Search Constraints
Search Results
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Book
Imagining the West: A Guide to Printed Materials in The British Library on The Literature of The American West
This guide explores fiction works about the American West and its place in the popular imagination.Whittaker, David J.
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Book
Women in the trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1900: A Guide to Materials in the British Library
Few regions, in any country, at any time, have so indelibly shaped their nation’s identity and its international image as the late nineteenth century American West. For nearly a century this West was portrayed in fiction, film, folklore and art as a vast arena of mythic struggles between rugged individuals,...Kemble, Jean
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Book
Mining the American West: A Bibliographical Guide to Printed Materials on American Mining Frontiers in the British Library
This bibliography provides a basic guide to the printed materials on this important topic in American History as reflected in the holdings of the British Library. It does not claim to be comprehensive, but it will provide the serious student with a window to the literature on Western American mining...Whittaker, David J.
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Book
The American Colonies, 1584-1688. A Selective Guide to Materials in the British Library
A guide to works concerning the European colonization of the areas of North America that later became the United States of America, focusing on the fifteen states bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Topics include politics and government, economy, society, and cultural and intellectual life.Sharp Wells, Anne
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Book
Conserving America: A Bibliographical Guide to Printed Material in the British Library Relating to American Environmental History and Thought
The purpose of this bibliography is to list the significant studies of American Environment History found in the British Library. Because no clear line can be drawn between conservation, reclamation, ecology and natural history, each is included. This bibliography does not contain references to all the holdings on the topic...Whittaker, David J.
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Book
Caribbean Publishing: A Selective Bibliography of British Library Holdings, 1800-1974
This bibliography includes British Library holdings of books that were published in Barbados, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, between 1800 and their respective independences: 1966, 1970, 1974, 1962 and 1962. A selective bibliography, there were some important exclusions, crucially, anything that was published by a ‘government printing...Oppenheim, Naomi
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Journal article
The International Standard Name Identifier: extending identity management across the global metadata supply chain
This article describes how ISNI is being adopted as a common identifier across disparate sectors of publishing. Whether publishing and distributing recorded music, film or text ISNI is making good identity management a staple element in the global metadata supply chain. As the content creation industries become more engaged with...MacEwan, Andrew
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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
Wikimedia Commons: A Beginner's Guide
A guide written for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, instructing users how to upload their images to Wikimedia Commons.Hinnie, Lucy R.
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Journal article
Orwell’s Political Pamphlet ‘Solar System’: A Network Interpretation of a British Library Collection
This article examines the network of publishers, authors and topics included in George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets at the British Library (shelfmark 1899.ss.1-49.), some of which were catalogued as part of a Ph.D. placement in 2019. It explores how the pamphlets came to be held at the British Library,...Treacher, Claudia
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Dataset
Frederick May's London Press Dictionary and Advertiser's Handbook (1883-1911)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Frederick May and successors, containing information on newspapers, magazines and periodicals and arranged in alphabetical and sometimes tabular order. Information for each title included price publisher office political and religious leaningFrederick May & Son ; British Library
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Dataset
The Newspaper Press Directory (1881-1920)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Charles Mitchell. Newspapers listed primarily listed in alphabetical order of the town the newspaper where the title was published. Information for each title included: features connected with the district such as population and trade; principal towns in...C. Mitchell and Co. ; British Library
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Abstract
Historic machines from 'prams' to 'Parliament': new avenues for collaborative linguistic research
Research in computational linguistics has made successful attempts at modelling word meaning at scale, but much remains to be done to put these computational models to the test of historical scholarship (see e.g. Beelen et al. 2021). More importantly, a lot of computational research looks at texts in a historical...Ridge, Mia ; Tolfo, Giorgia ; Westerling, Kalle ; Pedrazzini, Nilo ; McGillivray, Barbara
crowdsourcing, computational linguistics, and digital humanities
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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
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Book chapter
Tibet
Rinpoche, Lama Chime Radha
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Working paper
An Introduction to AI for GLAM
There is a growing interest in utilising Machine Learning (ML) techniques within Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM), and a corresponding demand for training to enable practitioners to engage confidently in this area. Staff at these institutions are seeking practical knowledge and skills in ML concepts and methods specific to...van Strien, Daniel ; Bell, Mark ; McGregor, Nora Rose ; Trizna, Michael
ICML, GLAM, and Machine Learning
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Working paper
