The Enchanted Island at the Metropolitan Opera

An operatic pastiche produced by the Metropolitan Opera wouldn’t normally seem to have much to do with early modern bibliography.

But when the pastiche is a mash-up of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and John Dryden’s update of the latter, all set to music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and other baroque composers, with stagecraft that fuses the painted shutters and wave machines of Restoration drama with high-tech projection done by 59 Productions, the same company behind War Horse, well, it’s too interesting an event to pass up for discussion here, where hybridity is always of interest.

The Enchanated Island’s all-star cast of spectacular singers, its music, costumes, and scenery made the production a success, despite a weak libretto inspired by Dryden and Pope, but unable to imitate or perhaps uninterested in imitating their surprising rhymes, rhetorical structures, and cadences.  The production’s over-the-top celebration of baroque artifice is evident in every detail, not least in this Caliban’s (Luca Pisaroni‘s) loveable hideousness.  Neptune’s (Placido Domingo‘s) entrance, set to Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” (see below), and attended by floating mermaids, was breathtaking (especially for Ariel, the spectacular Danielle de Niese, who donned an old-fashioned diving suit to get there).  That Handel’s music ascends harmonically, even as Ariel descends to the ocean floor to consult with Neptune, is the kind of infelicity that nags the libretto, but such complaints are lost in the awe of tableaus like the one below.

The libretto includes the role of Sycorax, memorably brought to life by Joyce DiDonato.   Far from depicting an old hag, DiDonato’s  Sycroax brings an interesting and even moving modern spin to the production.

The Enchanted Island is a one-time experiment to try to popularize baroque music.  It suggests the power of baroque stagecraft, especially when combined with modern technology, to refresh the modern stage.

The production is part of the Met’s “Live in HD Season,” which brings the Met’s productions to local theaters, providing some of the best seats in the house.

CAST:

Prospero       David Daniels

Sycorax         Joyce DiDonato

Neptune       Placido Domingo

Ariel              Danielle de Niese

Caliban         Luca Pisaroni

Miranda       Lisette Oropesa

Ferdinand    Anthony Roth

Snippets of the production and of its beautiful music conducted by William Christie can be seen and heard in this ad.

Laura Stevens on Peer Review at the TSWL

To follow up on the recent discussion about evaluating digital scholarship, Gena Zuroski pointed me to this very thoughtful essay about peer-review by Laura Stevens as Editor of the Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.  Stevens weighs the crowd-sourcing experiment of Shakespeare Quarterly against maintaining a double-blind review process, and wonders whether it is even possible for identities to remain hidden when so much scholarship is previewed one way or another before it ever reaches “published” status.

On balance, Stevens decides that the type of scholarship and the mission of the journal demand that they stick to the current format.

The virtues of open feedback are great, but having viewed well over a thousand readers’ reports in my tenure as editor, I am convinced that most readers provide a more forthcoming assessment of our submissions when their identities are not disclosed to the authors. Such feedback of course can be difficult to read—we all have our stories to tell of stinging reports on our own work—but on the other hand we cannot dismiss the positive comments of anonymous readers as flattery, and that must always be a worry when the authors and readers are aware of each others’ identities. In sum, I feel that more would be lost than gained if Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature abandoned anonymous review in favor of open approaches. I may contemplate setting up an open, online review for a single article or small collection of submissions in the future, as a way of fostering this relatively new mode of scholarly interaction. For now, though, this journal is sticking with the traditional, confidential mode of peer review.

Change at any level, in any form, is always difficult in academic settings, because of the presumption that an innovation will create more problems than the status quo.  And this is probably as it should be, considering the importance of academic culture for preserving and transmitting what otherwise would not get preserved in a money-driven, presentist economic environment.

What reflective pieces like Stevens’ essay demonstrate, however, is that maintaining the status quo is itself problematic in all sorts of ways, involving its own complications, and demanding its own cost/benefit analysis, such as the one that Stevens provides here.

DM

PS: I should also mention that Stevens also announces that EMOB’s own Anna Battigelli is joining the TSWL board.  Congratulation, Anna.

Digital Humanities at MLA?

