Preserving Digital Archives

Most attendees at the Beinecke Library’s recent conference on digital archiving–“Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century“–arrived equipped with the idea that there is no preservation without loss.

What may have given some attendees pause, particularly those who work primarily on the first two centuries following the Reformation, is how much 21st-century digital stuff is being preserved–and how idiosyncratic the process of selection can be.

Faced with the data deluge of a contemporary literary figure’s electronic correspondence, for example, how do archivists determine what gets archived and what gets tossed?  Now that archiving can begin during a writer’s or publisher’s lifetime, without a family member’s interference (think Cassandra Austen), who shapes the archive?  And if digital archivists shape the archive, what principles of retention do they use?  Where do their loyalties lie? With the author?  Or with the data-hungry and feverishly scandal-mongering scholars of posterity?

The two-day conference raised unresolved and provocative questions, many of which focused on the problem of selection.  Fran Baker, the Assistant Archivist for John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, discussed the complexity of archiving the Carcanet editorial papers, including email.  Hearing about the decision-making process determining what stays and what gets tossed may not seem new to librarians familiar with the problem of sorting and discarding, but in the context of shaping an archive, that decision-making process and its likelihood of error takes on urgency.

There were stories of forensic success, the most notable of which is Matthew Kirschenbaum’s narrative of the extensive and collective effort tracking down William Gibson’s electronic poem, “Agrippa,” which was designed to encrypt itself after a single reading.  That a text programmed to go away can be recovered suggests both the value of collaborating on large digital projects like The Agrippa Files and the perils of assuming that an author has control over her or his electronic archives.  Similarly, Beth Luey’s account of the rich storehouse of data contained in publishers’ records–sales data, copies printed, copies sold, print runs, design decisions, contracts, marketing files, legal disputes, reviews, book jacket design, subsidiary rights, and so forth–both encouraged work on publishers’ records and raised ethical and legal issues.  In the discussion that followed, for example, it became clear that though some publishers did not retain rejected manuscripts, others did, including pertinent correspondence and readers’ reports.

The Keynote talk by David Sutton noted that literary manuscripts are like no other manuscripts in that they offer insights into the act of creation.  He showcased ongoing projects that promote an awareness of digital literary archives:

• GLAM Group for Literary Archives & Manuscripts
• Diasporic Literary Archives Network

Hazel Carby’s eloquent, harrowing, and culturally resonant account of tracing her family genealogy back to a slave owner’s carefully archived records, reminded everyone that archives preserve both the beautiful and the monstrous.

Diane Ducharme drew on her experience at the Beinecke to warn that however much we may desire an unmediated past and a pristine archival order free from editing and explicating, all archives arrive shaped and selected.  Her discussion underscored the importance of searching for the traces of a previous archivist’s work.

Micki McGee described her experience with the Yaddo Archive Project, which aims at providing visualizations of the social network of writers who worked at Yaddo.  She described the process of seeking a relational database with social network mapping and a visualization widget.  Though the project, Yaddo Circles, requires authentication and is not yet available for public view, this vimeo provides an overview.  Clicking here reveals the kind of relational visualization this project might produce.

McGee also recommended looking at the following projects:

• Crowded Page
• Phybo
• Orlando Project
• SNAC Project
• The RoSE (Research Oriented Social Environment)
• Linked Jazz

These projects have potential for helping us recover the intensely sociable and highly competitive literary worlds of the long eighteenth century.   Like the many other provocative and interesting papers and introductions to sessions, they point a way forward even as they raise methodological, logistical, and even ethical questions.

This conference made clear the value of a longer conference, with sessions focusing on specific problems posed by digital archives of material both old and new.  I welcome contributions by others who attended the conference to help complete this cursory overview.

