Archive for January 2018 (8 posts)

Iterative Collaboration at LC Labs

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The following is a repost of a blog post from the SAA’s Electronic Records Section: BloggERS! This post is part of the recent BloggERS series on “Collaborating Beyond the Archival Profession.” 

Four women of LC Labs team circled around a computer screen

The LC Labs team – Jaime Mears Abigail Potter, Meghan Ferriter, Kate Zwaard, Jaime Mears (clockwise from left)

The LC Labs team works to increase the impact of Library of Congress digital collections. This includes not only the 2,500,000+ items available on loc.gov, but also on-site only content and derivative content, such as our 25 million MARC records. We want to increase the variety of ways users engage with our content, and we get there through experimenting and collaboration, ideally setting up feedback loops whereby the work of our Library of Congress colleagues and our users can inform each other. From hands-on approaches such as crowdsourcing and tutorials for using our loc.gov API, to more traditional avenues into the content such as podcasts, blog posts and works of art, we work with folks to interpret our collections in transformative ways for broader audiences.

 

man viewing a stereograph standing in front of a drawers of stereograph collection

Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp visits the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs division

Our Innovator in Residence program places an individual from three months to a year with Library of Congress staff and collections to create something inspiring for the public domain. The data artist Jer Thorp is our current innovator, and it’s been a blast over the last couple months showing him what we love about this place. As a part of his residency, Jer is producing a podcast called “Artist in the Archive,” exploring both stories found in our content and the story of the content itself – how it gets here, how it’s maintained, enriched, shared, and listeners get to meet the people doing the work! He’s also exploring Library of Congress data sets (such as using network analysis to identify polymaths in our MARC records), and will create a capstone work.

Inspired by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Chronicling America Data Challenge and the excellent work we see coming from the data journalism field to make data meaningful, we are running a Congressional Data Challenge in partnership with the Congressional Research Service. This competition asks participants to leverage legislative data sets on Congress.gov and other platforms to develop digital projects that analyze, interpret or share congressional data in user-friendly ways. Anyone can apply, and we’re even awarding $5000 for the first prize, and $1000 for the best high school class entry! We’ll also work with the winners post-challenge to host their product on our labs site.

Illustration of U.S. Capitol Building

The Congressional Data Challenge will run from 19 October 2017 through 02 April 2018.

Piloting applications with the public is our most ambitious effort at collaboration to date. Right now, we’re running a crowdsourcing application built on Scribe called Beyond Words, where website visitors can identify, transcribe, or validate images from WWI era historic newspapers in our Chronicling America collection. The beauty of this application is that it also generates a viewable gallery of these images and a public domain data set for download and use in classrooms, research, or perhaps generating further applications. Not only do members of the public contribute to the gallery and data set (we’ve had 2240 volunteers so far and 685 completed images),  but the data we gather from feedback and metrics from Beyond Words users inform application updates and the design of our upcoming transcription platform (stay tuned!).

Events allow us to create dialogues around issues we care about, widen our network of peers, and work closely with new partners. For the past two years, we’ve hosted a Collections as Data annual symposium investigating the computational readiness, impact, and ethics of library content served as data sets.  Upcoming events include leading the local planning committee for Code4Lib 2018 and co-hosting the 2018 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference with the Smithsonian and Folger Shakespeare Library.

To see more of what we’re up to, go to our site at labs.loc.gov and follow us on Twitter @LC_Labs. Let’s work together!

Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: Text analysis (part 4 of 7)

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This is part four in a seven part resource guide for digital scholarship by Samantha Herron, our 2017 Junior Fellow. Part one is available here, part two about making digital documents is here, part three is about tools to work with data, and part four (below) is all about doing text analysis. The full guide is available […]

Making a Newspaperbot

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The following is a guest post from Library of Congress Labs Innovation Intern, Aditya Jain. While exploring the possibilities of digital collections, Aditya created @newspaperbot. Below he shares his process, some of the challenges he encountered, along with the code. The Chronicling America API provides access to historical newspapers from the first half of the […]

January Innovator-in-Residence Update: Experiments with Jer Thorp

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We’ve been delighted to have Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp with us since October. During the first three months of his residency he has connected with staff, visited collections, and explored forms of data to make better sense the inner workings of the Library. Jer has been weaving together those threads with experiments and […]

Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: So now you have digital data… (part 3 of 7)

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This is part three of our Digital Scholarship Research Guide created by Samantha Herron. See parts one about digital scholarship projects and two about how to create digital documents. So now you have digital data… Great! But what to do? Regardless of what your data are (sometimes it’s just pictures and documents and notes, sometimes […]

From Code to Colors: Working with the loc.gov JSON API

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The following is a guest post by Laura Wrubel, software development librarian with George Washington University Libraries, who has joined the Library of Congress Labs team during her research leave. The Library of Congress website has an API ( “application programming interface”) which delivers the content for each web page. What’s kind of exciting is […]

Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: Making Digital Resources, Part 2 of 7

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This is part two in a seven part resource guide for digital scholarship by Samantha Herron, our 2017 Junior Fellow. Part one is available here, and the full guide is available as a PDF download.  Creating Digital Documents The first step in creating an electronic copy of an analog (non-digital) document is usually scanning it […]

New Year, New You: A Digital Scholarship Guide (in seven parts!)

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To get 2018 going in a positive digital direction, we are releasing a guide for working with digital resources. Every Wednesday for the next seven weeks a new part of the guide will be released on The Signal. The guide covers what digital archives and digital humanities are trying to achieve, how to create digital documents, […]