I thought readers of this blog would be interested in Stanley’s Fish’s recent piece about DH as the next big thing at MLA, but be sure to read Ted Underwood’s response, as well.

Underwood’s post usefully reframes and redirects Fish’s narrative about DH “saving” literary studies, but Underwood patiently explains why DH is not, and should not be, interested in engaging in the kinds of generational/methodological combat that Fish is endorsing:

In literary studies, change has almost always taken place through a normative claim about the proper boundaries of the discipline. Always historicize! Or on second thought no, don’t historicize, but instead revive literary culture by returning to our core competence of close reading!

But in my experience digital humanists are really not interested in regulating disciplinary boundaries — except insofar as they want a seat at the table.

As Laura Rosenthal observed on the Long 18th, Fish insists upon reading DH and its ambitions as an Oedipal narrative about succession and its anxieties.  Underwood, correctly in my view, advocates instead for a more pluralist view of literary studies that could encompass a variety of theoretical and critical projects, including DH.

But I agree with Underwood that these kinds of battles over competing normative claims seem unsuited to DH, and misconceive its relation to literary studies as it is conventionally understood and practiced.  It does not aim to displace literary studies or interpretation, largely because it represents an ensemble of practices too amorphous to be strictly defined, anyway.  Nonetheless, it offers, as Underwood concludes, less a coherent theoretical or polemical project, as much as “the name of an opportunity.”

Technological change has made some of the embodiments of humanistic work — media, archives, institutions, perhaps curricula — a lot more plastic than they used to be. That could turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing. But it’s neither of those just yet: the meaning of the opportunity is going to depend on what we make of it.

DM

Evaluating Digital Scholarship

Readers will be interested in a series of essays on the evaluation of digital scholarship edited by Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen and published in the recent issue of MLA’s Profession.

These essays are freely available as PDF files. Their titles are as follows:

“Introduction,” Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen

“Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship,” Steve Anderson and Tara Mcpherson

“On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship,” Geoffrey Rockwell

“Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship,” Bethany Nowviskie

“On Creating a Usable Future,” Jerome McGann

“Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick

In introducing the essays, the editors point to national calls for clearer guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship:

National scholarly organizations such as the Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies have called for department and institutions to “recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarhsip” (Report of the MLA Task Force).

This publication provides an opportunity for emob’s readers to discuss how digital scholarship might best be evaluated and to raise questions about the process of evaluation.

The Big Bundle Steal: Open Access and Subscription Databases

In previous posts we have addressed access to subscription databases. Several recent news items offer a timely reason to revisit the subject.

On July 19, 2011 the New York Times reported the indictment of twenty-four-year-old Aaron Swartz, one of the forces behind the Open Library Project and longstanding internet activist, for breaking into the JStor database and downloading over 4.8 million articles. The material downloaded represented close to JStor’s entire holdings. On several occasions Swartz’s surreptitious activity caused some of JStor’s servers to crash. Once Swartz returned all the hard drives containing the documents and promised not to redistribute them, the nonprofit online journal provider expressed no interest in pursuing legal action. JStor issued its statement about the case the same day that the New York Times’s article appeared. The return of the material to JStor, however, did not alter the government’s stance toward the situation. As United States attorney, Carmen M. Ortiz, noted, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” If convicted, Swartz could face a 35-year prison sentence and a fine of one million dollars.

Swartz undertook the downloading while he was on a ten-month fellowship at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics—a situation some may view as ironic and others as indicative of his strong commitment to open access for all information. Many have viewed the charges as over-reaching by the government, with some regarding the indictment as retaliatory for his internet activism as well as indicative of a lack of understanding about the digital environment. How could Swartz’s actions be called “theft” when the material remained on the JStor server? Isn’t this a matter of simply copying files? At the most wouldn’t his actions more appropriately fall under copyright infringement (although this scenario is complicated by the unwillingness of JStor to press charges)? That Swartz had legitimate access to JStor through his position at Harvard and that he conducted the downloading through unauthorized access of M.I.T.’s servers raise additional questions about illegal actions as well as his motivation. Was his purpose to analyze large data sets as he has in the past? (An explanation many have suggested, yet, as Michael Widner ponders in his recent ”JStor, the Semantic Web, and Bibliopedia” post, what aim could Swartz possibly have had in downloading so much content “that could not have been served via JSTOR’s Data for Research (DfR) API”?) Or did Swartz intend to make the JStor content freely available as the indictment, without citing any evidence, asserts?