Documenting Geographically and Contextually Diverse Data Sources: The BigScience Catalogue of Language Data and Resources
In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prioritization, however, has resulted in concerns with respect to the rights of data subjects represented in data collections, particularly when considering the difficulty in... -
Working paper
Entities, Dates, and Languages: Zero-Shot on Historical Texts with T0
In this work, we explore whether the recently demonstrated zero-shot abilities of the T0 model extend to Named Entity Recognition for out-of-distribution languages and time periods. Using a historical newspaper corpus in 3 languages as test-bed, we use prompts to extract possible named entities. Our results show that a naive...De Toni, Francesco ; Akiki, Christopher ; de la Rosa, Javier ; Fourrier, Clémentine ; Manjavacas, Enrique …
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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/kvwc-ty06. 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
thesis, student, UK, dissertations, PhD, theses, doctoral, EThOS, higher education, and research
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Journal article
American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library
The twentieth century was a golden age of pamphleteering in America, especially during the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945. Pamphlets were vital tools for radical organizations in educating and communicating with their own members and persuading the public...Collins, Jodie
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Research report
Bunnyfoot British Library Emerging Formats Report
Bunnyfoot undertook an exploratory study for the British Library to investigate users’ perspectives on the preservation and use of Emerging Formats in the Library context. These findings are intended to help inform requirements for the collection, preservation, discovery and use of these materials at legal deposit libraries.Tope, Andrew ; Kayukala, Mila
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Dataset
British Library Newspaper Title-level List: A list of catalogued newspaper titles held by the British Library
A title-level list of catalogued newspapers held by the British Library.British Library
datasets, catalogues, media, newspapers, periodicals, and metadata
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Research report
Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014 Collection Scoping Document
This document aims to establish the scope of the web archive collection for the Commonwealth Games to be held in Glasgow. The proposed collection has been given the working title “Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014". Collection of internet sites relating to the XX Commonwealth Games which were held in Glasgow, Scotland,...MacGlone, Eilidh
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Journal article
Selected English Masonic Bookbindings
Books as artefacts, as well as the texts that they contain, play a fundamental role in English freemasonry. The esteem in which they were held is shown in paintings. This detail comes from a portrait of freemason Dr Robert Crucefix (1797-1850) who is shown with significant items of regalia as...Marks, P. J. M.
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Other
In the Spotlight Participants Survey
In summer 2018, the LibCrowds project at the British Library ran a survey designed to help us understand who our participants were. The 22 question survey was based on earlier surveys run by the Galaxy Zoo and Art UK Tagger projects, to allow comparison with other crowdsourcing projects. It was...British Library
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Exhibition object labels
West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song
Fargion , Janet Topp ; Wallace, Marion
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Exhibition object labels
‘Sounds of Africa’, part of the Africa ’05 season
Wallace, Marion
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Other
Digital Sources in Europe for African History
There are copious resources for the study of African history on the internet. They include manuscripts and documentary archives, maps, museum collections, newspapers, printed books, picture collections, and sound and moving images. The websites of European institutions provide a good proportion of this content, reflecting the long, entangled, and troubled... -
Journal article
Author of his own fate? The eighteenth-century writings of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo
The life of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo (also known as Job ben Solomon) receives a fresh examination in this article, based primarily on his own writings. The son of an Imam from Bundu in Senegambia, Diallo was enslaved in 1731 and transported to America. He survived to gain his freedom, make...Naylor, Paul ; Wallace, Marion
Atlantic World, biography, Islam , scholarship, Senegal , Senegambia , slave narratives, West Africa , emancipation, slavery, archives, and Gambia
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Report
Locating a National Collection/Research Bods quantitative findings summary
The National Trust and The British Library, along with several cultural heritage partners, commissioned an audience research project to inform the development of an online history and heritage platform to provide broader access to the wealth of artefacts and resources from across the entire network of information providers. This slide...Strachan, Peter
Quantitative, Audience Research, Geography, Location, and Cultural Heritage
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Report
Locating a National Collection/Research Bods qualitative findings summary
The National Trust and The British Library, along with several cultural heritage partners, commissioned an audience research project to inform the development of an online history and heritage platform to provide broader access to the wealth of artefacts and resources from across the entire network of information providers. This report...Horgan, John
Audience Research, Qualitative, Location, Cultural Heritage, and Geography
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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
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Presentation
Locating a national collection through audience research
