Search Constraints
Search Results
-
Journal article
Chinese plates fit for an Acehnese queen
All over Southeast Asia is found a particular type of coarse Chinese export porcelain traditionally known as ‘Swatow’ ware but now more accurately identified as originating from Zhangzhou, dating from the late Ming period, from the end of the 16th to the early 17th centuries. One characteristic type of large...Gallop, Annabel Teh
Acehnese ninefold seal, Zhangzhou, Cap Sikureueng, Chinese porcelain, Chinese plates, Aceh, and Swatow
-
Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk: An Interdisciplinary Exploration and Solution
Memory institutions such as the British Library face the important challenge of preserving their digital collections for future generations. Disciplinary efforts to address this challenge are extensive but demonstrate significant inconsistency and uncertainty about how the field understands risk, as well as what it considers to be a valid response....Pennock, Maureen
libraries, risk, risk science, archives, digital preservation, reference model, and design science
-
Journal article
A literature review of palm leaf manuscript conservation—Part 2: historic and current conservation treatments, boxing and storage, religious and ethical issues, recommendations for best practice
Abstract The closure of the British Library during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic allowed the conservation department to undertake a treatment review of the conservation of palm leaf manuscripts in order to make better-informed decisions about the treatment of these complex objects. As part of the review a questionnaire was posted...Wiland, Julia ; Brown, Rick ; Fuller, Lizzie ; Havelock, Lea ; Johnson, Jackie …
traditional preservation methods, palm leaf, ethical conservation, boxing, and long-term storage
-
Book chapter
Library partnerships in an age of openness
Librarians are strong collaborators. As we move toward the “next normal,” partnerships and collaboration will play an even larger role. In our post-pandemic world, what does “open” mean in terms of access to libraries, their staff, and their services? National libraries, for example, are still, to some extent, fixed in...Jolly, Liz
public libraries, collaboration, hybrid digital, open libraries, COVID-19 and libraries, library partnerships, national libraries, British Library, library mission, and access
-
Journal article
The British Library – rethinking physical storage
Purpose The British Library (BL) faces a significant challenge with storage space predicted to run out within the next three years. However, alongside a plan to create additional capacity, the BL also intends to take the opportunity to rethink the integration of storage and workflows in order to implement a...Appleyard, Andrew H.
storage, library, automated, sustainability, and repository
-
Book
Making Miracles in Medieval England
The cult of the saints was central to medieval Christianity largely due to the miraculous. Saints were members of the elect of heaven and could intercede with God on the behalf of supplicants. Whilst people visited shrines and prayed to the saints for many reasons it was the hope of...Lynch, Tom
-
Journal article
Vehicularizing the vernacular: using the periodical press to popularize vernacular languages in Soviet Turkic communities
The study of language and script change among the Turkic communities of the Soviet Union often focuses on the switch from Arabic to Latin scripts. Less attention is paid to adaptations of the Arabic script to Turkic vernaculars, and to attempts aimed at convincing the literate masses of their usefulness....Erdman, Michael J.
-
Journal article
Great Doxology with Miaphysite Trisagion
The article contains the edition and study of three ostraca in the British Library (Ostracon 5878) which join with another fragment in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (P.Mon.Epiph. 607). The join of these pieces helps to date the British Library fragments to the turn of the 6th-7th centuries and assign...Toth, Peter
Monastery of Epiphanius, Liturgical ostraca, Apa Moses, Great Doxology, and Coptic liturgy
-
Journal article
Abroad Among Our Kind: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War Love Poems
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland arrived in Barcelona in the fall of 1936, two months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. They had come to help with the relief operations being organized...Aguirre, Mercedes
Love Poems, Spain, and Civil War
-
Software
Living-with-machines/MapReader: End of LwM
This release marks the end of the current funding for MapReader during the Living with Machines (LwM) project. @kasra-hosseini @andrewphilipsmith @rwood-97 @kmcdono2 @dcsw2 @kallewesterling @kasparvonbeelenHosseini, Kasra ; Wood, Rosie ; Smith, Andy ; McDonough, Katie ; Wilson, Daniel C. S. …
computer vision and maps
-
Other
Models for MapReader ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023 Geohumanities Workshop paper
Collection of fine-tuned models created during research published in Kasra Hosseini, Daniel C. S. Wilson, Kaspar Beelen, and Katherine McDonough. 2022. MapReader: a computer vision pipeline for the semantic exploration of maps at scale. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities '22). Association for...Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine ; Wilson, Daniel C. S.