A number of blog posts and other online articles have offered opinions about and analysis of the case, but Maria Bustillos’s post on The AWL (3 August 2011) offers a well-balanced look at the case. Besides providing valuable legal context and rejecting the possibility that Swartz would want or need to use JStor’s Data for Research for data analysis, she also helpfully distinguishes between nonprofit journal providers such as JStor and for-profit commercial enterprises such as Reed Elsevier. As Bustillos reminds us, costs, often significant, are involved in digitizing academic journals and maintaining reliable access to them. She also usefully clarifies that

JSTOR is paid (not by the public, but by institutions) for a service, not for content. The money that individuals pay for these articles goes not to JSTOR, but to the publisher that is making the material available.

I would add that a portion of the modest fees obtained by some scholarly societies from licensing their copyrighted journal and annual publications to JStor help defray their publishing costs, keep members’ dues down, and even on occasion provide funds for graduate student travel and scholarships. Bustillos rightly notes that JStor offers free access to nonprofit entities across Africa and other parts of the developing world. On its website JStor states that it furnishes over 600 institutions in the developing world with free access; its factsheet supplies some specifics and also announces the launch of a new alumni-access program. This announcement seems a welcome development and suggests that JStor is responding to a consistent complaint about access being withdrawn upon graduation from an institution.

Yet I should stress that this EMOB post is not meant as a paean to JStor. Like Bustillos, I believe that JStor should arrange for free access to the public domain material it provides. Rather this post is an effort to draw attention to the distinctions between nonprofit providers and for-profit providers of online materials. Indeed, I second Bustillos’s hope that “[i]f the Aaron Swartz case clarifies the position of open access advocates with respect to nonprofit services like JSTOR, that at least will be a good thing.”

JStor provides access through bundling—the practice of selling online access by assembling a number of journal titles as a package that libraries purchase for their patrons. Yet not all bundlers are alike, and it does seem odd to me that Swartz decided to copy JStor’s collections as opposed to those of other bundlers. In a 2008 piece, “Collection Sales: Good or Bad for Journals?”, Mark Armstrong evaluates the practice of bundling in terms of its effects on the journals (as opposed to readers). While he sees bundling as positive practice for journals, he does not see bundling by commercial publishers as salutary for nonprofit journals and interestingly sees JStor as a possible model that nonprofit journals may wish to emulate:

In the historic regime of stand-alone journal sales there was little tension when a nonprofit journal was published by a highly commercial publisher. Now, though, there is a tension, and non-profit journals might benefit from gradually disentangling themselves from the more commercial publishers. Both for-profit and non-profit journals, however, should surely make full use of the powerful instrument of bundling. In particular, relative to any stand-alone sales strategy, a non-profit journal will be better off if it joins the collection sales programme of a noncommercial publisher. The current example of JSTOR, which distributes a collection of largely non-profit journals (with a lag), might be a possible guide for how to disseminate the current output of non-profit journals. (21)

In the footnote that closes this paragraph Armstrong further explains,

JSTOR (www.jstor.org) distributes a large number of journals from several disciplines, with a preponderance of non-profit and society journals. Articles are distributed with a lag of several years, so as not to unduly cannibalize a journal’s library subscriptions. JSTOR is available to libraries on a bundled basis (with scope for libraries to choose only particular subject areas). Since JSTOR has always distributed collections rather than individual journals, there is no issue about basing its library prices on historical individual subscriptions. JSTOR is a non-profit enterprise and sets relatively low prices to libraries, and pays relatively low prices to participating journals for distribution rights.