Free Trial Access to Early European Books (EEB)

The following has been forwarded from Emma Longden at ProQuest.  Readers are encouraged to post responses to Early English Books – Thanks, AB

Free trial to ProQuest’s Early European Books now available

ProQuest is pleased to offer a free open trial to Early European Books to EMOB readers – hurry, access ends Monday 22^nd April, 2013

Every day in universities worldwide, early modern scholars turn to ProQuest’s Early English Books Online as the definitive source of incunabula and early printed works in English. But EEBO, of course, provides only a partial view of intellectual life in early-modern Europe. In fact it contains only 4% of the continent’s printed output of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What of intellectual life beyond the British Isles?

Users of EEBO can now internationalize their research through ProQuest’s acclaimed new companion resource Early European Books.

Through the highest quality digital reproductions of thousands of printed works by important writers and thinkers working in continental Europe pre-1700, Early European Books gives researchers an international overview of early print culture during this vibrant period of history.

Over four million pages have already been scanned in high-resolution colour, including images of all pages, bindings and page-edges, allowing for a detailed examination of each book’s history and provenance. All volumes are digitized on-site at participating libraries, which to date include Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Bibliothèque nationale de France (from June 2013), Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and Wellcome Library, London. These digital scans have been gathered in a bespoke platform with search capabilities tailored to the needs of the specialist early modern researcher to provide the most detailed tool for early printed sources available.

ProQuest is delighted to offer EMOB users a free open trial of Early European Books until Monday 22^nd April, 2013

Click here to access the Early European Books Open Trial

Want more time to explore the resource? University-based members can also contact their librarian to arrange a 30 day institutional trial.  For queries about this trial, or to share post-trial feedback about your experience of using Early European Books please email emma.longden@proquest.co.uk

EEBO Interactions Ends

EEBO Interactions, the web site that fused social networking and digital bibliography, is shutting down at the end of March 2013.

ProQuest’s decision to decommission EEBO Interactions should come as no surprise.  If traffic indicates success, the site received too little to certify its academic or commercial value.   The small core of contributors who worked brilliantly and doggedly to improve bibliographic entries was not enough to prove that value.  Why should it be?  In a world where crowd-sourcing promises instant and free correction, EEBO Interactions‘ small stream of corrections proved too little and too slow.

Nevertheless, the decision to shut down EEBO Interactions is a disappointment because it ends a promising and visionary venture on ProQuest’s part.  Proquest accomplished at least two great things.  First, it offered a rare joint venture uniting academic and commercial worlds.  Second, it conjured up the first bibliography to offer relational cataloging.  If this  iteration of that vision  did not quite take off, it is to be hoped that later iterations will.  Traffic may be one indication of success, but vision is another.

As an editor for EEBO Interactions, I would like to thank EI‘s contributors.  They are a special group of readers, experts willing to put time into a promising experiment.  I have told Stephen Brooks that I would ask emob readers what EEBO Interactions could have done to encourage traffic or otherwise improve.  What might a second iteration include or not include?  Is an unedited, crowd-sourced version of EEBO that runs parallel to EEBO the way to go for such interactions?  Or is an ESTC-led editorial board the way?  An option in between these two poles?

One note of caution.  Anyone interested in preserving information recorded on EEBO Interactions should download material before the end of the month.   ProQuest will save material contributed to EI in some form, but it will be difficult  to access.

Those interested in correcting EEBO entries in the future will want to use http://eebo.chadwyck.com/about/webmaster.htm, or click here.

English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA at UCSB)

This is the second of a two-part series on free digital archives featuring English ballads.  It follows Eleanor’s discussion of the JISC-funded Broadside Ballad Initiative at Oxford.

The University of California at Santa Barbara has created a free digital ballad collection called The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), which provides access to more than 8,000 seventeenth-century ballads.  The collection includes ballads from the Pepys Collection, the Roxburgh Collection, the Euing Collection, and the Huntington Library.  EBBA is directed by Patricia Fumerton at UCSB.  This project was supported by the N.E.H.

Individual entries provide links to  sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, and often recordings.  These features facilitate introducing students both to ballads’ visual details–ornaments, woodcuts, columned verse–and to their tunes.

Cataloging is full and includes the following:

EBBA ID: An internal identifier. Each individual ballad in the archive has a unique EBBA ID.