computational humanities, computer vision, maps, models, and image classification
-
Dataset
Diachronic and diatopic word embeddings from newspapers digitised by the British Library (1830-1889): North and South England
Diachronic word embeddings (decade-level) trained with Word2Vec (via Gensim) on different geographic subcorpora of the Heritage Made Digital British and the Living with Machines historical newspaper collections: - North England (north.zip) - South England (south.zip) At the moment, for each subcorpus, Word2Vec models are available for each decade in the...Pedrazzini, Nilo ; McGillivray, Barbara
historical semantics, diachronic embeddings, late modern English, word embeddings, word vectors, word2vec, and diatopic embeddings
-
Dataset
Decade-level Word2Vec models from automatically transcribed 19th-century newspapers digitised by the British Library (1800-1919)
Word embeddings trained on a 4.2-billion-word corpus of 19th-century British newspapers using Word2Vec and specific parameters. The embeddings are divided into periods of ten years each. Unlike those in this repository, these were not aligned and OCR errors skimmed from the vocabulary. See related GitHub repository for the full documentation:...Pedrazzini, Nilo
historical semantics, British newspapers, word embeddings, word vectors, word2vec, and Late Modern English
-
Journal article
FAST the Inside Track: Where We Are, Where Do We Want to Be, and How Do We Get There?
This is an overview of the development of FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) from its inception in the late 1990s, through its development and implementation to the work being undertaken by OCLC and the FAST Policy and Outreach Committee (FPOC) to develop and promote FAST. FPOC members explain how... -
Conference paper (published)
“Webcomics Archive? Now I'm Interested”: Comics Readers Seeking Information in Web Archives
There is a longstanding tradition of understanding information needs and interaction behavior across different user groups to inform the design of digital products and services. There is a gap in such research of comics readers, specifically how they seek and interact with the information and interfaces of web-based archives provided...Berube, Linda ; Makri, Stephann ; Cooke, Ian ; Priego, Ernesto ; Wisdom, Stella
-
Book chapter
The sociability of scientific knowledge exchange in British Farming, 1950-90
This is a single chapter from an edited collection that has the following abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agricultural practices and rural livelihoods were challenged by changes such as commercialization, intensified global trade, and rapid urbanization. Planting Seeds of Knowledge studies the relationship between these agricultural...Horrocks, Sally ; Martin, John ; Merchant, Paul
agrciculture, food, and farming
-
Journal article
Writing Milan and Turin in the Light of (Failed) Utopia: Luciano Bianciardi and Paolo Volponi
This article examines a series of novels by Italian writers, Luciano Bianciardi and Paolo Volponi, that capture the transformations brought about by the post-World War II economic growth in the urban-industrial society of Northern Italy. The analysis draws on utopia as, in Ruth Levitas’s words, a ‘desire for a better...Brecciaroli, Giulia
Paolo Volponi, Utopia/dystopia, Turin, Luciano Bianciardi, Literary Urban Studies, Milan, and post-war Italian literature
-
Journal article
Scientific investigation of the Minsterley Maidens’ crowns
25 samples were taken from seven eighteenth-century commemorative Maidens’ Garlands and Crowns from Minsterley, Shropshire. The samples were investigated by digital microscopy, macro-X-ray fluorescence scanning, Raman microscopy and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The study intended to obtain as much information as possible on the making of the...Risdonne, Valentina ; Melita, Lucia Noor ; Burgio, Lucia ; Morris, Rosie
-
Journal article
A literature review of palm leaf manuscript conservation—Part 1: a historic overview, leaf preparation, materials and media, palm leaf manuscripts at the British Library and the common types of damage
Abstract The closure of the British Library during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic allowed the conservation department to undertake a treatment review of the conservation of palm leaf manuscripts in order to make better-informed decisions about the treatment of these complex objects. As part of the review a questionnaire was posted... -
Journal article
Under the Impression: Multispectral Imaging of Lord Frederick Campbell Charter XXI 5
Lord Frederick Campbell Charter 5 is the only surviving English document that still has an authentic, legible, pre-Conquest seal attached to it. The text purports to be a writ of Edward the Confessor (1003x5–1066) granting a slew of rights to Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury. We examined the writ using multispectral...Hudson, Alison ; Duffy, Christina