Ted (Theodore C.) Bergstrom, an economics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, has been studying academic journal pricing for more than two decades, and his work supplies an additional context for assessing the differences between for-profit and nonprofit journals and the practice of bundling. In a co-authored 2006 article that appeared in ”Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” [4.9 (Nov. 2006): 488-495], he and Carl Bergstrom compare “The Economics of Ecology Journals,” and their findings seem to be in keeping with larger trends. One of the several graphs they furnish affords a visual view of the stark pricing differences and citation costs of journals published by for-profit entities, by commercial and scholarly partnerships, and by nonprofit publishers (p. 489).

Figure 2. For-profit publishers (yellow) charge institutions more per page for journal subscriptions than do non-profit publishers (blue), such as scholarly societies and university presses. Journals published jointly by scholarly societies and for-profit publishers (red) are typically priced intermediately. Solid lines indicate linear regression through the origin (Non-profit: slope = 0.25, r2=0.67. Joint: slope = 0.86, r2=0.83. For-profit: slope=l38,^=0.90. Note that the regression slopes are not equal to average prices per pages, because the latter effectively weights each journal by its size.) From Carl T. Bergstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 4.9 (Nov. 2006): 488-495, p.489.

As the authors explain, this chart shows that the

average cost per recent citation for journals published by non-profit societies is $0.78. Journals published jointly between a scholarly society and a for-profit publisher cost on average $2.42 per recent citation and those produced by for-profit publishers without an affiliated society cost on average $433 per recent citation (Figure 2). Thus, whether we measure cost as price per page or price per citation, for-profit journals are approximately five times as expensive as their non-profit counterparts.

Given that one of their findings reveals that the “price differences between commercial and non-profit publications do not reflect an underlying difference in quality as measured by citation rate” (488), the cost-per-citation analysis should cause serious pause.

Bergstrom’s ongoing work with other collaborators in the Big Deal Contract Project charts the stranglehold that for-profit outfits such as Elsevier and Springer have held over academic libraries. Also notable are the widely different fees that libraries might pay from one of these providers for the same material. A posting on a 2009 talk Bergstrom gave at the University of Michigan reports that “as an aside, almost, [Bergstrom] tells us that while UMich and Illinois pay Elsevier about $2.25M for the “Freedom Collection”, Wisconsin pays about $1.2M for the exact same collection.”

Bergstrom has consistently concluded his articles with suggestions of how to address the various problems stemming from commercial publishers’ bundling practices. In the previously cited 2006 ecology article, he and his co-author stress that faculty should not abdicate purchasing decisions to librarians, noting that librarians depend on faculty and graduate student input in making such decisions. They forcefully conclude

The fraction of library budgets that is currently going to the shareholders of large commercial publishers could instead be used to provide services of genuine value to the academic community. Professional societies and university presses could help by expanding their existing journals or starting new ones. Individual scholars could advance this process in many ways: by contributing their time and efforts to the expansion of these non-profit journals, by refusing to do unpaid referee work for overpriced commercial publications, by self-archiving their papers in preprint archives or institutional repositories, and by favoring reasonably priced journals with their submissions. (495)

Over the years Bergstrom has adjusted his recommendations to address the shifting landscape effected by the ever-increasing move to digital access. In his 2010 essay “Librarians and the Terrible Fix: Economics of the Big Deal” essay, published in Serials, 23.2 (July 2010): 77-82, Bergstrom presents an array of possibilities. In this piece he now sees merit in the “sale of institutional site licenses for non-profit journals” (80). As he explains, unlike commercial entities that have made the most of price inelasticity [that is, when an increased price “results in a less than proportionate decrease in demand”—a situation Bergstrom describes as “a paradise for monopolists” (77)], “[n]on-profit institutions have no incentive to charge prices significantly higher than average costs, even if demand is price inelastic” (80). Moreover, he emphasizes that libraries should engage in hard bargaining with commercial publishers who charge prices that far exceed average costs. Nor should libraries be afraid of abandoning entirely the “big deal” if not satisfied with the price. Although he acknowledges that libraries should make their own decisions about the refusing the big deal, Bergstrom encourages such action by offering successful examples. Stanford’s and Cal Tech’s decisions to forego overpriced big deals exemplify prestigious research institutions who have benefitted from this stance.

