Report: THATCamp British Library Labs

The British Library Labs team organised a THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, on Friday 13 February 2015, hosted in the British Library’s Conference Centre, London.

The day benefited from the excellent organisation, easily accessible location, with good facilities and lovely food, that the British Library team always provide and which makes everything else with the day go so well.

The day itself was an unconference, in which the schedule was set in the first session based on proposals made in the camp’s blog before the meeting. As is usual for unconferences, notes were recorded real time using Etherpad; all the way through from the schedule through to the outputs of each session. Read more about the day in the unedited comments in its Etherpad here: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/PvhdyG8suO.

Dr Francesca Benatti and Dr David King from The Open University’s Digital Humanities network attended the session, joined by Simon Brown from the Royal College of Music who collaborates on the Listening Experience project. We were particularly keen to follow up Dr Benatti’s presentation at last year’s British Library Lab’s Text Mining: Opportunities and Tools, event, in which she discussed some of the issues regarding extracting reading experiences from texts. This in conjunction with Simon’s need to extract listening experiences from texts formed the basis of a session proposal, Getting Experienced, we submitted.

We are pleased to report that our session was one of those run during the day. In the session we gained some valuable insights into the broader question of extracting experiences. Thank you to those who took part, though no one was able to report that they had already done what we are trying to do and how we should do it. So there remains something for us to work on!

You can read further reports on THATCamp British Library Labs on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog.