The surprising adventures of the mechanical curator презентация

the beginning...

…)

⇒ Mahendra Mahey and Ben O’Steen

(situated in the ‘Digital Scholarship’ dept.)

“Create, explore and foster new and innovative ways to work with the British Library’s existing digital content.”*
(*My paraphrasing)

curators, librarians and programmers supporting the innovative use of our digital collections.
We explore how digital technologies are re/shaping research and how this informs how the library does its business.
We encourage and support colleagues & scholars of all disciplines to work innovatively with and across the library’s diverse digital content

of the scanned books that might be about 19th century European travel?”

“I like ‘distant reading’. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it sounds useful. Does the library offer that?”

are shortlisted and two ‘winners’ are picked.

been told, some actual money at the end of it.)

and the DJ”


Can a researcher record a session drawing from digital objects, in the same way a DJ does with music tracks?

me interpret the vast amount of content you hold. You don’t provide any but make it impossible for others to do so.”

“I want to work on broad sweeps of content, rather than book-by-book.”

“API? what’s that? I don’t care. Just give me the files.”

access to a large amount of data, can it be useful?

One way to try it out, was to ‘eat our own dogfood’

19th Century?

aka how well does modern photographic face detection routines work on 19th C illustrations?

differences?
Often drawn more symmetrically - male faces were more likely to be exaggerated.
Depiction is typically 'clean' and posed
Fashion: beards, spectacles and hats - different to the modern training data

pause and look over my shoulder.

Every day it dug up illustrations that surprised me and the team around me.

So… I wonder if anyone else might be surprised and intrigued by them too?
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/archive

challenge to find anything viewable.

The chasm between digital and print:
http://samplegenerator.cloudapp.net

in making it a bit more accessible?

The Mechanical Curator twitter account has only got a handful of people following it after all. Maybe there isn’t much appetite for it?

Colouring-in Pages for Children

the Printed Image 1750-1850: Applying Data Science Techniques to Printed Book Illustration’
TSB Digitial Innovation Contest New tech for tracking Public Domain in the Wild

be fed into the next phase of the Georeferencer

on Tagging
Art Therapy Courses

million views as of 10/06/2014)

How about getting every image viewed once? (done by 5/3/2014) at least 5 times? (only a few hundred left 12/06/2014!)

useful?

Not just images, but any of our researchable digital content?

at the end of last year. Equivalent to $40,000 for a years use!

This gave us capacity and storage for our “unplanned” experiments.

Microsoft (and UCL) are joining in on a new experiment...

UCL Big Data CS students do when given access to cloud computing, all of the book data and a focus group of digital humanists?”

to validate and assure incoming tags.

are experimenting with broader and more direct access to our digital holdings.
There is a demand for this content!
Take the content to where people go.
NB ‘where’ is entirely dependant on the current culture of search and research. Right now, it’s Google.

'The Mineral Baths of Bath. The Bathes of Bathe's Ayde in the reign of Charles 2nd as illustrated by a drawing of the King's and Queen's Bath, signed 1675. Whereunto is annexed a Visit to Bath in the year 1675 by “A Person of Q" by The British Library (More from this book here: https://www.flickr.com/search/?tags=sysnum000878624)





Slide 10 - Title: The costume of Yorkshire, Illustrator: "Walker, George; Havell, R & D (George Walker; R and D Havell)" Provenance: London, 1814 Caption: Rape threshing https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/12459323374

Slide 11 - Image taken from page 3 of 'Worthy Workers. A monthly magazine for all, etc. [Edited and partly written by Sarah Sutton.] no. 1. March 1886' https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11287891873

Slide 16 - Image taken from page 467 of '[The History of New South Wales, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Pamaratta [sic], Sydney, and all its dependancies ... with the customs and manners of the natives, and an account of the English colony, from its foundation https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11001417405

Slide 20 - Image from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/10/peeking-behind-the-curtain-of-the-mechanical-curator.html