Evidently more libraries are doing just that. In “Libraries Abandon Expensive ‘Big Deal’ Subscription Packages to Multiple Journals” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 July 2011), Jennifer Howard reports on efforts by the University of Oregon library and other Oregon academic libraries as well as those by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to abandon or fiercely renegotiate the “big bundle deals” offered by commercial publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Blackwell and to return to purchasing individual subscriptions.

As this discussion has indicated, the big bundling deals that have received the primary criticism are those provided by commercial publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, and the like. As Bergstrom observes, “[A] library that signed its first big deal contract [with Elsevier] in 1999 would be paying 80% more in 2009 than it did in 1999” (79). Moreover, while Elsevier and Springer increased their 2010 subscription rates in 2009, numerous non-profit societies either froze or reduced their prices in response to widespread library budget reductions (79). Especially in light of ongoing financial cuts, that almost half of university library serial budgets is spent on these big bundle deals should concern us all. Open access is an ideal for which we should strive, but JStor does not seem to be the kind of villain in this larger narrative of access and bundling that some responders to Swartz’s case have painted it as being. According to JStor’s factsheet, “Since our launch in 1997, JSTOR has never raised archival collection fees for participating institutions. In addition, because we have added new content to each collection every year, users have access to more content for the same fee.” Frankly, I am puzzled by Swartz’s choice of bundle.

DH @ #SHARP11

Thank you to EMOB for inviting me to discuss my experiences with the Digital Humanities at this year’s SHARP conference.  I’m afraid the length of my post reflects my excitement, yet despite its length, I did not hear every paper or witness every panel.  I hope that other attendees use the comments to fill in any gaps. –Lisa Maruca

As technologies change our environments for reading, writing and research, it is incumbent on our scholarly organizations to take note. And what group is better prepared to explore our digital future than the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), dedicated  as it is to the interdisciplinary study of the history of literacy and its changing materials forms, sites and technologies.  This year’s SHARP conference in Washington DC last weekend, organized by EMOB’s own Eleanor Shevlin along with Casey Smith, and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Institute, and the Corcoran College of Art + Design, illustrated that the field of Digital Humanities, though still in its incunabula stage, is growing at a dynamic rate.  It also made clear that book historians are prepared to enthusiastically explore the new tools and new theories emerging from a variety of DH practitioners, institutions and new partnerships.

My own experience of the conference was infused with new media theories and practices from beginning to end.  I was “tweeting” the conference on my new iPad, and at the same time taking notes on Evernote, an app that synchs my jottings across platforms. The constant access to the Internet provided by the venues meant that I could look up books, websites, or even places for lunch as needed.  This is not the first time I have used Twitter to report on a conference, but a lively backchannel, encouraged by @sharporg (the alter ego of SHARP vice-president Ian Gadd), allowed conversation about the presentations to unfold and real time. It also facilitated meetings in “real life” of those of us who only had met online before: there’s a reason they call it “social media.” Perhaps more importantly, though, the tweets allowed those who could not make it to the conference to “eavesdrop” on the proceedings, thus opening it to a larger group than those able to physically attend–which is precisely why SHARP has been encouraging the use of such tools.

The first panel I attended on Friday morning was a roundtable focused on RED, or the Reading Experience Database site. I actually learned about this site, which allows users to upload written examples of reading practices from historical sources, many years ago–it was a Digital Humanities project before that label even existed.   What I didn’t know, however, is that the site recently received a second grant from the AHRC, which allowed them to upgrade their interface substantially, and add a number of important usability features, such as tutorials and descriptions designed to attract a large audience.  The database, crammed with information  usually culled from diaries, correspondence, and memoirs, but sometimes including fictional representations as well, is searchable by author, reader or keyword.  Because the grant also has allowed them to expand internationally, much of the roundtable was devoted to status reports from the new RED sites, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands.  Panelists discussed issues such as what constitutes a national boundary, citizen, or language; whose reading experiences are to be included; and how to usefully delimit or focus the new projects. The extension of RED into these new countries and the consequent gathering of a larger data set enable new research questions and findings about transnational reading experiences.