Title: A diplomatic transcription of the ballad title as it appears on the ballad sheet. The title consists of all ballad text before the first lines of the ballad, including verse headers but excluding text recorded elsewhere under other catalogue headings (such as the license or author, date, publisher and printer imprints).

Date Published: The year—or, in most cases, range of years—during which EBBA believes the ballad to have been published. See Dates.

Author: The recognized author of the ballad in cases where an indication of authorship has been printed on the ballad or, in the case of Pepys ballads, when Weinstein has identified an author from external sources (e.g., Wing, Rollins).

Standard Tune: The standardized name for the melody (according to Claude M. Simpson or other reliable sources). Clicking the standard tune name will return all ballads with the same melody, including alternate tune titles.

Imprint: A diplomatic transcription of the printing, publishing, and/or location information as it appears on the ballad sheet.

License: A diplomatic transcription of the licensing or permission information as printed on the ballad.

Collection: The name of the collection to which the ballad belongs. In cases where the ballad is not part of a named collection, the name of the holding library plus “miscellaneous” will appear. For example, Huntington Library ballads that are not part of a collection are grouped as “HEH Miscellaneous.”

Sheet/Page: For ballads that are collected as independent sheets, the citation page displays the word “Sheet” and lists the sheet number given to it by its holding institution (usually part of its shelfmark). For ballads bound in a book, the citation page displays the word “Page” and lists the page number within the bound volume.

Location: The name of the holding institution.

Shelfmark: The shelfmark assigned by the holding institution.

ESTC ID: The Citation Number for the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Use this number to find the full ESTC citation for any given ballad at http://estc.bl.uk/.

Keyword Categories: The keywords from EBBA’s standardized keyword list that relate to the ballad’s theme and content.

Notes: Clarify potential areas of confusion for users, such as ballads that have print on both sides of a sheet.

MARC Record: A link to our MARC-XML records

Additional Information: Information specific to each part of the ballad.

Title: Separate titles for multi-part ballads.

Tune Imprint: Tune title(s) as printed.

First Lines: A diplomatic transcription of the first two lines of the ballad text proper, below any heading information included in the title or elsewhere under other catalogue headings.

Refrain: Repeated lines at the end of or within ballad stanzas.

Condition: Description of ballad sheet damage and the current state of the sheet. (This information is from Weinstein and is currently for the Pepys collection only.)

Ornament: A list of decorations made of cast metal that appear on the ballad. Frequently used to fill empty spaces in the forme and/or to delimit parts of the ballad text, these ornaments include vertical rules, horizontal rules, and cast fleurons. (This information is from Weinstein and is currently for the Pepys collection only.)

Ballad scholars working with EEBO or ECCO will be familiar with the difficulty of finding ballads, making English Broadside Ballad Archive and Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads necessary.

Together with new printed resources, such as Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini’s Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate 2010) and Angela McShane’s Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (Pickering & Chatto 2011), these digital resources provide a robust and growing archive  for the systematic study of a format whose transiency may have discouraged such studies in the past.

Text Encoding Initiative Seminar at Brown

Readers may be interested in the following announcement from Julia Flanders about a special NEH-funded “Taking TEI Futher” institute.  Additional information is available at the WWP’s webpage for their Seminars on Scholarly Text Encoding.

The deadline is approaching for applications to the introductory TEI customization workshop in the NEH-funded “Taking TEI Further” institutes. Please note that the dates for the “Publishing and Transforming TEI Data” seminar have been changed.

Taking TEI Further: TEI CustomizationBrown University, May 8-10, 2013Guest instructor: Trevor Muñoz, University of MarylandApplication deadline: February 15, 2013Taking TEI Further: Teaching with TEIBrown University, August 21-23, 2013Guest instructor: Jacqueline Wernimont, Scripps CollegeApplication deadline: June 1, 2013Taking TEI Further: Publishing and Transforming TEI DataBrown University, November 20-22, 2013 [note the date change!!]Guest instructor: David Birnbaum, University of PittsburghApplication deadline: August 15, 2013

**Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant, up to $1000 for graduate student participants.**These seminars assume a basic familiarity with TEI, and provide an opportunity to explore specific topics in more detail, in a collaborative workshop setting.

