 My name is Neil Stewart. I'm from LSE in London. I'm here to talk to you about a project we undertook, which is called Charles Booth's London. I'm just waiting to make sure that the Wi-Fi is working. I've given it the snazzy subtitle Imagining the Victorian Metropolis. I hope I can demonstrate how we did try to imagine the Victorian Metropolis. I'm going to include a live demo later, assuming I can get the Wi-Fi to work. If that doesn't happen, then we all get to leave early, so that's good. If you'd like to have a look at the site while I speak, I'd encourage you to do so. You can search for Charles Booth's London. It should be the top hit on Google. Other search engines are available. Or you can go to booth.lse.ac.uk and have a look at the site while I talk. I should also say I'm going to try and keep the time because I am conscious it's the final slot in the graveyard shift. We probably would all like a drink fairly soon. Looks like we now have Wi-Fi, so on with the show. Who here has some knowledge of Charles Booth and Booth's projects in his poverty maps? That's good. I'm seeing maybe half of the people in the audience have got some knowledge of him. For those of you who don't, Charles Booth was a Victorian businessman, philanthropist and social reformer. I didn't write down when he was alive, but it was between 1840 and 1916, I want to say. Roughly around that. He was quintessential Victorian and latterly Edwardian. Booth's project was to try to understand the extent of poverty in Victorian London. Booth went into his project disbelieving that poverty was as prevalent as many of the thinkers of the day proposed, particularly the Fabian early socialists. His research showed that it was much higher. Some 30% of people in a city of 6 million lived below the poverty line. The poverty line was actually a phrase that Booth himself coined to express the points at which someone can be considered to be living in poverty. That's nearly 2 million people. It was what we would now consider to be a mammoth research project involving a very large team of people. The project lasted 15 years. One of those people was Beatrice Webb, Beatrice Potter, Ney Beatrice Potter, who went on, amongst other things, to form the LSE. It's another reason why it's an important project for us at LSE. Booth's findings were handed down to us by way of what we would now consider to be excellent Victorian research data management as a number of things. I'll just run through what those things were. There was the publication Life and Labour of the People in London, which ran to four editions between 1889 and 1903. The final edition in 1903 was 17 volumes and over 4,000 pages of findings. There were the poverty maps themselves. You can see an example of one here. I'll show you more of that a bit later on. There were 12 individual maps, each one representing a particular area of London. There were the notebooks, including the famous police notebooks, which were the writings of his research team as they went around London, literally walked the streets of London and recorded their findings. There are around 450 of those, so quite a few. That full archive is held at LSE Library. As you can probably guess, it's considered to be something of a jewel in the crown, not just LSE Library, but LSE more generally. What did we have? First of all, we had one, as well as the hard copy archive, we had one very old website, which is called Charles Booth's online archive. You can see here, we were very pleased and honoured to win the Multimedia and Web category Silip Emerald Public Relations and Publicity Awards 2002. This website was from 2000-2001, which in terms of the web is positively archaic. That website did a pretty good job of displaying the archival materials. The maps didn't really do them justice at all. To use a bit of a euphemism, it had become challenging to manage. Another way of putting that is that we couldn't really do anything with it at all, because the institutional memory about how to update this particular site had been lost, so it was in some senses a dead website. Although it's worth mentioning that it did continue to get a lot of traffic, so three or four hundred user sessions per day, so there was obviously demand for information about Booth and the Booth maps and so on. We also had an old-ish website, which was called Phone Booth, a colleague Peter Spring. I always mention Peter because he had the genius idea of naming it Phone Booth and you look at it on your phone. We got hits to the site from people looking for information about the history of London Phone Booth, so who knew that people were interested in that, but there we go. This had modern mapping application functionality, so it had kind of slippy maps. We geo-located the notebooks against areas of the map, but the site was experimental and prototypical. It was essentially in a sort of permanent public beta form, so we knew we needed to do more with that site as well, so we had these two different websites. What we knew we needed to do was to bring together the functionality of the old websites, but also we had an opportunity in that in 2016 it was the 100th anniversary of Booth's death, which is slightly morbid, but it seemed like a good hook to hang our hat on, so to speak. To commemorate that 100th anniversary, there was an exhibition in the library which was curated by my colleague Indi, who's in the audience over there. There was a research festival around the contemporary resonance of Booth's work, so all sorts of aspects to that, so information visualisation, the way in which we think about poverty in the city, social history, et cetera, et cetera. There's also a Booth family memorial event, so the many, many ancestors, what's the opposite of that? Many members of Booth's family came to LSE to commemorate his life, which was great, so there were about 50 of them, it was amazing. We actually, one very memorable