Another pivotal “techie” event involved a new format for SHARP: a digital projects poster session.  In this informal gathering, presenters stood by open laptops while the audience wandered from station to station chatting with the designers about their online collections or tools.  In the digital tool category, Ian Gadd showed off the Virtual Printing Press, an accurate scale model, complete with moving parts, of a Franklin Press.  Existing in Second Life on its own deserted island (Gadd  plans to have students build a printing house around it), the goal of the press is to teach students without access to original machinery the mechanics of printing.  George Williams demonstrated BrailleSC.org, a site that not only highlights the reading experiences of South Carolina’s blind citizens through recorded oral histories, but also offers plugs-in that web designers can utilize to make their own sites more user friendly to the visually impaired.  In the collection category, Katherine Harris, who also organized the panel, showed off the Poetess Archive Database, which is, to quote the site, “a bibliography of over 4,000 entries for works by and about writers working in and against the ‘poetess tradition,’ the extraordinarily popular, but much criticized, flowery poetry written in Britain and America between 1750 and 1900.”  Troy Bassett exhibited his Database of Victorian Fiction, a description of every multiple volume British novel known to have been published. Jessica DeSpain discussed her project, The Wide, Wide World Hypertext Archive, a searchable collection of the illustrations, cover designs, and textual variants of the over 100 editions of Susan Warner’s nineteenth-century American novel, The Wide, Wide World. Lord Byron and His Times, directed by David Radcliffe (in absentia), is yet another collection, this one (again according to the site) “a growing digital archive of books, pamphlets, and periodical essays illustrating the causes and controversies” surrounding the poet.  Not included in this poster session, but presented at an early panel, was a project similar to these in both its focus on one particular, narrow set of works, and its comprehensiveness of bibliographic detail:  Marija Dalbello and Nathan Graham’s 1893, a collection that traces the history of the foreign titles displayed in the Woman’s Library at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. All of these projects are labors of love, requiring years of work at a time when tenure committees can still be leery of nontraditional forms of scholarship, and generously making texts, bibliographic information and new constellations of meaning available to a larger audience.

The SHARP conference closed with a look at the future of the reading, writing and research with a final plenary session on Digital Technology. Matt Kirshenbaum highlighted the Deena Larsen collection at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), which includes the electronic literature pioneer’s early-era personal computers, software, and multiple versions of writings by other authors of 1980s and ‘90s hypertext  (I will return to some of Kirshenbaum’s larger points).  Next, Brian Geiger discussed the digital future of ESTC, which will rely on user-generated collections of digital surrogates. Ben Pauley then spoke about the Eighteenth Century Book Tracker, which uses crowdsourcing to correct metadata in Google Books.  As discussed on EMOB last year, Geiger and Pauley received a Google Digital Humanities Research Awards to connect ESTC’s online records directly to Google’s facsimiles.  The last presenters, Simon Burrow and Mark Curran, showed off their expansive project on the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, due to be released almost any minute (SHARP attendees received a temporary password to play with the beta version).  This project generates and geographically maps statistics on sales, dissemination patterns, editions, clients, genres, prices, etc. of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a Swiss publishing house of the late eighteenth century that sold works by other publishers as well.  The potential of all this data to be put to use to analyze and understand “big picture” trends (dare I say distant reading?) in book consumption and the dissemination of ideas during the Enlightenment gets us back to the original goals and roots of book history.   At the same time, it brings this information to an audience of students and scholars far beyond the privileged few that previously had access to the STN archive.  Katherine Harris, as respondent, hurriedly wrapped up the session, already running over, with comments pointing out the appropriateness of the mash-up of digital humanities and book history, and the inclusivity of both fields.

So far, most of the DH work I have discussed has been focused on making tools and gathering collections that further the study of the book.  This is certainly appropriate for an organization like SHARP.  Yet books are not the only technologies of authorship, reading and publishing.  One of  Kirshenbaum’s key points was that we need to use—and modify as needed—the bibliographic methods developed by book historians to create methodologies for the analysis and, importantly,  preservation of more recent material artifacts of literacy, including computer hardware, software, web interfaces and other born-digital and digital-analog hybrids objects.  The metadata challenges alone are immense, but must be addressed if we want to preserve the future history of new media.