These seminars are part of a series funded by the NEH and conducted by the Brown University Women Writers Project. They are aimed at people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one, and are intended to provide a more in-depth look at specific challenges in using TEI data effectively. Each event will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants’ projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation.

The seminars will be strongly project-based: participants will share information about their projects with the group, discuss specific challenges and solutions, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create sample materials (such as syllabi, docmentation, etc., as appropriate to the event). A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding will be assumed.For more detailed information and to apply, please visithttp://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars/

Folger Institute “Early Modern Digital Agendas”

The following announcement, from Owen Williams, Assistant Director of the Folger Institute, will be of interest to readers:

In July 2013, the Folger Institute will offer “Early Modern Digital Agendas” under the direction of Jonathan Hope, Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde. It is an NEH-funded, three-week institute that will explore the robust set of digital tools with period-specific challenges and limitations that scholars of early modern English now have at hand. “Early Modern Digital Agendas” will create a forum in which twenty faculty participants can historicize, theorize, and critically evaluate current and future digital approaches to early modern literary studies—from Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) to advanced corpus linguistics, semantic searching, and visualization theory—with discussion growing out of, and feeding back into, their own projects (current and envisaged). With the guidance of expert visiting faculty, attention will be paid to the ways new technologies are shaping the very nature of early modern research and the means by which scholars interpret texts, teach their students, and present their findings to other scholars.

This institute is supported by an Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. Please visit http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/ for more details.

Owen writes that he will be happy to answer questions pertaining to this interesting new project.

From Boston to Peru: Reading Books at the Boston Athenaeum and the Peru Free Library

How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read? 

–V. Woolf, “How to Read a Book”

Photo Credit: Megan Manton/Boston Athenaeum

“To enter the building is to feel an overwhelming impulse to read.”  So wrote Sarah Schweitzer about the Boston Athenaeum in a 2009 Boston.Com article.  Indeed, pushing back the building’s red, leather-bound doors, one plunges into the world of reading like a sea-creature slipping into the ocean’s depths.

How is it that a building can transform us from scatter-brained urban land creatures subject to Boston’s many disparate calls into more focused beings equipped to swim through the world of learning?  It may be that the library’s high ceilings and twelve floors expand our sense of possibility, inviting the mind to unbend.  Certainly, the Athenaeum’s quiet aura of uninterrupted work offers a refuge from the jostling noise of the city’s streets.  Fellow readers lost in concentration call us to our task.  Art, sculpture, newspapers, journals, 750,000 books, maps–all await, encouraging inquiry.  The interior’s opulence telegraphs the value of spending time with books, transporting us to a lost age when leisure allowed one to linger over fictions and treatises, sermons and histories, maps and art, with nothing more pressing awaiting than afternoon tea.

But the Athenaeum’s true luxury is something even more precious and more rare than comfort and splendor alone: it offers the order necessary for sustained reading.

We see this order in the carefully designed reading spaces enticing one to that concentrated state of mind so beneficial for reading.  Solid walnut tables provide space for research materials.  Desks tucked between bookshelves beckon. Upholstered chairs placed next to side tables allow readers to sit next to stacks of books and begin the task of browsing.  The reference room displays recent journals side-by-side on long tables (shown below) carefully ordering the chaotic possibilities before us.

Photo Credit: Megan Manton/Boston Athenaeum

In short, the library has been designed for readers by readers to encourage us to leave the tyranny of the present by plunging into the otherworldly and timeless worlds contained in books.  Seated at the Athenaeum, we can take down volumes and, in Woolf’s words, “make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author.”

