It is wonderful to be collaborating with Leeds Libraries on their online Games Jam this month, which is encouraging people to create playful interactive adaptations of books in the BBC’s Novels that Shaped Our World list. In my experience game jams are a brilliant way of bringing historic and literary digital library and archive collections…
Over the past year British Library staff have contributed to the AHRC-funded project”Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship”. Led by James Baker, University of Sussex, the project set out to demonstrate the value of corpus linguistic methods and computational tools to the study of legacies of catalogues and cultural institutions’…
For the past four years, the British Library has been researching, collecting and documenting complex digital publications produced in the UK. Born in response to the 2013 UK Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations, the Emerging Formats project looked at different examples of digital writing, analysed how these can be best preserved and given access to within…
The New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) is in an annual international award, which encourages and promotes the best in new media writing; showcasing innovative digital fiction, poetry and journalism. The types of interactive writing that we have been examining, researching and tentatively collecting in our emerging formats work at the Library. Read full post here.
For many people, our personal understanding of time has been challenged during the covid-19 pandemic, with minutes, hours and days of the week seeming to all merge together into “blursday”, without our previous pre covid-19 routines to help us mark points in time. Read full post here.
Working for the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), I recently catalogued British Library oriental manuscript 2361, a musical compendium copied in Mughal India during the reign of Aurangzeb (1618-1707; ruled from 1658). The QDL is a British Library-Qatar Foundation collaborative project to digitise and share Gulf-related archival records, maps and audio recordings as well as Arabic…
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer is drawing to a close and autumn feels hot on its heels. On recent walks I’ve noticed blackberries ripening in the hedgerows, tree leaves turning colour and bats darting through the air. Read full post here.
This is a slightly extended version of a talk I presented at the Digital Library Federation 2018 Forum, held in Las Vegas in October 2018. Thanks to students in my Fall 2017 “Digital Public Humanities” course; the Providence Public Library Special Collections department; Diane O’Donoghue; Julieanne Fontana, Angela Feng, and Jasmine Chu; Monica Muñoz Martinez; Susan Smulyan;…
I recently gave a talk at Brown University on “Institutionalizing Digital Scholarship,” and upon reflection it struck me that the lessons I tried to convey were more generally applicable. Everyone prefers to talk about innovation, rather than institutionalization, but the former can only have a long-term impact if the latter occurs. What at first seems…