moment was revealing the new version of the website, which I'll show you in a minute, and they actually gasped and clapped, so that was quite something. To do this work, we had a cross-library team, we had a project manager, which was me, we had a UX specialist, a web editor, a metadata specialist, and anarchist, Indi, who I've already mentioned who's in the audience. We divided our work between outsourced web design, and that was our web development partners, Mickey and Mallory, who are based just across the river in Manchester proper. But we did the conceptualisation, the technical development, copywriting, project management and so on in-house, so that's something that we took on ourselves to do. We did user experience and audience analysis, followed by the web and technical development, so we tried to work out, we tried to understand who our audiences actually were, and there's obviously a site like this has got obvious academic interests, so those people are interested in social history, the history of London, but we also found out by doing this research that there was considerable interest for people who were interested in family history and genealogy, so perhaps your great-great-grandfather or grandmother lived in Victorian London, you could actually have a look at the archives and the maps to perhaps get an understanding of what their life might have been like. So the project was started in May 2016, and we actually completed it at the end of November 2016, so almost exactly a year ago. The screenshots here give an idea of what we tried to do with an iterative design process, so there's probably not super clear, but that plus that sort of equals that, and we turned that final design, Frankenstein's Booth website, because we got the kind of paper and scissors and glue out and clutched things together and get a design that we liked. Here is the site. We've obviously made an effort to use modern web design pre-sets. We've got colour scheme both based on the maps but also some of the LSE branding, so we've tried to make it look like an LSE website. We've got this primary architecture at the top here, so we can see maps, notebooks, highlights, learn more and about, and I'll take you through some of that as well. So have a look at the maps. We have a single stitch, so the 12 maps are stitched together into one single map, and we've georectified that map, which means that we've aligned it with a map, properly aligned it with a map of modern-day London. So if we zoom in a bit, I'll use where LSE is as our point of reference to begin with, which is just here. We've got a legend, which is the legend that Booth himself used, and I'm not sure how visible that is, but you can see the famous categorisation of poverty, and streets marked as black. Streets marked as black, such as this one here. Booth classified as lowest-class vicious semi-criminal, which is a very Victorian way of thinking about poverty, although it's worth noting there that Booth, the Victorian sense of vicious, was vice-prone as opposed to liable to lash out. We also overlaid the notebooks against the map. For example, if we click here, you can show notebooks, and we get these green dots, which is a bit tricky to decide what colour to use for those dots, because you don't want anything too garish, but you also don't want anything that gets lost in the colours of the maps. I'm not sure how well we did that, but there we go. If you click on one of those dots, you get to view the notebook entries themselves, and we can go through to that. This uses the triple IF viewer, which has been mentioned a few times already today, which is a standard method of displaying images on the web, archival material on the web. It allows you to do all this great full screen, and we can zoom here as well, I think, just by clicking. You can see, you might be able to read that. At the top there, we've got Walk with Police Constable E-Tate round the district bounded to the north by New Oxford Street and High Hobe and on the east by the city boundary, which runs through Staples Inn and continues. George Duckworth, who's the researcher in question, has even drawn a little map to orientate himself. For those of you who know London, Lincolnton Fields is here, so the modern day LSE is sort of here. It gives you a real sense of the Victorian city, hopefully. It's also possible to access, if we go into the notebooks area proper, it's also possible to access the map via notebooks. If we run a quick search and look down a bit. Here's an example of something that's come up with High Hobe. This is actually a really nice page. Again, it's George Duckworth, and he's saying he's at the special licensing session of the Hobe and something. Justice is of the Peace at the Hobe Inn Hall. Once again, he's drawn a little diagram of the layout of this session of the Justice of the Peace. Again, hopefully very evocative of late 19th century London. If I go out of there. You can see where this is geolocated. Apparently this meeting happened just south of Oxford Street. We did think quite a lot about those interactions. Get my notes together. Some of that was quite tricky, just like me looking through my notes, which I shouldn't have allowed to get out of order, sorry. That interaction design, you might have noticed just when I was demoing this, we had some examples of non-digitised notebooks that were being geolocated against the map because we hadn't yet digitised the full archive. So we needed a way of telling people that, sorry, you can't see this. We did think about flashy pop-ups and all that sort of thing. In the end, we've just linked through to something saying, I'm sorry, we haven't digitised all of the notebooks, but hopefully we'll get round to that soon. Another challenge for us was thinking about the way in which we deal with discrepancies between modern-day and Victorian London. So to give you an example of that, it might be a bit