Category Archives: digital scholarship

Code the Collection

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Author: Dr Megan Gooch is Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries 

Event poster for 'Code the Collection'. Image of board game titled 'The Panorama of Europe', with small tiles of different European cities. Date and details of event: 4-5 March 2026, Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library. Text: Experiment and work with datasets provided by University of Oxford's libraries and museums and the Berlin State Library. Logos for Digital Scholarship at Oxford, Centre for Digital Scholarship (Bodleian Libraries) and the Berlin State Library.

What do coins, ethnographic collectors, a medieval manuscript, religious texts and AI have in common? They all made an appearance at a Hackathon run by the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship team in March 2026. 

A hackathon, in case you’re new to the concept, is a collaborative (and often competitive) event using data to build a technology prototype.  

Why did we do a hackathon? 

Quite honestly, we’ve had data envy for a while now. Some of our brilliant library and museum colleagues in places like the US Library of Congress Labs, National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry and the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum Data Services have been showcasing their collections data for years. We were also inspired by the KU Leuven Libraries approach to cultural data hackathons. This approach, called Collections as Data, has been on our To Do list, but an opportunity to meet colleagues from the State Library of Berlin’s Stabi Lab as part of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership kickstarted our collaborative Collections as Data journey.  

At the Stabi Lab they already had some data collections online and were keen to find out more about how people might use these data. At the Bodleian we wanted to know how people wanted to use data before we invested in any infrastructure or data clean-up projects.  

The result was a year-long research project in which we used two hackathons – one in Berlin in October 2025 and one in Oxford in March 2026 – to see what people did with some Oxford and Berlin cultural heritage data sets. Read the results of our Berlin edition here. 

11 people in the Centre for Digital Scholarship working during the hackathon. Spaced around 3 tables.

Image: Attendees at the Code the Collection hackathon in the Centre for Digital Scholarship (Weston Library). Photo credit: Nick Cistone, Photographer, © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

How did people use our data? 

We welcomed teams with mixed technical abilities, including MSc in Digital Scholarship students, programmers, humanists and social scientists. We added some of our own technical and digital collections specialists to the mix in case anyone needed any help.  

We provided a range of datasets from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (including the Berlin State library and museums in Berlin), and Oxford’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums. 

One team created a ‘vending machine’ in which you fed a coin, and it would play you a musical instrument from the same year as your coin was made. As a lifelong numismatist (coin specialist), I loved the creativity of this one. Another team used data from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin to map collectors and collecting hotspots, which revealed the obvious (German cities were popular), but also uncovered some surprising connections like collecting activity in Brazil, West Africa and Chile.  

The third team came with a research question about analysing religious and non-religious texts and used a range of textual data and software Stata to demonstrate the changing nature of languages and theological texts. The fourth group took one manuscript, the medieval Piers Plowman at the Bodleian, and created an interface which both enabled those studying Middle English texts to interrogate different dialect words and had handy features for Middle English learners to look up words. Our final group was one of our software engineers who unleashed his creativity by using AI to create an interactive discovery interface for Berlin collections. 

What did we learn? 

For me, the most amazing thing about what our hackers created was what they did with data we already had openly available on the internet. I mean, yes, we pointed people to the data and collated a list of datasets. But these amazing games, analytical tools, and entire discovery platforms didn’t require us to spend years creating new digital infrastructure or enhancing our metadata.  

Could we have better infrastructures for computational access? Well yes, there’s always room for improvement and technology is changing so quickly. Could we have better data? Also yes, but no data will ever be perfect, so it’s a real insight to know that researchers, students and programmers can deal with the messiness of real cultural heritage data.  

My final learning is that it takes a heck of a lot of work to organise a hackathon, and the team did a brilliant job of making it look this easy. We’re hoping to publish more blog posts on our hackathon teams, so sign up to our mailing list to stay in the loop.  

Welcome back to our digital blog 

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Author: Dr Megan Gooch, Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries 

Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Japan. d. 20/1-2): https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/31e509ac-1836-453f-8a32-159f81747426/

Oh hi!  

