Speakers: Mahendra Mahey and Ben O’Steen, British Library Labs
The CAS Digital Humanities Seminar series
Hundreds of thousands of digital items and objects are being created and collected for researchers to use such as digitised manuscripts, sheet music, newspapers, maps, archived websites, radio, performances, TV news broadcasts, and artworks, as well as the more expected items like scanned versions of books.
This wonderful cacophony of content is having a significant effect on how institutions like the Library support the research needs of their users. Will people discover new information when they are no longer restricted to viewing a single page from a single book at a time? How can the Library build systems that provide a coherent route across its content, regardless to whether it is a televised news report or a unique signatures drawn in the margins of a map? How can we use crowd-sourced information, computer vision and machine-learning techniques to provide people with better tools to better judge and interpret the context of illustration or work? How can we exploit animations and interactive infographics to better convey the information bound in our holdings? This is the research space that British Library Labs explores.
Mahendra and Ben will talk about the British Library Labs project which is about getting scholars to use the British Library's incredible digital collections for their research, through various activities such as competitions, hack events and projects. We will highlight some of the work that we and others are doing around digital content in libraries and talk about potential projects we would like to encourage researchers to work on and promote our current competition which closes on the 22 April 2014.
The CAS Digital Humanities Seminar series presents research that combines arts and humanities disciplines with technology. The seminar series highlights the ways in which Arts can make use of IT to ask new questions, or to provide new methodologies for engaging with research questions. No knowledge of IT is needed to take part in the seminars, and all members of the Nottingham community with an interest in Arts research and IT are welcome to attend.
About our speakers:
Mahendra Mahey is the Project Manager of British Library Labs. He started working at the Library in March 2013 and works closely with the Digital Curators and Digital Research team in Digital Scholarship at the Library. Previously, he was at UKOLN at the University of Bath managing several projects; working on the Jisc-funded Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) initiative (organising several Developer Happiness Days e.g. dev8d.org); one focusing on how UK academic institutions could manage their research information using a common European metadata standard; one supporting research in digital repositories of scholarly outputs. He was also an adviser for the Jisc Regional Support Centres in the West Midlands and Scotland encouraging academics and librarians in Further and Higher Education to use electronic learning resources and make effective use of e-learning technologies and techniques in their practice. For over 10 years, he worked as a lecturer of Social Sciences, Computing, Multimedia and English for speakers of other languages in Further and Higher Education colleges in the UK and in Poland.
Ben O’Steen started working at the British Library at the beginning of August 2013, changing from working as a freelance developer in the academic sector to become the Technical Lead for British Library Labs. Whilst his expertise lies in solving interesting problems using computers, his formal training is in chemistry. Like many chemistry graduates, his career path has had nothing to do with chemistry: He has authored a Physics GCSE training course, created electronics for art installations, co-founded the “Developer Happiness” conference (dev8d.org), and was the lead developer in the Bodleian Library’s R&D department, and built their RDF-powered repository and digital asset management systems. In recent years, he has worked on Jisc funded projects (OpenBibliography, OpenCitation), written reports for funders on topics such as text-mining and sat on technical advisory boards for SWORD, ORCID and other groups.
Over the past few years, he has become more involved with science education, volunteering his time to schools to talk to children about science and electronics. The topic he is most asked to talk about is 3d printing and he often has his homemade printer with him. His free time is not dominated by electronics however, he is interested in crafting and often spends evenings playing boardgames.