tricky to see, but just here, there's a street called Veer Street. So you'd think in theory you'd be able to search for Veer Street and you'd think to yourself, oh great, there's Veer Street, I'll go to that and find it on the map. It's actually taking you elsewhere though, so it's taking you to Veer Street just off Oxford Street. Now I forgot to mention the opacity slider, so we're now transforming the map into modern-day London. The reason that we were able to locate Victorian Veer Street is because there's a modern-day version of Veer Street which continues to exist and the search is done on modern-day, the modern-day map of London as opposed to the Victorian, the poverty map. So we're giving, you know, we could be giving false positives there. And as part of the research we did into this problem, so that Veer Street, and you can see, if I zoom in a little bit, the Veer Street which is here is, it's no longer with us so it's gone and you can see there, it's been overlained by Kingsway and the Aldwych. That was actually a slum clearance which happened at the beginning of the 20th century. So the analysis that we did showed that some 50% of the streets of London had changed since Booth's time as a result of redevelopment. There's the Blitz, of course, which we've heard about a little bit in a previous session, I think. So how do we deal with this? I'll talk a little bit about how we might deal with that at the end of the presentation. So to go back into PowerPoints. So hopefully that gives you a sense of the site itself and some of the challenges we were thinking about. And just some brief notes on technology there. So we used OpenStreetMap and the OS names API to allow that searching that I showed you to take place. AAAF and Universal Viewer I've already talked about. We used Elasticsearch to index the metadata of the notebooks. If you're interested in this technical stuff, there's a full write-up by our developer Tom Carter which you can see at that URL. I'll tweet that out after the session because it's a horrible URL. So what does the future holds? So I've mentioned this issue with mapping and the fact that you can very easily, obviously, search the modern-day map of London but it can be difficult, it can be challenging to search the Victorian map. So we're thinking about how we address that. One way of doing that would be to create a gazeteer of Victorian London which would be to record every street in the Victorian city on the Victorian poverty maps and then give those vector coordinates to say where they are. The problem with doing that is that if one of us is a group of us in LSE library or if we outsource that or whatever, we estimate that it would take over a thousand hours to do. So a great deal of very painstaking and quite frankly quite tedious work for a single person to do. There would be other benefits to that though. We could release that information as an open data set so if other people wanted to recreate a map of Victorian London, they would be free to do so using that information. You could do nifty things presumably if we also got classifications of the level of poverty for each of those streets so you could have functionality on the website so you could select only streets that are deemed to be vicious and have those highlighted on the map. So there's a great deal of potential for this. We thought about options with crowd sourcing perhaps. Crowd sourcing would probably take a day or two to glean this information from citizen scientists. One avenue of possibility we're exploring is with the Institute of Historical Research's Layers of London projects. Layers of London, I'd encourage you to have a look at that if you're not familiar with it because they're doing some things that are quite similar to what we've done with Charles B's London except they're using multiple different maps, multiple different historical maps of London and then overlaying those on modern-day maps of the capital. I put there digitisation of the rest of the archives so we've actually done that. So we've now got digitised versions of all of the notebooks, give or take a few, which were very challenging to digitise. So at some point we'll need to add those to the site so we've got essentially the full-booth archive available via Charles Booth's London. One thing I didn't mention in my demo was highlights articles and I'm not going to do that now but highlights articles are a way, we've tried to give a way into the archive by providing narratives about particular thematic interests of the archives. So we had one on drink and drugs, one on migration and immigration and one on prostitution, that was the third one, wasn't it? So slightly salacious but we thought they'd be a way of giving people an in to the maps we thought sort of speak for themselves but the archive can be an intimidating thing to try and dive into so we wanted to give people a way in, an easy way in. We'd like to do more of that because we think they've been successful so we'd like to look at that again. Very briefly about user experience testing we did try and do UX work when we were doing in the fairly limited time we had with the project, we're yet to take it out to our public and see what they think and then act upon what they think about the site. So things, there's obviously things that we could be doing better but we need help in doing that and we need to talk to our users to understand that better. Thank you very much, there's that URL again. There's actually an LSE, there's a blog that LSE runs called the impact of social science so myself and my colleague Andy have written a post for that which will be coming out later in the week I couldn't persuade them to make it live for this talk unfortunately but there we go. So if you want to know more or want to read about this that's a good place to go as well as Tom Carter's technical writer. I think that's everything I had to say. Thank you.