Photo credit: Megan Manton/Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum is a subscription library.  To borrow books and use the upper floors requires a membership fee beyond the reach of many.  But the first floor is open to the public six days a week, and the Athenaeum’s programs, including concerts, are open to the public free of charge.  Its value as a public space is at least threefold: it is a research and membership library; an art museum and public gallery; and a public forum for lectures, readings, concerts, and other events.

Perhaps most of all, the Boston Athenaeum is a valuable icon reminding us of the civic value placed by a community on reading.

Less palatial, but no less essential, are the public spaces created by our public libraries.  Situated by the apple orchards of upstate New York is the Peru Free Public Library (shown below), a lovely 1927 structure that blends the old and the new.  It maintains its early twentieth-century elegance, even as it runs on solar energy.

Photo credit: Theresa Sanderson

Smaller in scale than the Boston Athenaeum (it holds about 14,000 items), it, too, beckons readers with its carefully arranged reading spaces.  A fireside (below) often warms  readers working at the reference room’s long tables during the shortening fall days and throughout the winter.

Photo credit: Theresa Sanderson

Carefully arranged reading spaces offer an opportunity to clear one’s head:

Photo credit: Theresa Sanderson

A children’s reading room is designed to invite young minds to the world of books:

Photo credit: Theresa Sanderson

The Peru Free Library’s many activities bind the community through art shows, pottery shows, book sales, children’s activities, public lectures, and other events.  Like the Boston Athenaeum, the Peru Free Library is carefully and creatively managed.

Public reading spaces like the Boston Athenaeum and the Peru Free Library contribute immeasurably to their communities and to their readers, allowing them to expand their sense of who they are.   By orchestrating spaces designed to slow us down long enough to stop skimming and sink into deep reading, they encourage a more studied approach to thought than is possible away from books.  If we feel as Woolf did, that heaven is “one continuous unexhausted reading,” the Boston Athenaeum and the public libraries that share its commitment to encouraging reading make it a little easier to experience heaven on earth.

New Digital Projects II: Vernacular Aristotelianism and Digitized Archives at the Wellcome Library

The following guest post, the second of two parts, is by Andie Silva, Wayne State University

In a previous post, I discussed the Vernacular Aristotelianism database featured during the first week of a two-week workshop at the University of Warwick this past summer.  During that workshop, Chris Hilton, senior archivist at the Wellcome Library, presented that library’s massive restructuring of its archives and plans to digitize their entire collection.

As if that were not already an impressive undertaking, the Wellcome promises that all their material will be available, not only for open access (with a library membership card—free with in-person visit) but also for sharing: users will be free to copy, link, and even embed any digital materials from the Wellcome for any non-commercial purposes.

However, as Hilton demonstrated, digitization is not enough: without the proper coding and re-cataloguing of the material, most users won’t know where to look, or what to look for. What he calls the “white box” syndrome is a constant challenge to digital archivists: how does one translate the intricate, detailed knowledge of the archivist into a blank search box? In a way, that is largely impossible; having heard many tales of “found treasures” from scholars who took the time to get to know a librarian and talk to them about their research, I am not one to underestimate the value of physically visiting an archive.

Of course, not everyone is able to do so, and that is where the digital archive comes in. While digitization cannot fully supplant true archival research, it allows instead for new kinds of research. Take, for instance, the already fully digitized Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts. Thanks to a very generous grant by the JISC’s Islamic Studies Program (and, no doubt, some very hard-working grad students), this digital archive is an online researcher’s dream. Each manuscript has been photographed in full, including the covers, binding, and original coloring and detailing. Because the whole book, and not just a close-up of the pages, has been photographed, the researcher is better able to grasp the sizing, page setting, and general condition of the manuscript. From this broader view, the reader can then zoom in to a specific page and actually read its contents. Granted, this process is a little slow—however, given the quality and viewing options, I can’t see that as a major flaw.