multispectral imaging, digital humanities, conservation, seals, early medieval history, writs, and Norman Conquest
-
Journal article
Conserving paper: reflections on cultures of conservation in Europe and East Asia
Since the 1970s, a continuous exchange of information about conservation between Europe and East Asia has greatly influenced approaches to the treatment of paper objects as well as the tools and materials used. This knowledge is often disseminated and absorbed in a purely practical manner, stripped out of its wider...Kralka, Paulina
-
Journal article
Investigating the Properties of Folded Parchment – A Preliminary Study
Parchment manuscripts form an important part of many historic collections. They are often found folded, with some displaying multiple fold patterns resulting from changing uses over their history. Parchment is a potentially fragile medium and folding can increase its susceptibility to damage, as well as hampering access and display. Treatment...Garside, Paul ; Dekeyser, Camille
humidification, folded parchment, FTIR-spectroscopy, and shrinkage temperature
-
Journal article
Pursuing the Percys: the original owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours
In 2019 the British Library acquired the Percy Hours, a late thirteenth-century book of hours from York. This acquisition reunited the manuscript with the Percy Psalter, acquired by the Library in 1990. Together they originally formed a single volume psalter-hours. The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a small number of...Jackson, Eleanor
Psalter-hours, heraldry, psalter, social history, book of hours, manuscript, patronage, and York
-
Learning object
Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 2)
This is the second of a two-part lesson introducing deep learning based computer vision methods for humanities research. This lesson digs deeper into the details of training a deep learning based computer vision model. It covers some challenges one may face due to the training data used and the importance...Strien, Daniel van ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Wevers, Melvin ; Smits, Thomas ; McDonough, Katherine
-
Learning object
Computer Vision for the Humanities: An Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification (Part 1)
This is the first of a two-part lesson introducing deep learning based computer vision methods for humanities research. Using a dataset of historical newspaper advertisements and the fastai Python library, the lesson walks through the pipeline of training a computer vision model to perform image classification.Strien, Daniel van ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Wevers, Melvin ; Smits, Thomas ; McDonough, Katherine
-
Dataset
Diachronic word embeddings from 19th-century newspapers digitised by the British Library (1800-1919)
Word vectors related to the paper "Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers" by Nilo Pedrazzini and Barbara McGillivray (2022). The embeddings were trained on a 4.2-billion-word corpus of 19th-century British newspapers using Word2Vec and specific parameters. The embeddings are divided into...Pedrazzini, Nilo ; McGillivray, Barbara
historical semantics, word-vectors, late-modern-english, newspapers, diachronic-embeddings, and word2vec
-
Journal article
Islamic Manuscripts from Aceh in the British Library
Aceh has long been renowned as a centre of Islamic scholarship, and some of the most famous Malay texts were composed in this area of north Sumatra. However, despite an abundance of philological and literary studies of texts from Aceh, little attention has yet been paid to the materiality of...Acehnese, Aceh, manuscripts, binding, Malay, Arabic, illumination, and Southeast Asia
-
Book chapter
Blue Heritage Among Fishermen of Mafia Island, Tanzania
Off the South-East coast of Tanzania, at the mouth of the Rufiji River, lies the Mafia archipelago. This chapter explores the concept of blue heritage by showing how the fishermen of Mafia have altered their language, perception of time and sense of community to include the sea and its animals....de Haan, Mariam
ethnography, Rufiji River, Tanzania, whale sharks, fishing communities, fishing, Mafia archipelago, and fish
-
Journal article
Effects of soothing images and soothing sounds on mood and well‐being
Objectives Mental health problems are increasing at an alarming rate, calling for the need for more cost-effective and easily accessible interventions. Visual images and sounds depicting nature have been found to have positive effects on individuals' mood and well-being; however, the combined effects of images and sounds have been scarcely...Witten, Emily ; Ryynanen, Jasmiina ; Wisdom, Stella ; Tipp, Cheryl ; Chan, Stella W. Y.