We know it’s been a while but we’re back on this blog to tell you about some of our work on digital scholarship and other digital things in the Bodleian Libraries.  

First things first, what’s digital scholarship? 

 ‘Research and teaching that is made possible by digital technologies, or that takes advantage of them to ask and answer questions in new ways’  (Melanie Schlosser, Digital Scholarship @ The Libraries, Ohio State University Libraries, March 11, 2013)

This definition makes more sense if you’re working in a humanities or social sciences discipline. In other sciences you may think ‘that’s just my research’. But we also think about digital scholarship in the context of the library as the ways we can make our collections and their data available for research. This could be anything from the study of ancient papyri to training large language models (LLMs) on textual data.  

Next up, who are we and what can you expect from this blog? 

In the Centre for Digital Scholarship team we run a programme of events and training every term, check out our events on the Digital Scholarship @Oxford website. Bodleian Bytes is our online research showcase, so get in touch if you have some great digital research you want to share with Oxford and international audiences. Bodleian Student Editions is a series of in-person workshops where you get to work with real collection items and transcribe them. But be prepared for some top nineteenth-century gossip if you come to those! Expect some blog posts on fascinating new research in digital scholarship (and maybe some historical gossip too). 

Our team also work with researchers to ensure research data is safe and finds the best home in Oxford, making your work findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. So if you have data drama, get in touch with the Sustainable Digital Scholarship service team. If you’re worried you don’t understand what research data sustainability is by the way, no shame, but check out our short explainer video. We’ll blog on key issues in research data management and how it affects you, but also use this space to showcase some fantastic projects we work with.  

Electronic Enlightenment is a resource of more than 80,000 digitised letters from the Enlightenment period (roughly the eighteenth century) which we are adding to all the time. The team will share posts about new content and the international social network of letters between the good, the bad and the ordinary in the Enlightenment. 

Finally, our team are active researchers and we’re working on projects to understand whether AI tools such as LLMs and computer vision can be used to identify archaeological objects or catalogue books. We’re looking at how digitisation processes and digital collections are created and used in the cultural sector and we’re using hackathons to understand how people might use our collections data in new ways for research or creative outputs, you can find the project page here. In short, we’re a curious bunch and always keen to meet you whether or not you define yourself as a digital scholar. 

Dr. Megan Gooch is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries. Megan has 20 years’ experience working in museums, heritage and libraries in curatorial, learning, research and leadership roles. Megan has been PI and Co-I on AHRC-funded research projects, and has experience and publications in the fields of audience research, museum studies, numismatics and digital scholarship. She is also the Director of the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School.  

Workshop invitation: Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

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We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

 

Sign up for a workshop: see below for details.

 

We are pleased to announce the fourth year of Bodleian Student Editions workshops, a collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History.

There will be 6 standalone workshops taking place in the year 2019-20, two per term. Workshops are held in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. Dates for each term will be announced in that term, and are as follows:

Michaelmas Term 2019

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 30 October
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 28 November

Hilary Term 2020 To be announced in Hilary

  • 10:00-16:30 Wednesday 3rd Week, 5th February
  • tbc

Trinity Term 2020 To be announced in Trinity

  • tbc
  • tbc

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in previous workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

You can read about research conducted in previous workshops here.

Participation in the workshops is open to undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at the University of Oxford in any subject and year, full-time or part-time. Eligibility includes visiting students who are registered as recognized students, and paying fees, but does not include informal visitors, postdoctoral researchers, or staff.

If you would like to participate, please contact Francesca Barr, Special Collections Administrator, francesca.barr@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that owing to the workshops regularly being oversubscribed, we can only confirm places on this term’s workshops. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops, and will be notified of the dates for each term before they are advertised more widely.

