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!

In a rapidly evolving field it is difficult to keep up with all the available tools, techniques and data sources available and being used. This session would offer a space to share experiences – good and bad – of various tools and data sources that people have used to do data cleaning, data analysis, named entity extraction, text analysis, visualisation and any particular experiences of using data sources (either specific sources, or types of interfaces)

This session isn’t intended to deliver an in-depth view of any particular tool or data source but to take a cook’s tour based on the experience of the attendees.

A follow-up of the workshop held on February 12 in the frame of the Data Curation Conference (www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/IDCC15/idcc_data_exploration_12_Feb_2015.pdf ), and in particular in connection with the topic and objectives of the AHRC-funded project Visualising European Crime Fiction (internationalcrimefiction.org/ahrc-project/), the proposed session aims at working with datasets collecting bibliographical and biographical information on a few thousands of crime novels and novelists. The data have been collected from the Paris Crime Fiction Library (fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_des_litt%C3%A9ratures_polici%C3%A8res); the catalogue of the British, French, Italian, and Hungarian national libraries; from Amazon.co.uk and from numerous other bibliograhical sources.

With the help of an expert Tableau professional user, Chris Love (www.theinformationlab.co.uk/author/chris-love/), and the expertise of the scholars involved in the project (Dominique Jeannerod, Andrew Pepper, and Federico Pagello from Queen’s University Belfast; Loic Artiaga; University of Limoges; Sandor Kalai, University of Debrecen), the session will allow the participants to explore the potential of Tableau public to visualise data in a number of different ways.