Kirschenbaum’s point was timely, as few papers at the conference addressed digital forms of literacy or contemporary literacy machines.  My own paper discussed the role of the reader in ebook platforms and book apps, while my co-panalist, Marianne Martens, analyzed the economics of publishing multi-platform books for teenagers.  A few other papers undermined our easy acceptance of the facsimile book: Mary Murrell touched on digitization methods in her paper on “Books as Data” and Bonnie Mak also brought the labor of book scanning to the forefront in “From Facsimile to Fact in the Information Age.” Daniel Selcer and Theresa Smith reminded us that even a photographic facsimile is not a transparent rendition of authenticity but an artifact in its own right in their brilliant theoretical analysis of a “black hole” in Eames’ famous Copernicus reproductions.  The papers I heard provided a much needed starting point in answer to Kirschenbaum’s call, but they just scratch the surface of what remains to be done.

It’s possible that papers I missed may have analyzed new technologies as well, but I think that it’s clear that more papers and more studies are badly needed.  This is not just an issue of “including” the Digital Humanities.  The digital age is here, for better and worse, and if book history/bibliography and related organizations want to stay relevant, our contemporary forms of textual dissemination must be the subject of scholarship that draws on and uses these innovative forms of research and publication.  Luckily, I think that SHARP, known for its inclusivity and interdisciplinarity, unafraid to set original scholarly agendas and create new centers of learning, is ideally situated to be the bridge between the past and the future.

EEBO Interactions as an Interactive Guide

One of the things I really like about EEBO Interactions is that unlike so much of the digital world, which prompts us and scolds us and reminds us and worries us into action, EEBO Interactions offers readers an opportunity to correct, tweak, and probe the digital world. Readers can post queries. They can email other contributors. They can correct incorrectly dated title pages, note cross-referenced material, suggest attributions, refer readers to pertinent sources, such as ODNB entries, articles, or books. Where these sources are electronic, links can be provided so that subsequent readers can check those sources instantly from within EEBO.

This interactive function points the way forward to a more mature and more robust resource, not just because entries themselves become more substantial–though that is one significant consequence–but because the database itself becomes more relational, more flexible, less static.

We have not yet discussed the power of electronic resources to go beyond their fixed print relatives. It would be great to hear from readers about the nature of this new relational power–and of how it might best be put to use within EEBO Interactions to strengthen EEBO, not just as a provider of texts, but as an evolving bibliographical database in its own right.

Text Creation Partnership makes 18th century texts freely available to the public

This announcement is making the rounds of listservs and the like, and it should be of interest to emob readers:

(Ann Arbor, MI—April 25, 2011) — The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,229 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,229 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page images for keying and is permitting the release of the keyed texts in support of the Library’s commitment to the creation of open access cultural heritage archives. Gale has been a generous partner, according to Maria Bonn, Associate University Librarian for Publishing. “Gale’s support for the TCP’s ECCO project will enhance the research experience for 18th century scholars and students around the world.”

Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Miami University of Ohio, says, “The 2,229 ECCO texts that have been typed by the Text Creation Partnership, from Pope’s Essay on Man to a ‘Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,’ are gems.”

Mandell, a key collaborator on 18thConnect, an online resource initiative in 18th century studies, says that the TCP is “a groundbreaking partnership that is creating the highest quality 18th century scholarship in digital form.”

This announcement marks another milestone in the work of the TCP, a partnership between the University of Michigan and Oxford University, which since 1999 has collaborated with scholars, commercial publishers, and university libraries to produce scholar-ready (that is, TEI-compliant, SGML/XML enhanced) text editions of works from digital image collections, including ECCO, Early English Books Online (EEBO) from ProQuest, and Evans Early American Imprint from Readex.

The TCP has also just published 4,180 texts from the second phase of its EEBO project, having already converted 25,355 books in its first phase, leaving 39,000 yet to be keyed and encoded. According to Ari Friedlander, TCP Outreach Coordinator, the EEBO-TCP project is much larger than ECCO-TCP because pre-1700 works are more difficult to capture with optical character recognition (OCR) than ECCO’s 18th-century texts, and therefore depend entirely on the TCP’s manual conversion for the creation of fully searchable editions.