depression, Project Soothe, mood, sounds, well-being, images, nature, and anxiety
-
Journal article
Dunhuang scrolls: Innovative storage solutions at the British Library
The British Library’s Stein collection contains about 14,000 scrolls, fragments and booklets in Chinese from a cave in the Buddhist Mogao Caves complex near Dunhuang in north-west China. This article describes storage and access solutions for the collection in the context of a busy research library and the currently ongoing...Kralka, Paulina ; Muzart, Marya
conservation, storage, paper, Central Asia, Dunhuang, and scroll
-
Journal article
Buddhism and trade: interpreting the distribution of rock-cut monasteries in the Western Ghats mountains, India using least-cost paths
Trade is frequently cited as the primary influence on the florescence of rock-cut Buddhist monasteries in the Western Ghats mountains, India between 200 BCE and 400 CE. Yet the monasteries have been foci of art-historical scholarship without detailed investigation of archaeology and geography. The relationship between monasteries, trade routes, ports...Rees, Gethin
trade, rock-cut monasteries, early historic, Deccan, Buddhism, and Western Ghats
-
Journal article
Collections Within Collections: An Analysis of Tipu Sultan’s Library
The library of Tipu Sultan of Mysore is one of the most important in the history of South Asian Islamic collections. Unlike many collections which can be regarded as dynastic libraries, Tipu’s was relatively newly-formed. Most of the books had not been acquired before the mid-eighteenth century but nevertheless came...Sims-Williams, Ursula
Tipu Sultan, Islamic seals, manuscript studies, and Deccan India
-
Journal article
The official and personal seals of Tipu Sultan of Mysore
This article looks at all the known seals of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782-1799) particularly those found in the manuscripts which formed his Library collection, disbanded in 1799 after the fall of Seringapatam and subsequently divided between the East India Company London (now in the British Library), and the...Sims-Williams, Ursula
Tipu Sultan, seals, Seringapartam, and East India Company Library
-
Journal article
Animals, Joseph Dalton Hooker and the Ross Expedition to Antarctica, 1839–1843
In 1839 the Ross Expedition to locate the Southern Magnetic pole was launched from Chatham. Over the next four years, this voyage of discovery would bring into sharper focus the land and seas surrounding the Antarctic region. Official reports and modern accounts of this voyage invariably situate the humans on...Sharp Jones, Cam
animals, HMS Erebus, Ross Expedition, Antarctica, zoology, and Joseph Dalton Hooker
-
Journal article
Qur’an manuscripts from Mindanao: collecting histories, art and materiality
The study of the writing traditions of the Malay world of maritime South East Asia has been both shaped and distorted by the differing colonial experiences within the region. In particular, a chasmic disconnect can be discerned between the western swathe occupied by the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei...Gallop, Annabel Teh
Maranao, Islamic art, Qur'an manuscripts, manuscript illumination, Maguindanao, and Mindanao
-
Journal article
The Croatian Collections in the British Library
The paper discusses Croatian historic collections acquired by the British Museum Library in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The results of previous research into the collection are mentioned and the new findings are presented. The paper considers the growth of the Croatian collection to...Grba, Milan
Glagolitic, Slavic, academic publications, Croatia, Croatian books and collections, British Museum Library, manuscript, and Eastern European
-
Journal article
Reading the Way to the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Armagh
This paper examines the series of text-image devices found in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 52), at the explicit to the Gospel of John (fol. 103r), the tituli to the Book of Revelation (fol. 159v), and the Revelation explicit (fol. 170r), to suggest how the manuscript...Jackson, Eleanor
