Project Meeting, 16 September 2014

Jonathan Blaney [minutes], Niels Brugger, Josh Cowls, Ralph Schroeder, Peter Webster, Jane Winters
Apologies: Eric Meyer, Helen Hockx-Yu

1 Minutes of the previous meeting

Accepted as an accurate record.

2 Matters arising

Members of the team had met with bursary holders who have been struggling with the results of using the interface.
Jaspreet Singh has agreed to write a blog post and the team will write a post about the researcher meeting held that day.

3 Institutional updates

 3.1 British Library

The BL has been in touch with the Royal Danish Library, who are experts in this kind of Solr-Lucene index to seek advice on how to keep searches performant when using facets. The BL has implemented a quick and full mode. Quick mode searches 1/3 of each shard, which is still 1/3 of two billion.
There are now prototypes of most stage one functionality and the BL is now working on stage two. The URL is currently included in search results but it may be best to separate this. Audio files gives a context-free result, as do any non-HTML result; there is a filter to select HTML only.
The BL may take out the n-gram result with no searches. Dips in the data in certain years are probably an artefact of the data. The team agreed that one of the features of web archives is that it is hard or impossible to get a sense of the overall data and understand why there may be gaps.

3.2 OII

The group agreed that the contributors’ deadline for the book should be March; drafts could be taken in in January for feedback in February and March.

3.3 IHR

The IHR had mostly been working on the first of the films, which was shown to the group, to general approval.

4 Communication and publicity

The group agreed that the researchers should be invited to write a blog post at the end of the project.
A 1500 word article about the project has been written for the IHR’s magazine, Past and Future.

5 Being Human festival

JW said that this looks like being a good day, but it is unclear if the team will be able to give a talk at the event.

6 December conference

Tobias Blanke has been asked to be a keynote; a meeting has been scheduled with him to discuss what he may cover.
James Baker, British Library, will talk about the Library’s Big Data work.
The group discussed who might be invited to form part of a panel on the ethics of big data.

7 Any other business

The project needs to put its outputs onto ResearchFish, so this information needs to be collated now.