Type of session: Talk

Title:  From Hack & Yacks to Reading Groups: Keeping skills apace Digital Scholarship

Name of session facilitator(s): Nora

Approximate duration: 1 hr

Skill level: All

Proposal:

Research libraries and cultural heritage institutions must be able to adapt to a changing research landscape and invest in the development of staff skills and core competencies to match if they are to continue to effectively support and engage with modern scholars. The Digital Curator team at British Library creates a variety of opportunities all year round for library staff to develop skills necessary to support emerging areas of modern scholarship, particularly the Digital Humanities (DH).

In this talk I can share a bit about how we approach this through our Digital Scholarship Training Programme, and in turn would love to hear from other campers where and how they keep their skills up to date!

Prerequisite: Just an interest

Type of session: Play

Title: A simple tutorial using Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped in Google Fusion tables.

Name of session facilitator(s): Nora

Approximate duration: 1-2 hr

Skill level: All

Proposal:

I can walk through a short exercise we did for colleagues at British Library as part of our staff Digital Scholarship Training Programme showing how to use Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped. The dataset relates to our Canadian Photographs Collection. We’ll use OpenRefine to extract location names referenced in these image captions, and then Google Fusion Tables to find latitude/longitude and map the results. Participants are more than welcome to recommend/suggest/try other mapping tools with the data provided at their own pace as well and report back to the group!

Dataset: Picturing Canada Messy Data

Prerequisite: A laptop with OpenRefine installed. A Google account. A print out of Preparing your Data to be MappedRevised and a saved copy of GoogleSheetsGeocodeScript to cut and paste into Google Sheets.