links for PhD Open Day attendees interested in learning more about Digital Scholarship.

1. Introduction to Digital Scholarship
Nora McGregor
Digital Curator, Digital Research Team
https://www.bl.uk/people/experts/nora-mcgregor

2. www.bl.uk
Introducing the Digital Scholarship Department @BL
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We are a merry band of experts in digital research,
digitisation, librarianship, digital history & humanities,
computer and data science.
Our Mission: Enable the innovative use of British
Library digital collections and data for research and
enjoyment.
www.bl.uk/digital
@ndalyrose

3. www.bl.uk
Supporting the computational turn in
humanities research
• Create machine-readable text for search/analysis (OCR/HTR)
• Work more efficiently with our data and keep it tidy (data cleaning)
• Classify data about people, places, concepts
(georeferencing/named-entity recognition)
• Automatically extract, analyse and understand useful information
from a single image or a sequence of images (computer vision)
• Explore a bigger body of material computationally than by
individually reading entire texts (text & data mining)
• Look for trends, patterns and relationships not apparent from close
reading (distant reading)
• Gain a broad overview of a topic (topic modeling)
• and so much more....
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We consider digital scholarship
broadly as research that combines the
methodologies from traditional
humanities & social science
disciplines…….with computational
tools provided by computing
disciplines.
Examples of some of the tools and methods you might be interested in exploring further:

4. www.bl.uk
We support digital research/ers through...
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• Improving access and use of our digital collections by experimenting with digital technologies and collaborating on a
wide range of digital projects:
• Using data science and digital history methods to analyse millions of historical documents and create a richer
understanding of the impact of mechanisation in the 19th century (Living with Machines)
• Advancing the state of the art in automatic handwritten text recognition technology
• Supporting the adoption of IIIF to improve sharing of digital collections
• Deploying corpus linguistic methods and archival research to characterise curatorial “voice”
• Developing engaging crowdsourcing projects to enrich metadata about our collections or solve cataloguing
problems
• Creating and supporting Collaborative PhD opportunities for undertaking novel digital research
• Engaging with and keeping current with global conversations on digital tools, standards and interfaces
• Offering both general digital research support and guidance to more advanced (BL Labs Digital Research Support)
• Knowledge sharing through our blogs and social media
• Enhancing digital skills for British Library staff through our Digital Scholarship Training Programme

5. www.bl.uk
For a lot more in-depth info on opportunities for using
computational methods and tools in your research….
• Join us at Module 5: Not Just Books (10 February)
• Have a click through our online presentation Digital Research @ British Library:
Collections, data, tools and methods
• Take a look at our Digital Scholarship Department Blog
• Drop an email to digitalresearch@bl.uk & labs@bl.uk
Thank you!
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Next steps