Search Constraints
Search Results
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 …
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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
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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
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Book chapter
Tibet
Rinpoche, Lama Chime Radha
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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 …
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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
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Blog post
Diarists and diaries
‘But one shower of rain all this month.’ - entered John Evelyn in his diary on 29th April 1681. What would you write about April 2020 in your diary? John Evelyn (1620–1706) is one of the best-known English diarists. He is known as a diarist but he was also a...Déri, Andrea
science, modern history, curiosity, writing, and environmental science
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Blog post
Esperanto and Endangered Languages
Esperanto can be described as the language of hope, peace, and solidarity as Professor Renato Corsetti, General Secretary of the Academy of Esperanto has discussed in his previous posts for the European Studies blog. Hope remains the governing principle, as the name of the language attests (espero in Esperanto). Driven...Déri, Andrea
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Other
Guides to Choosing Persistent Identifiers - Version 3
The FREYA Project has compiled short guides to help with choosing persistent identifiers for various types of entities. These are the final version. The first versions were released in May 2020 for community feedback and comment throughout June 2020. Revised versions were developed in July 2020 and are published here....Madden, Frances ; van Horik, René ; van de Sandt, Stephanie ; Lavasa, Artemis ; Cousijn, Helena
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Journal article
‘And since that time has never been heard of…’ The forgotten boys of the sea: Marine Society merchant sea apprentices, 1772–1873
The supply of child labour during Britain’s industrial revolution conjures mental imagery of destitute children toiling in mines and mills, but in recent years, historians have demonstrated that children worked in many nooks and crannies of the economy, not just the highly visible new industries. The shipping industry was a...Withall, Caroline
maritime apprenticeship, Marine Society, indentures, child labour, merchant shipping, apprenticeship, and merchant seamen
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Journal article
Turkic Typologies: Ideology and Indigenous Linguistic Knowledge in the Work of Bekir Çobanzade
The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic...Erdman, Michael
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Journal article
‘An ‘authentic’ performance?: The cultural politics of ‘folk’ in Bengal and Bangladesh’ (part 2)
Folk performance genres have long been adapted to shorter formats for festivals, films, television and the new media. Contemporary practices of Kobigaan (a verse-duelling/song theatre genre) reveal how it functions differently for different communities relying on their cultural/collective memory of the genre. This section of the article first engages with...Basu, Priyanka
cultural memory, souvenir, festivals, sound chronotope, and Bengali cinema
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Journal article
Biographical Myth and the Publication of Mozart's Piano Quartets
The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for...Ridgewell, Rupert
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Journal article
‘How soon was now?’: A retrospective on the popularity of nouveau vintage
Fashion is a product and reflection of time and tantamount to modernity. The promise of which rests in the future, thus fashion is forever looking forward in the ambition to be ‘new’. Vintage fashion, namely clothes from past periods apprehend this perpetual cycle, often adopted by alternative groups of consumers...Brett, Rachel
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Journal article
Sovereign Signs: Titles of Kingship on Malay Seals
The recent publication of a new catalogue of over 2,000 Malay seals—defined as seals from Southeast Asia, with inscriptions in Arabic script—makes available for the first time a substantial corpus of primary source material from the Malay archipelago, dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The main function...Gallop, Annabel Teh
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Abstract
Using smart annotations to map the geography of newspapers
Geographic information is a key component in the description of collection objects, and yet its format is often unsuited for use with methods of geographic analysis. Catalogue entries are often inconsistent, in plain text, and without geographic coordinates (much less coordinates linked to authority records). Georesolution of the relevant fields...Ryan, Yann ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; van Strien, Daniel ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar …
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Book chapter
“Existentialist Hu-ha”?: Censoring the Existentialists in the British Theater
This chapter will look at the censorship of playwrights associated with existentialist thinking in the British theater, from the opening up of the London stage to French writers after the Second World War to the end of theater censorship in Britain with the passing of the Theatres Act 1968. Consideration...Andrews, Jamie