John the Evangelist, diagrams, Book of Armagh, manuscript, Gregory the Great, Moralia, art, white martyrdom, Heavenly Jerusalem, reading, eschatology, and meditation
-
Research report
Data Study Group Final Report: The National Archives, UK: Discovering Topics and Trends in the UK Government Web Archive
The challenge we address in this report is to make steps towards improving search and discovery of resources within this vast archive for future archive users, and how the UKGWA collection could begin to be unlocked for research and experimentation by approaching it as data (i.e. as a dataset at...Beavan, David ; Nanni, Federico
-
Conference paper (published)
When Time Makes Sense: A Historically-Aware Approach to Targeted Sense Disambiguation
As languages evolve historically, making computational approaches sensitive to time can improve performance on specific tasks. In this work, we assess whether applying historical language models and time-aware methods help with determining the correct sense of polysemous words. We outline the task of time-sensitive Targeted Sense Disambiguation (TSD), which aims...Beelen, Kaspar ; Nanni, Federico ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Tolfo, Giorgia …
-
Journal article
Maps of a Nation? The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research
Although the Ordnance Survey has itself been the subject of historical research, scholars have not systematically used its maps as primary sources of information. This is partly for disciplinary reasons and partly for the technical reason that high-quality maps have not until recently been available digitally, geo-referenced, and in color....Hosseini, Kasra ; McDonough, Katherine ; van Strien, Daniel ; Vane, Olivia ; Wilson, Daniel C.S.
-
Journal article
'I Renounced my Children as Aforesaid': A Consensual Divorce of 369
This article offers the edition of a divorce settlement of 369 housed in the British Library. The papyrus is one of the few fourth-century deeds of divorce. In addition to the standard clauses found in such settlements, provisions for the care of the minor children of the ex-couple are also...Micucci, Federica
-
Dataset
UK Doctoral Thesis Metadata from EThOS
This dataset has been superseded by a more recent version: https://doi.org/10.23636/ybpt-nh33 If you require access to an earlier version, please email openaccess@bl.uk, including the dataset title, date, and DOI in your request. The data in this collection comprises the bibliographic metadata for all UK doctoral theses listed in EThOS, the...British Library ; Rosie, Heather
higher education, ethos, dissertations, thesis, research, PhD, doctoral, student, UK, and theses
-
Dataset
UK Doctoral Thesis Metadata from EThOS
This dataset has been superseded by a more recent version: https://doi.org/10.23636/j278-4b96 If you require access to an earlier version, please email openaccess@bl.uk, including the dataset title, date, and DOI in your request. The data in this collection comprises the bibliographic metadata for all UK doctoral theses listed in EThOS, the...British Library ; Rosie, Heather
higher education, student, EThOS, research, doctoral, thesis, PhD, UK, dissertations, and theses
-
Book chapter
Tibet
Rinpoche, Lama Chime Radha
-
Conference paper (published)
ICIDS2020 Panel: Building the Discipline of Interactive Digital Narratives
Building our discipline has been an ongoing discussion since the early days of ICIDS. From earlier international joint efforts to integrate research from multiple fields of study to today’s endeavours by researchers to provide scholarly works of reference, the discussion on how to continue building Interactive Digital Narratives as a...Bernstein, Mark ; Palosaari Eladhari, Mirjam ; Koenitz, Hartmut ; Louchart, Sandy ; Nack, Frank …
-
Blog post
Clouds: How Luke Howard linked Weather Lore and Natural Philosophy
William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) ‘lonely as a cloud’ poem was conceived in April 1802 on a spring day walk in the Lake District. A few months later, in December 1802, a pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard (1772-1864) delivered a paper in London, on the dynamics of cloud formations. The two...Déri, Andrea