The new British Library Labs competition for 2015 is live and closes on 29 April 2015. The competition encourages anyone to come up with an idea of what you might do with British Library digital content. We will choose 2 ideas by May 29th 2015  and you will work from June to October 2015  as ‘researcher in residence’ at the British Library (expenses paid up to £3600) and showcase your work on November 2, 2015 where you can win a first prize of £3000.

Previous winners have included:

• how to make statistically representative samples from our book collections (Pieter Francois’s Sample Generator)
• applying the intuitions of a DJ to working with digital collections (Dan Norton’s Mixing the Library, Information Interaction and the DJ)
• linking digitised handwritten manuscripts to transcribed texts in visually appealing way (Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber’s Text to Image Linking Tool)
• finding Victorian jokes in our digital archives, creating a database of Victorian humour and attempting to make Victorian jokes funny again over social media (Bob Nicholson’s Victorian Meme Machine)

This workshop will include an overview of the competition, give advice and tips on the application process with a question, answer and discussion ‘clinic’.

This will then be followed by a look at some of our digital data we have available to either shape your ideas or inspire you to come up with a new exciting one whether or not you want to enter our competition. What we have learned more than anything is that people’s idea’s change once they see the digital content we have.

So if this session is chosen, we will give you wireless access to our shiny new, mini Network Area Storage device with around 8TB of data on it. We will give you a walk through of what’s on there and then you will have a chance to explore and investgate it and more importantly grab what you want! Our NAS box contains:

• 3 million catlogue records from the British and Irish national library catalogues
• 107,000 Digitised playbills from 1602 – 1902
• 1 million images from our Flickr release, including metdata, user generated tags for around 70,000 images, over 3000 georeferenced maps, OCR text from all the books (22 million pages)
• Metadata from Image, Sound, Media, Electronic journals collections.

Look to see what’s on our shiny new mini-nas!

Don’t miss this opportunity, so make sure you vote to have this session!

With one foot firmly in corpus linguistics, Digital History has often been about finding, collecting, collating, manipulating and linking textual information.  However, just as historians have learned to move beyond the text in traditional historical research, so too do we need to move beyond the text in our undergraduate DH instruction. What can we do with digitised images, with our students, beyond merely viewing them.  How can we manipulate or otherwise analyse them with basic software (cloud or downloadable) tools in a way that is both ‘play’ and assists in developing in core learning outcomes.

I propose a “make” session in which we collaborate to great a seminar-ready package of

• Freely accessible historical images
• A basic historical or humanities framework in which to understand the image collection (blurb text!)
• An undergraduate-friendly activity that students can undertake with minimal software or hardware requirements but which encourages active use of the digital environment for understanding material, visual or audio-visual sources.

I would advocate putting it up on Github at the conclusion of the session to allow for re-use and further development via forking.