The Bodleian Libraries welcome thoughts and queries from students of all levels on ways in which the use of archival material can facilitate your research. For an idea of the range of collections in the Weston, visit our current exhibitions in Blackwell Hall. Thinking 3D: Leonardo to the Present, in the Treasury gallery, tells the story of the development of three-dimensional communication over the last 500 years, showcasing techniques that revolutionised the dissemination of ideas in anatomy, architecture and astronomy and geometry and ultimately influenced how we perceive the world today. Talking Maps in the ST Lee Gallery is a celebration of maps and what they tell us about the places they depict and the people that make and use them. Drawing primarily on the Bodleian’s own unparalleled collection of more than 1.5 million maps – including the Gough Map (the first to show Great Britain in recognizable form), the Selden map (a late Ming map of the South China Sea, and fictional maps by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – it also features specially commissioned artworks and loans from artists and other institutions. Both exhibitions are free to attend and can be accessed through Blackwell Hall.

 

Build your own Digital Bodleian with IIIF and SPARQL

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This post describes a simple way to create a customised, interactive view of a set of documents. Despite my provocative title, it’s not a rival to Digital Bodleian, having far less content and without the personalisation and commenting features. BUT it is 1) customisable in terms of the items it displays and 2) not limited to Oxford collections. So in the long term this technique could be useful to researchers who want to focus on a set of items, such as the manuscripts, printed works or art works of a particular culture or era.

IIIF is the International Image Interoperability Framework (discussed previously). At the time of writing there are around 32,000 objects with IIIF manifests linked from Wikidata, from over 100 GLAM collections. Just under two thousand of these are from Digital Bodleian. The Bodleian items are usually multi-page documents such as manuscripts, incunabula, or other printed books, many of which are in this digital form thanks to the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project.

With some code in the SPARQL query language, we can request the IIIF manifest for each document we are interested in, and send it to a reader application that will give us a nice interactive interface. Continue reading →

Workshop invitation: Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

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A collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History

We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

 

Sign up for a workshop: see below for details.

 

After two successful series, we are entering the third year of Bodleian Student Editions workshops, held in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. There will be 6 standalone workshops taking place in the year 2018-19, two per term, on the following dates:

Michaelmas Term 2018

  • 10:00–16:30 Tuesday 5th week, 6 November
  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 8th week, 28 November

Hilary Term 2019

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 30 January
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 28 February 

Trinity Term 201To be announced in Trinity

  • 10:00-16:30 Wednesday 8th Week, 19th June

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in previous workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

You can read about research conducted in previous workshops here. To hear about future textual editing workshops and other events as they are advertised, please join the digital scholarship mailing list.

Participation is open to students registered for any course at the University of Oxford. If you would like to participate, please contact Francesca Barr, Special Collections Administrator, francesca.barr@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that owing to the workshops being oversubscribed both years running, we can only confirm places on this term’s workshops. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops, and will be notified of the dates for each term before they are advertised more widely.

The Bodleian Libraries welcome thoughts and queries from students of all levels on ways in which the use of archival material can facilitate your research. For an idea of the range of collections in the Weston, visit the exhibition Sappho to Suffrage: Women Who Dared in the Treasury gallery in Blackwell Hall (http://treasures.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), which showcases some of the Bodleian’s most treasured items in celebration of 100 years of suffrage. Our current flagship exhibition, Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth is open in the ST Lee Gallery until 28 October; entry is free but timed, and tickets are available at the Information Desk in Blackwell Hall, or online for a £1 booking fee (https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Conference announcement—Digitizing the Stage 2019

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What: Digitizing the Stage

When: 15–18 July 2019

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Registration: required—please see the conference website to sign up for notices

Together with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship is delighted to announce that Digitizing the Stage will return next summer. The event will take place on 15–18 July 2019 at the Weston Library. There will be a small pre-conference workshop preceding the three-day, single-stream conference, which will have a renewed emphasis on performance. More information can be found on https://www.digitizingthestage.com.

The inaugural conference in 2017 gathered scholars, librarians, theatre professionals, and others in a convivial and productive series of talks and demonstrations highlighting digital explorations of the early modern theatre archive. The success of the event was due in no small part to the energy, creativity, and thoughtfulness of the participants, for which we remain profoundly appreciative. Thank you for your interest and participation.

If you would like to stay informed about conference developments, including the upcoming call for proposals, please email the Folger Shakespeare Library via digitalconf@folger.edu to be added to the 2019 mailing list.

