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2 minutes to read Posted on Wednesday November 12, 2014

Updated on Monday November 6, 2023

Small Data, Footbridges and Phonographs: BL Labs celebrates the end of phase I

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Vicky Garnett of Trinity College Dublin (a Europeana Cloud partner) blogs about her recent experience at the British Library Labs Symposium in London, and the relevance for Europeana Cloud.

Europeana Cloud is currently investigating the way in which humanities and social science researchers use big datasets from cultural heritage institutions.

Together with my colleague at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Jennifer Edmond, we’ve been talking to institutions in the GLAM sector to find out what web services they offer (such as APIs). We’ve also spoken to researchers who are actively using the data contained in APIs. Our findings will be presented at a workshop in The Hague in December and included in an upcoming report.

One of the institutions featured in our work is the British Library. We were therefore pleased to be part of a one-day symposium on November 3rd, held to mark the end of the first phase of the BL Labs project and to present the winners of the BL Labs 2014 competition. Since there are many parallels between the work of BL Labs and that of Europeana Cloud, it made for an interesting day.

The winners of this year’s competition covered both the highly practical and the highly whimsical. TILT (Text to Image Linking Tool) from Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber at the University of Queensland, Australia, offers a practical solution to almost un-OCR-able handwritten manuscripts.

Bob Nicholson from Edge Hill University created a Victorian Meme Machine, which aims to use crowdsourcing, data-mining and social media to bring the Victorian sense of humour to the 21st Century. Both used content contained within the British Library collections to bring their tools to life and the development of these tools was supported by the BL Labs team.


Humanities Scholars Should Remember their Skills
The uses of digital content and the impact of these increasingly technological methodologies was the basis for keynote speaker Tim Hitchcock’s lecture, or rather as he put it ‘worrying in public’. He posited his talk through the lens of the ‘macroscope’, a term he used with much caution. Hitchcock worried that in the scramble to find the bigger picture through distant reading - and in the light of all this miraculous and impressive data gathering, and cross-disciplinary work - that Humanities researchers might forget the essence of what makes them ‘Humanities’ researchers.

Methodologies in Digital Humanities are almost moving towards the social sciences, looking at, for example, network analysis, GIS techniques and many other tools that require big data to find meaningful results. This is, Tim says, important and drives knowledge forward. But he urges Humanities researchers to remember the skills they have within their own fields: that of close reading and obtaining and ‘cleaning up’ small data for deeper analysis. The irony for Tim is that in the rush to use big data we miss 90% of what's actually there.

On the back of these thought-provoking words, the discussion was opened up to the floor, wherein future directions for Humanities were discussed. One commenter suggested that in the ever-increasing fight for funding, those in the Humanities were in a difficult position where they were almost compelled to turn to cross-disciplinary research in order to survive.

The afternoon brought a slightly more upbeat tone, with demonstrations and presentations from some of the ongoing projects between the British Library and the BL Labs project. Daniel Wolff and Adam Tovell from the Digital Music Lab at BL showcased their digital methods for musicologists, while Peter Balman (winner of the British Library’s Innovation Challenge) outlined his work to develop a tool that will analyse the use of British Library digital collections, who is using them, where they are using them and how they are using them.

Footbridges, not Suspension Bridges
The next two talks spoke directly about the work of BL Labs, its impact and the lessons that have been learnt. BL Labs Manager Mahendra Mahay began by putting the work of the first two years of BL Labs into the context of the Library and its mission to address the needs of researchers wanting to access the vast wealth of items within both its concrete and virtual walls. Technical lead Ben O’Steen then presented his work to develop ‘footbridges not suspension bridges’ to provide the means for people to access and reuse the data. In other words, a footbridge fulfills the function of a bridge: it gets the user to the other side without getting their feet wet. A suspension bridge does exactly the same job except that there are more people using it and it looks a lot fancier! With so many projects being short-lived and often merely exploratory, O’Steen’s aim is to provide a solution that is functional to the task without over-complicating an otherwise simple requirement. Why build a suspension bridge if it’s only going to be used once and barely looked at?

Five Key Lessons
The final presentation from the British Library was from the Principal Investigator of the British Library Labs project, Adam Farquhar. He outlined the 5 key lessons that he and his team have learnt so far along the way:

1. More is more! The more digital content you have, the more opportunity you give people to reuse it.

2. Less is more (tools and services). It is not our job to pick winners but this can conflict with how we develop and deliver tools and services. The answer is not just to provide tools. It’s to provide tools that work for researchers and meet their needs.

3. Bring your own tools. Similarly to lesson no. 2, we can’t build everything. We need to let people pick and choose the tools they want to use with our content.

4. We have to let people be creative. Put in place the ability for people to create tools, projects or collections themselves.

5. Allow people to start small and finish big. Allow and encourage users to start with an obtainable goal but ensure that it can be scaled up if necessary. The scaleable part could be the collection, the methodology or the overall output.

The additional lesson I took from this was perhaps an unintended one.

Edison Phonograph in action. Photo Vicky Garnett / 2014.

After the main symposium, we were invited by composer Sarah Angliss to create our own voice recording on a wax cylinder. A few curious but cautious individuals gathered next to her Edison Standard Phonograph, unclear and unsure what we were about to do.

Her partner in crime then played us a wax cylinder of a woman singing from nearly 100 years ago. The sound quality was tinny, and the delivery of the woman’s voice coming out of this spinning black tube was almost a parody of Music Hall, yet as Sarah explained, these were artefacts of the technology and were not necessarily representing the way people truly sounded.

She further demonstrated this when she changed the phonograph head, replaced the recorded cylinder with a blank one (now made in Brighton) and asked us all to say something very clearly into the phonograph’s horn. We had to speak loudly and clearly, being sure to ‘en-un-ci-ate’ each syllable to ensure the recording head was sufficiently vibrated to capture the sound on the wax.

Dutifully, we all trotted out a line of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ into the phonograph, with much giggling, and showboating. We played it back. We heard nothing. Our attempts at speaking clearly had not caused a big enough ripple. The equipment was all set up, we had shouted about Mary’s ‘snow-white fleeced’ lamb and yet still nothing.

At this point a few members of the group drifted away. This was a shame but served as a tidy metaphor for technology in general, echoing much of what had been discussed over the course of the day. Keep it simple. If it doesn’t work first time, people won’t come back for a second try.

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