playing and making in libraries - edinburgh napier university• poetic places • rob sherman’s...
TRANSCRIPT
Playing and Making
in Libraries
Talk for:
RIVAL (Research Impact Value and LIS)
11th July 2018
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
www.bl.uk 2
Founded in 2010, the Digital
Scholarship Department at British
Library supports researchers and
staff to make innovative use of our
digital collections and data.
We are a group of cross disciplinary
experts in the areas of digitisation,
librarianship, digital history &
humanities, computer and data
science, looking at how technology is
transforming research, and in turn,
our services.
@BL_DigiSchol
Meet the Digital Scholarship Team
Main Activities:
• Staff training
• Promoting Digital Scholarship within BL
• Curating digital research data
• Project management
• Engagement with users
• Creating and sharing online content with other libraries and research centres
• Communication: events, blogging, social media
• Off the Map Competition
• Playing Beowulf
• Litcraft
• Ambient Literature
• Poetic Places
• Rob Sherman’s transmedia residency
• Interactive Fiction Summer School
• Gothic Novel Jam 2018
• International Games Week
• AdventureX
• Games & GLAMs
What I’ll talk about today:
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The Off the Map Competition
• A new type of collaboration
• Explores how British Library digital collections
can be used in creative ways
• Engagement with new audiences
• Opportunity for students in the UK to
showcase their talents to industry
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C.J. Visscher, London , 1616 (detail) Maps C.5.a.6
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John Leake, An exact surveigh of the streets lanes and churches contained within the
ruines of the City of London, 1667. Maps Crace port 2.58
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2013 winning team:
Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort University, Leicester
Created an interpretation of 17th Century London
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)
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2014 winning team: Gothulus Rift, University of South Wales
Created a Fonthill Abbey inspired game called Nix using Oculus Rift
YouTube flythrough: http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw
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2015 Winning Game:
“The Wondering Lands of Alice”
Team Off our Rockers, De Montfort University in Leicester
YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/7bwx4uUnbV4
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Off the Map 2016 1st Place:
“The Tempest” by Team Quattro, De Montfort University, Leicester
YouTube flythrough: https://youtu.be/0lzpEFgpk3Y
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Playing Beowulf
Project with University College London Institute of Education, funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council in the UK. Developed a game-authoring tool
based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, for use by schools, universities,
curators and library visitors.
http://darecollaborative.net/2015/03/11/playing-beowulf-gaming-the-library/
http://creativeedutech.com/products/missionmaker-beowulf/
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Litcraft uses the Minecraft platform to
explore and better understand literary
landscapes; e.g. Treasure Island
Each map is recreated from the maps
published with each text, hand-crafted
and scaled to provide a fun world, that
permits both exploration and building
tasks.
https://chronotopiccartography.wordpress.com/litcraft/
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“Here’s an admission at the start of a research programme:
We don’t know what Ambient Literature is.
We’ve started to map the territory, to define by identifying borders and by testing the edges. It’s important to note though, that we don’t want to reduce the idea to something tight and defined, rather our intention is to open it up, so show by doing, making and thinking.
We do know that Ambient Literature asks for writing to be specific, to be for this form. That there are rules, grammars of making and thinking about readers and texts in new ways.”
Tom Abba, Ambient Literature project launch
It Must Have Been Dark by Thenby Duncan Speakmanhttps://ambientlit.com/index.php/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then/
The Cartographer’s Confessionby James Attleehttps://ambientlit.com/cartographersconfessionhttps://vimeo.com/237541329
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Next few projects I’m about to discuss use Public Domain
images from the Microsoft Partnership Digitisation Project
2006-8
• 68,000 volumes (47,000+ titles) published in the 19th
century mostly in English
• Excluded authors active 1850-1901 and who died after
1936
• Output: 25 million pages
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The illustrations were extracted algorithmically from the
digitised books:
25
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <mets:mets
xmlns:xsi="http://ww
w.w3.org/2001/XML
Schema-instance"
xmlns:mets="http://w
ww.loc.gov/METS/"
xsi:schemaLocation=
"http://www.loc.gov/
METS/
http://www.loc.gov/
standards/mets/ver
sion18/mets.xsd
info:lc/xmlns/premi
s-v2
Image snipped out
Algorithmically
From ALTO XML
Image taken from page 207 of 'London and its Environs. A
picturesque survey of the metropolis and the suburbs ...
Translated by Henry Frith. With ... illustrations'
ALTO XML
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The illustrations were uploaded to Flickr and albums were
created through crowd-sourced tagging
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Sarah Cole, Poetic Places
Creative-Entrepreneur-In-Residence
http://www.poeticplaces.uk/
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What is Poetic Places?
• A free, native app for Android and iOS devices.
• Bring poetic depictions of places into the physical world,
helping people to encounter literature and heritage in
relevant locations, accompanied by materials drawn from
cultural heritage collections.
• Brings literature and heritage into everyday life in
unexpected moments. Serendipitous discovery; not tours.
• Browse the poems and places without being in situ.
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Interactive Writer-in-Residence 2014/15
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Lines in the Ice - Seeking the Northwest PassageBritish Library Free Exhibition
November 2014 to April 2015
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Sir John Franklin Lady Franklin
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were lost on the ill-fated Franklin expedition in
search of the Northwest Passage in 1845
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Isaak Scinbank, the ‘Arctic Angler’ of Milldale
http://onmywifesback.tumblr.com/post/100107314408/scinbank
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/collectioncare/2014/11/the-salmon-
book-conservation-in-reverse-.html
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
The Digital Cairn
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Rob Sherman – On My Wife’s Back
Events & Music
https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/songs-from-on-my-wifes-back
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Infinite Journeys
Interactive Fiction Summer School23 – 27 July 2018
https://www.bl.uk/events/infinite-journeys-interactive-fiction-summer-school
200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. Aperfect opportunity to run a gothic novel themed challenge.Sub-theme is: The monster within
Gothic Novel Jam with Read Watch Play; participants to make something creative inspired by the gothic novel genre. By the 31st July upload or share it on the itch.io Gothic Novel Jam site.
Entries can include stories, poetry, art, games, music, films, pictures, soundscapes, or any other type of digital media response.
We want participants to use images from the British Library Flickr account as inspiration
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4-10 November 2018
http://games.ala.org/international-games-week
http://games.ala.org/gaming-at-the-british-library
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For 2018 International Games Week the British Library is hosting
The Narrative Games Convention: AdventureX
10-11 November 2018
http://adventurexpo.org/
https://youtu.be/PyJl5stFteI
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A forum for those who are interested in games, cultural heritage
and GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums)
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!forum/games-and-glams
https://twitter.com/games_glams
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Web: http://www.bl.uk/subjects/digital-scholarship
Blog:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @miss_wisdom #bldigital