Friedlander explains that, for a limited period, the EEBO-TCP digital editions are available only to subscribers—ten years from their initial release—as per TCP’s agreement with the publisher. Eventually all TCP-created titles will be freely available to scholars, researchers, and readers everywhere under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (PDM).

Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, says that large projects such as those undertaken by the TCP are only possible when the full range of library, scholarly, and publishing resources are brought together. “The TCP illustrates the dynamic role played by today’s academic research library in encouraging library collaboration, forging public/private partnerships, and ensuring open access to our shared cultural and scholarly record.”

More than 125 libraries participate in the TCP, as does the Joint Information Systems (JISC), which represents many British libraries and educational institutions.

To learn more about the Text Creation Partnership, visit www.lib.umich.edu/tcp. To learn more about ECCO, visit http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/

Free Trial of Gale Cengage’s British Literary Manuscripts Online

For the next three weeks, emob readers can explore Gale Cengage’s British Literary Manuscripts Online for free.  The database contains facsimile images of manuscripts digitized from microfilm.  Though the texts themselves cannot be searched, their metadata  can be.  Authors can also be browsed alphabetically.  The resolution is good, and legibility can be enhanced through digital magnification and brightness and contrast controls.   Line tools and highlighting tools allow for digital annotation.

The product consists of two parts, both of which are included in the free trial: part one includes Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; part two includes manuscripts written between 1660-1900.

On the database’s home page, the following links to online  tutorials help with basic paleography.

Paleography: Reading Old Handwriting 1500-1800: A Practical Online Tutoria (National Archives)l

Andrew Zurcher’s English Handwriting 1500-1700: an online course

Scriptorium’s English Handwriting: An Online Course (Cambridge)

Other links on the BLMO web site include sites for portraits, maps, and digital scholarship.  As with actual manuscripts, it is sometimes difficult to know what one is reading, though the full citation link on the entry’s page sometimes helps.

It will be interesting to hear readers’ evaluations of this product, particularly how productively it can be put to use, for research or teaching or both.

A Digital Public Library of America

Robert Darnton has championed the concept of a national digital public library through a series of galvanizing essays in The New York Review of Books.  In October 2010, he convened a community of what Harvard Magazine described as “forty-two leaders of research libraries, major foundations, and national cultural institutions” in Cambridge to discuss strategy for building a digital public library of America.  That same month, Darnton’s opening talk at that conference was published in the New York Review of Books.  His The Library: Three Jeremiads, appeared in NYRB in December, further delineating the complex relation between digital libraries and their brick-and-mortar counterparts.  Details of the conference were published both by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education and by the Harvard Magazine, which cited Darnton as describing the project as

the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress…bringing millions of books and digitized material in other media within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any individual with access to the Internet.

Responses to the concept of constructing a national digital public library have been positive.  In December, David Rothman published “Why We Can’t Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System” in the Atlantic, arguing that one of the benefits of the project is that it digitizes more than the commercial selections offered by Kindle’s and iPad’s digitization projects: significantly, it digitizes library books.  Referring to a digital public library, Rothman claims it’s a cause

I’ve publicly advocated since 1992 in Computerworld, a 1996 MIT Press information science collection, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere, including my national information stimulus plan here in the Fallows blog?

Rothman departs or seems to depart from Darnton, however, over the issue of access.  Rothman wants the digital public library to be a genuine public library, open to all citizens, not simply those affiliated with research libraries.

Details of the plans continue to emerge.  Michael Kelly provides an overview of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and its plans for a year of workshops regarding the project in Library Journal.com.  Recently (Feb. 18th), Jennifer Howard again interviewed Darnton for the Chronicle of Higher Education to obtain updates on the progress made by Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society on the Digital Public Library of America.

Now that Oxford and Cambridge are making plans to digitize their backlists, this may be a good time to discuss the benefits and consequences of having a national digital public library.  Will digital books be read?  Do readers need POD (Print-on-Demand) options?  Is this project getting the attention it deserves?