{"id":1680,"date":"2014-11-03T17:26:17","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=1680"},"modified":"2014-11-03T17:48:32","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:48:32","slug":"victorian-meme-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2014\/11\/victorian-meme-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Victorian Meme Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog post was written during a presentation at the British Library Labs Symposium in November 2014<\/a>. It is likely full of errors and omissions having been written real-time<\/p>\n

Bob Nicholson from Edge Hill.<\/p>\n

Victorian’s not associated with humour – “We are not amused”. But jokes were everywhere in Victorian culture – perhaps forgotten or downplayed – you can quote from the great Victorian literature, but what is your favourite Victorian joke?<\/p>\n

Jokes reveal lost of things – slang etc. Were an area of existing research for Bob.<\/p>\n

Initial Idea:
\n* Find way of extracting jokes from newspapers
\n* Start marking up jokes with metadata\/semantic tagging
\n* Try to find suitable image from the BLs image collection
\n* Overlay text on a suitable image to push out to social media<\/p>\n

Issues:
\n* Where to look?
\n* Books – e.g. “Book of Humour, Wit and Wisdom” – a joke book. Manually extracted these
\n* Newspapers – many had weekly joke columns – e.g. 20 jokes per week over many years – thousands of jokes
\n* Existing markup breaks newspapers down to columns
\n* But difficult to get access to the source data in appropriate format
\n* Have manually downloaded and extracted for now
\n* OCR\/Transcription
\n* Poor OCR not good enough for re-publishing the jokes
\n* Need to use manual transcription
\n* Using Omeka to provide transcription platform (using ‘Scripto’)
\n* Quicker to type up text than markup broken OCR
\n* Simple xml markup j = joke, t = title, a= attribution
\n* Want to go further – mark up names, dialogue
\n* Publishing Jokes
\n* Original idea of putting speech bubbles on pictures extremely challenging
\n* Instead putting jokes next to image of person – as if they are telling the joke
\n* Looking for images that can be used in this way
\n* Would also like to find images that would work for dialogue style jokes
\n* Ideally would like to be able to use images which somehow add to the narrative of the joke<\/p>\n

What Next?<\/h2>\n

Coming soon “The Mechanical Comedian” – will tweet a joke each day
\nhttp:\/\/www.victorianhumour.tumblr.com
\n@victorianhumour<\/p>\n

Eventually will publish database of jokes at http:\/\/victorianhumour.com<\/p>\n

Will start inviting users to re-interpret jokes – trying to make terrible jokes funny again<\/p>\n

All tools used in the project have been free and open source. Allows you to get started cheaply.
\nNext:
\n* Seek external funding & new partnerships
\n* Expand and automate joke extraction
\n* Implement a new transcription platform
\n* Develop an accessible online database of jokes<\/p>\n

Big picture<\/h2>\n

Repurposing – difficult to use the digitised versions of newspapers
\nRemixing – bringing together disparate elements
\nGamification – new ways of engaging people with the material
\nLabs – has allowed Bob to bring an idea and to start experimenting<\/p>\n

To follow
\nwww.digitalvictorianist.com
\n@digivictorian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog post was written during a presentation at the British Library Labs Symposium in November 2014. It is likely full of errors and omissions having been written real-time Bob Nicholson from Edge Hill. Victorian’s not associated with humour – “We are not amused”. But jokes were everywhere in Victorian culture – perhaps forgotten or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[99],"class_list":["post-1680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bl_labs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1680"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}