All posts by jwbaker

James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He is currently working on a history of knowledge organisation in twentieth century Britain. In 2021, I begin a major new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950'. Previous externally funded research projects have focused on legacy descriptions of art objects ('Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship', Arts and Humanities Research Council), the preservation of intangible cultural heritage ('Coptic Culture Conservation Collective', British Council, and 'Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development', British Academy), the born digital archival record ('Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities', European Commission), and decolonial futures for museum collections ('Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections', Arts and Humanities Research Council). Prior to joining Southampton, James held positions of Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, Digital Curator at the British Library, and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
DHums, History, Research

49456 books

Leave a comment

Held on a large mass storage device in the corner of my office are (among other things) 49456 books, broken down into pdfs, ocr fragments, jp2 files, and reams of metadata. Most – if not all – of this information derives from books published in the nineteenth-century. The OCR, unlike some, is pretty good: even picking up the odd umlaut. The problem is that none of the data looks like pdfs, ocr fragments et cetera, but is rather filed as countless .dat files in series readable only to machines. Over the next few weeks I will be working with researchers and skilled technicians to restructure the data so that it is readable to people, so that power users – those, for example, who use R (ie not me!) – can interrogate this data, find out what patterns and mysteries are held within.

Of course me being me I took one look at the manifest, hit CTRL+F, and typed ‘Cruikshank’. After a little playing around with Excel macros 29 records came back: one Isaac Cruikshank entry for his work with George Woodward on the marvelous 1796 Eccentric Excursions (this a 1807 edition), the rest related to George Cruikshank – from his early radical work with William Hone circa 1819-1820, to his later illustrative pieces for William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) and for the The Ingoldsby Legends. I’m not sure quite what I plan to do with these books yet, but once we’ve restructured the data I might start by comparing the Cruikshank plates between editions: to see what, if anything, I can find out about the re-use of plates and modularity of these texts.

This blog has changed... massive change photograph courtesy of Flickr user 416style / Creative Commons Licensed
This blog has changed… massive change photograph courtesy of Flickr user 416style / Creative Commons Licensed

As all this should make clear, my day-to-day is now rather different to what it has been for the last 6 months. I’m now a Digital Curator at The British Library and so alongside posting on the BLs Digital Scholarship blog, this blog will change to reflect this (exciting!) new arrangement.