Locating a National Collection (LaNC) aims to help cultural heritage organisations to use location data — such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe — to connect collections and engage audiences. Location-based interfaces such as web maps offer opportunities to open up collections...Rees, Gethin
Interface design, Geography, Location, Web maps, Cultural Heritage, and Metadata
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Presentation
Locating a National Collection
Locating a National Collection (LaNC) aims to help cultural heritage organisations to use location data — such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe — to connect collections and engage audiences. Location-based interfaces such as web maps offer opportunities to open up collections...Rees, Gethin ; Vitale, Valeria
Interface design, Geography, Location, Web maps, Cultural Heritage, and Metadata
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Journal article
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 as a Source for Florentine/Pisan University History
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 contains a selection of statutes related to the university of Florence and Pisa from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The manuscript was originally produced to specifically document rulings between the institution and Florentine government, suggesting it may have been a personal vademecum of...Rossi, Elena
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Journal article
A Sense of Place: The ‘London’ Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III
The British Library, Royal MS. 13 A. III, containing a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, was likely produced in southeast England in or around London between the late thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only manuscript with an extended series of illustrations,...Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy
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Journal article
‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible
This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758‐1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of...Billingsley, Naomi
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Research report
British Library Research Report 2019-20
It will come as no surprise that the impacts of a global pandemic on our research activities are a major theme of this, our fourth, annual Research Report. Regular readers will know that our reports reflect the breadth of research undertaken by our staff, students, fellows and collaborators during the...British Library
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections
'Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections ' is a tool aimed at heritage professionals to support decision making for persistent identifier (PID) use. The project’s 2020 survey found the value of PIDs, for example in creating trustworthy links, was understood but needs to be more clearly addressed directly to decision makers...Madden, Frances
persistent identifiers, Towards a National Collection, and PIDs
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Journal article
Six Poll-Tax Receipts from Arsinoe
Micucci, Federica
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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
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Journal article
Covid-19 and the Future of the Digital Shift amongst Research Libraries: An RLUK Perspective in Context
Research Libraries UK is a consortium of 37 of the UK and Ireland’s largest research libraries with the purpose of convening its members around the key issues that affect them, to represent their collective voice, to support them as they face shared challenges, and to be an effective advocate on...Baxter, Guy ; Beard, Lorraine ; Beattie, Gavin ; Blake, Michelle ; Greenhall, Matthew …
library services, library space, academic libraries, Covid-19 pandemic, and digital shift
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Abstract
PIDs for Repositories: DOIs and URNs and Handles, oh my….
This presentation, given at a workshop on PID requirements in the UKRI Open Access Policy, gives an overview of implementation options to meet technical requirement 5a: "PIDs for research outputs must be implemented according to international recognised standards, examples of international standards include DOI, URN or Handle".Cope, Jez
PIDs, Open Access, and UKRI
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Report
Archiving Social Media Workshop Two (June 2019)
The workshop was organised by the British Library Web Archiving Team with support from Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education at the British Library on Monday 10th June 2019. The participants at the workshop were a mix of academic researchers, postgraduate research students and information professionals from the British Library,...UK Web Archive
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Report
Archiving Social Media Workshop One (July 2018)
The workshop was organised by the British Library Web Archiving Team with support from Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education at the British Library on Monday 16th July, 2019. The participants at the workshop were a mix of academic researchers and information professionals from the British Library, The National Archives...UK Web Archive
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Presentation
Publisher Submission Portal User Survey - Autumn 2021
A presentation given to the Collection Development and Acquisitions sub-group (CDAS) of the Legal Deposit Implementation Group in December 2021. CDAS brings together representatives from the six UK legal deposit libraries, to report on operational matters and plan policy for co-operation on managing the legal deposit collections. The Publisher Submission...Hazell, Lottie
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Research report
Publisher Submission Portal User Survey Report – December 2021
The Publisher Submission Portal is a tool that can be used to deposit born digital publications to the British Library, and other legal deposit libraries, to fufil obligations under legal deposit law. The Portal is designed for use by small publishers, defined as producing 50 or fewer publications per year....Hazell, Lottie
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Research report
Quality Assurance in the New Media Writing Prize Collection
The UK Web Archive is an online repository for UK based websites. Managed by the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries—the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, Cambridge University Libraries, and the Trinity College, Dublin—the UK Web Archive's chief...Pyke, Tegan
Emerging Formats, digital preservation, British Library PhD placement, web archiving, digital storytelling, and New Media Writing Prize
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Dataset
Persistent Identifiers as IRO Infrastructure: Survey 2 Data
The survey ran from 4 October to 8 November 2021 and was open to everyone working in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums internationally but the survey had a clear UK focus. Some responses have been removed or recoded to protect the identity of respondents.Kotarski, Rachael ; Madden, Frances
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Journal article
MapReader: A Computer Vision Pipeline for the Semantic Exploration of Maps at Scale
We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i)...Hosseini, Kasra ; Wilson, Daniel C.S. ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine
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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
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Journal article
Design Choices for Productive, Secure, Data-Intensive Research at Scale in the Cloud
We present a policy and process framework for secure environments for productive data science research projects at scale, by combining prevailing data security threat and risk profiles into five sensitivity tiers, and, at each tier, specifying recommended policies for data classification, data ingress, software ingress, data egress, user access, user...Arenas, Diego ; Atkins, Jon ; Austin, Claire ; Beavan, David ; Cabrejas Egea, Alvaro …
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Journal article
Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English
We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance...Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Colavizza, Giovanni ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona
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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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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.
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Conference paper (published)
Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy
This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it,...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Nanni, Federico ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Ahnert, Ruth …
nineteenth-century English, living machines, BERT, and animacy
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Conference paper (unpublished)
A Deep Learning Approach to Geographical Candidate Selection through Toponym Matching
Recognizing toponyms and resolving them to their real-world referents is required for providing advanced semantic access to textual data. This process is often hindered by the high degree of variation in toponyms. Candidate selection is the task of identifying the potential entities that can be referred to by a toponym... -
Book chapter
How we got here
Wilson, Daniel C.S.
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Book chapter
Text Meets Space: Geographic Content Extraction, Resolution and Information Retrieval
In this half-day tutorial, we will review the basic concepts of, methods for, and applications of geographic information retrieval, also showing some possible applications in fields such as the digital humanities. The tutorial is organized in four parts. First we introduce some basic ideas about geography, and demonstrate why text...Leidner, Jochen ; Martins, Bruno ; McDonough, Katherine ; Purves, Ross
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Research report
Data Study Group Final Report: Smart monitoring for conservation areas
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) monitors over 250,000 protected areas (e.g. national parks and nature reserves) and thousands of other sites and critical habitats. These sites are the foundation of global natural assets and are central to the preservation of biodiversity and human well-being. Unfortunately, they face increasing pressures... -
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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Conference paper (unpublished)
Contextualizing Victorian Newspapers
Beelen, Kaspar ; Ahnert, Ruth ; Beavan, David ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Hosseini, Kasra …
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Conference paper (unpublished)
Defoe: A Spark-Based Toolbox for Analysing Digital Historical Textual Data
This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations.... -
Journal article
Babbage among the insurers: Big 19th-century data and the public interest
This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of...Wilson, Daniel C.S.
big data, Thomas Rowe Edmonds, Charles Babbage, public interest, and insurance
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Policy report
British Library Persistent Identifier Policy
The purpose of this policy is to outline the approach to the use of identifiers and persistent identifiers (PIDs) in internal and external facing British Library systems, to define a consistent set of requirements for PIDs to use when managing and developing services and to articulate the responsibilities in applying...British Library
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Dataset
Digitised Books. c. 1510 - c. 1900. JSONL (OCR derived text + metadata)
The dataset comprises metadata and OCR generated text from 49,455 digitised books published between c. 1510 - c. 1900. The books cover a wide range of subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry and literature. The dataset is in JSON Lines (JSONL) text format.British Library Labs ; British Library
OCR and monographs
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Book
A catalogue of manuscript and printed reports, field books, memoirs, maps, etc., of the Indian Surveys, deposited in the map room of the India office
A catalogue of manuscript and printed reports, field books, memoirs, maps, etc., of the Indian Surveys, deposited in the map room of the India office is the published listing of the holdings of the map collection of the India Office, the working archive used for the administration of India from...Markham, Clements