Roundtable Discussion at EC/ASECS 2009

EC/ASECS conference, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 8-11 October, 2009, hosted by Lehigh University.

Bibliography, the ESTC, and 18th-Century Electronic Databases:  A Roundtable

 Inspired by James May’s recent essay, “Some Problems in ECCO (and ESTC),” in The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (23.1 [Jan. 2009]), this roundtable will examine current bibliographic shortcomings found in ECCO, the Burney Collection of 17^th and 18^th Century Newspapers and the ESTC and will explore ways that scholars and the managers of such databases could join forces to help solve and improve these tools. Each participant will offer a 5 to 8-minute opening statement, and ample time will be allowed for audience involvement in the discussion. Offering an east coast forum, this roundtable will follow on the heels of a similar roundtable that will be taking place at the Huntington when the International ESTC board meets this September. In addition, “ECCO and EEBO: Some ‘Noisy Feedback’”, an ASECS 2010 roundtable organized by Anna Battigelli, will offer a “part-two” to this EC/ASECS session. 

Chair: Eleanor Shevlin (West Chester University)

Participants: James E. May (Penn State University—DuBois), James Tierney (University of Missouri—St. Louis), David Vander Meulen (University of Virginia), Benjamin Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State University), Brian Geiger (ESTC, University of California, Riverside), Scott Dawson (Cengage-Gale).

This blog, Early Modern Online Bibliography (EMOB), offers an excellent opportunity for exchange and discussion in advance of these roundtables.

Roundtable Discussion at ASECS, 2010

ASECS conference, Albuquerque, N.M., 18-21 March, 2010

EEBO, ECCO, and Burney Collection Online:
Some “Noisy Feedback” 

In a 2009 article in the Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, James May suggested that “scholars need to provide a little noisy feedback to corporate ventures like ECCO if future projects are to benefit from their expertise.”  This roundtable discussion is designed to provide constructive scholarly feedback for ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection Online.  Brief (5-minute) presentations on these databases’ bibliographical problems should focus on ways in which they might be strengthened.  Possible topics include how to correct attribution errors, strengthen search mechanisms, detect and improve digital images that are insufficiently clear or in some cases illegible, augment and clarify holdings information, eliminate duplicate records, signal the existence of listings not reproduced, and so forth.  Following the brief presentations, panelists will consider the issues raised and invite members of the audience to participate in the discussion.  All participants are encouraged to read the set of related readings on the bibliography below, suggest additions to it, and join in discussions on this blog leading up to the session. 

Chair: Anna Battigelli, SUNY Plattsburgh

Panelists: James E. May (Penn State University—DuBois); Sayre Greenfield (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg); Eleanor Shevlin (West Chester University of Pennsylvania); Stephen Karian (Marquette University); Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Rare Book School, University of Virginia)

Respondents:  Scott Dawson (Gale/Cengage); Brian Geiger (ESTC); Jo-Ann Hogan, (Proquest)

Tentative Bibliography of Articles Pertaining to Early Modern Online Text-bases

There are a number of excellent articles on online text-bases, some of them online.   Below is a preliminary list of items.  As additional entries are received, they will be entered in the bibliography listed under  the “Pages” link on the blog’s home page.  Please refer to that link for the most updated version of the bibliography.

 

Robin C. Alston, “The History of ESTC,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 15 (2004), 269-329.  http://www.r-alston.co.uk/review.htm

Hugh Amory, “Pseudodoxia Bibliographica, or When is a Book Not a Book? When It’s a Record” In The Scholar & the Database: Papers Presented on 4 November 1999 at the CERL Conference Hosted by the Royal Library, Brussels, ed. Lotta Hellinga, 2 (2001), 1-14.

Kevin Berland, “Formalized Curiosity in the Electronic Age and Uses of On-line Text-Bases,” The Age of Johnson 17 (2006), 392-413.

Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Numbers Game: Appraising the Revised STC,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88:3 (1994), 353-407.

Peter Damian-Grint, “Eighteenth-Century Literature in English and Other Languages: Image, Text, and Hypertext,” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner, “Conversion of Primary Sources,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Gabriel Egan and John Jowett, “Review of the Early English Books Online (EEBO),” Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies (January 2001), 1-13 http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/reviews/jowetteebo.htm

Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Databases of Early English Playbooks,” Literature Compass Online: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00577.x

Kevin Franklin and Karen Rodriguez’G, “The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: 18thConnect,” HPCWire (November 24, 2008), 3 pp. http://www.hpcwire.com/industry/academia/The_Next_Big_Thing_in Humanities_Arts_and_Social_Science_Computing_18thConnect_35010199.-html 

Ian Gadd, “The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online,” Literature Compass Online: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00632.x

Sayre Greenfield, “ECCO-Locating the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (Jan. 2007), N.S. 21:1 (2007): 1-9.

Robert D. Hume, “The ECCO Revolution,” http://trials.gale.com/nerl/documents/ECCO%20Whitepaper.pdf

William A. Jackson, “Some Limitations of Microfilm,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 35 (1941), 281-88.

George Justice, “The ESTC and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies,” Literature Compass Online: http://wip.literature-compass.com/18thcentury/view_LICO_002.asp

Diana Kichuk, “Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO),” Literary and Linguistic Computing 22:3 (2007), 291-303.

Thea Lindquist and Heather Wicht, “‘Pleas’d By a Newe Inuention? Assessing the Impact of Early English Books Online on Teaching and Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33:3 (2007), 347-60.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W50-4N7RD86-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&-_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&-_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=-f3de976995f1591bd11a1407b2732363

Shawn Martin, “EEBO, Microfilm, and Umberto Eco: Historical Lessons and Future Directions for Building Electronic Collections,” Microform & Imaging Review 36:4 (2007), 159-64.  http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/66/

Shawn Martin, “Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 10:1 (2007), http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/54/

Shawn Martin, “Collaboration in Electronic Scholarly Communication: New Possibilities for Old Books,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 9:2 (2006), http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/53/

Shawn Martin, “Reaching Out: What do Scholars Want from Electronic Resources?” Proceedings of the Association for Computing in the Humanities, (2005), http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/52/

James May, “Some Problems in ECCO (and ESTC),” The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer N.S. 23:1 (Jan. 2009), 20-30.

James May, “Accessing the Inclusiveness of Searches in the Online Burney Newspapers Collection,” The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer N.S. 23:2 (May 2009), 28-34.

James E. May, “Who Will Edit the ESTC? (And Have You Checked OCLC Lately?),” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 12 (2001), 288-304.

John P. Schmitt, “Early English Books Online,” The Charleston Advisor 4:4 (2003), 5-8.  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/charleston/chadv/2003/-00000004/00000004/art00005

Henry L. Snyder and Michael S. Smith, eds., The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future (New York, AMS Press, 2003).

Matthew Steggle, “Knowledge Will be Multiplied,” Digital Literary Studies and Early Modern Literature,” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies.  Ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

Stephen Tabor, “ESTC and the Bibliographical Community,” The Library 7th ser., 8:4 (2007), 367-86.

Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz, and Pich Hemy Ros, “Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library’s 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive,” D-Lib Magazine 15.7/8 (2009). 
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html

Claire Warwick, “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources” A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

William Proctor Williams and William Baker, “Caveat Lector.  English Books 1475-1700 and the Electronic Age,” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 12 (2001), 1-29.