PhD Open Day Intro to Digital Scholarship (13 Jan 2021)
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• Using data science and digital history methods to analyse millions of historical documents and create a richer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