A global collection of astrolabes in linked open data

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I previously wrote about how easy it is to describe a GLAM collection item in Wikidata: it’s quicker than writing a blog post in WordPress and the resulting data are endlessly reusable. This time I’ll go into more detail about using Wikidata’s interface to describe items from museum collections, and announcing a new tool to browse the aggregated collection.

The Museum of the History of Science recently shared catalogue data about its outstanding collection of 165 astrolabes on Wikidata. Although Wikidata already had the power to describe astrolabes, very few had been entered, so this donation is a huge leap forward. If nothing comes to mind when I say “astrolabes”, here’s an image gallery generated by a query on Wikidata.

I’m going to take a random entry from David A. King’s “A Catalogue of Medieval
Astronomical Instruments” and describe it in Wikidata. Having checked that it isn’t already there, I click “Create new item” on the left hand side of any Wikidata page. At first I’ll be asked for a name and one-line description in my chosen language.

Continue reading →

Workshop—Digital Delius: Editing, Interpretation, and Cataloguing

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We regret that this workshop has been cancelled. Please contact the organizers (see below) to find out more about their work on Digital Delius.

This workshop is open to anyone conducting or interested in pursuing research in music and musicology, who would like to learn more about using digital techniques. Undergraduates and postgraduates are most welcome.

Book a place by emailing Joanna Bullivant: please see below for details.

 

What: Digital Delius: Editing, Interpretation, and Cataloguing—workshop

When: 10:00–17:00, Thursday 11 October 2018

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Open to all

Free

Registration is required: please email Joanna Bullivant (joanna.bullivant@music.ox.ac.uk) by 1 October 2018 with your name, email address, and access and dietary requirements.

How might digital technologies enrich your musicological research in editing, interpretation, and cataloguing, and help you to present your work to others?

We hear increasingly about the importance and possibilities of digital methodologies, but it is not always easy to know how to go about using digital techniques in tandem with more traditional research, or what the benefits of these techniques might be. This workshop uses the ongoing project ‘Digital Delius’ as a case study, showing how a variety of digital techniques and software are being used to cast light on such critical areas of Delius research as sources and variants, editing, interpretation, and cataloguing. The aim is to introduce work in progress and provide a series of guided practical exercises to help participants to gain awareness of skills and methods that can be applied in their own research.

Convenors

Joanna Bullivant is a musicologist, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. She has created the forthcoming digital catalogue of Delius’s works, and is part of the team creating an interactive digital exhibition on Delius for the British Library as part of their new Discovering Music web space.

David Lewis is a researcher based at the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He has recently worked on projects at Goldsmiths, University of London, Universität des Saarlandes and Universiteit Utrecht. He has worked on online resources for instrumental music (Electronic Corpus of Lute Music), music theory (Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works and Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum) and work catalogues (Delius Catalogue of Works). His current research explores uses of Linked Data to support and extend the exploration and sharing of musical information and research.

REGISTRATION

To register, please email Joanna Bullivant (joanna.bullivant@music.ox.ac.uk) by 1 October 2018 with:

  • Your name
  • Current status/research interests (undergraduate, postgraduate etc)
  • Your email address
  • Access or dietary requirements

Research Uncovered—Romantic poetry and technical breakthrough: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive

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Book a place!

Paul Eggert
What: Romantic poetry and technical breakthrough: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive

Who: Paul Eggert

When: 13:00—14:00, Wednesday 7 March 2018

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: open to all

Admission: free

Registration: required

This talk will show a new technical solution to an abiding problem – presenting a large body of literary works in multiple versions. It has been trialled in The Charles Harpur Critical Archive, due to be published in June.

Harpur’s work in New South Wales in the mid-19th century makes a perfect case study of the technology. His verses made 900 appearances in the press, but publishing opportunities for him other than in newspapers were almost non-existent. A digital solution addresses the textual problems that defeated the attempts to capture the full range of his poetic achievement in book form.

Paul Eggert is the Martin J Svaglic Endowed Professor of Textual Studies at Loyola University Chicago, and former president of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

This public lecture is co-hosted by the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book and Centre for Digital Scholarship.