Another fantastic improvement is that the thumbnails of each page appear in a separate frame, allowing the viewer to browse the entire work while inspecting specific pages. This kind of “horizontal browsing” (although in this case the frame is vertical) is something Hilton hopes will be applied to the rest of the Wellcome digital materials. According to Hilton, this extra frame will also contain information about related materials, cross-searching, and external links. I imagine that due to monetary and time constraints the rest of the materials will not be as detailed as the Arabic Manuscripts. Nonetheless, this collection demonstrates the incredible amount of information and details that are possible for those implementing digitizing projects. Thanks to those who catalogued and annotated the Arabic collection, researchers have the option to investigate even material details like binding and physical conditions of a manuscript and never have to pay more than the price of an internet connection.

While digital projects may not (and perhaps should not) replace material archives, they offer new possibilities for research. Scholars interested in statistics, for example, are now better able to quantify and analyze data at the speed of a search engine. One of the workshop participants, for instance, questioned the use of “Publics” in the title “Reading Publics,” arguing that it was not a word contemporary to Renaissance audiences and therefore inaccurate to describe their acts of reading, purchasing, and engaging with books. His claim was backed by a database search for the use of the word “public” in sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts, which revealed only a few works using the word anywhere in the text. He quickly realized, however, that his initial search had failed to elicit books that included variant spellings or synonyms. What’s more, his research was limited to English texts, and (more importantly) texts that had already been transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership for EEBO (another exciting project that is not yet entirely available to the public).

This example makes clear some of the limiting aspects of digital research: we are always, sometimes unawares, conditioned by the parameters of the search box—and, more specifically, by whoever coded the keywords into the database. This example also highlights a new kind of conversation that is made possible by virtue of digital projects.  New endeavors like Vernacular Aristotelianism and the Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts show us that digital archives have the opportunity (perhaps even, I dare say, the responsibility) to rethink literary categories, to open up new angles for research, and to foreground aspects of book production and reception beyond the figure of the author.

Digital Life Spans and Library Access

Today’s Inside Higher Ed has an article by Barbara Fister called “The Library Vanishes – Again” that may be of interest.

Fister reports that EBSCO, which provides the Academic Search Premier database,” no longer offers full access to The Economist due to a contract dispute.  Similarly, the ERIC database, an online database of education research and information, was taken offline because of undisclosed “privacy concerns.”  It will remain offline until the privacy issues are resolved.  Fister conjectures that the privacy issues ailing ERIC might well result from the searchability of digitized databases: now that ERIC’s 360,000+ documents are online, data within those documents, including confidential data, is simply easier to find.  As she puts it,

materials that were publicly available in a pre-web state tended to evade notice; web access  is wonderful, but it exposes things.

Fister’s article confirms the digital world’s double identity of promise and instability.  Digitization makes items accessible and at its best provides full-text searchability.  But until some core values are arrived at regarding how to guarantee digital life spans, a library’s promise of access, ever contingent on library budgets and whims, remains in question.

This fall may be a good time to give thought to the library as it is affected by digitization.

In the meantime, I recommend Fister’s brief article in full at http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/library-vanishes-again#ixzz24HzGXGb1

CFP: JEMCS Special Issue on the Early Modern Digital

The following call for papers, posted on SHARP-L, may be of interest

to readers.  Contact Devoney Looser for additional information (contact information below).

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies:  Special Issue on the Early Modern Digital (due 15 Jan 2013)

It is well understood that “the digital turn” has transformed the contemporary cultural, political and economic environment.  Less appreciated perhaps is its crucial importance and transformative potential for those of us who study the past.  Whether through newly—and differently—accessible data and methods (e.g. “distant reading”), new questions being asked of that new data, or recognizing how digital reading changes our access to the materiality of the past, the digital humanities engenders a particularized set of questions and concerns for those of us who study the early modern, broadly defined (mid-15th to mid-19th centuries).For this special issue of JEMCS, we seek essays that describe the challenges and debates arising from issues in the early modern digital, as well as work that shows through its methods, questions, and conclusions the kinds of scholarship that ought best be done—or perhaps can only be done— in its wake.  We look for contributions that go beyond describing the advantages and shortcomings of (or problems of inequity of access to) EEBO, ECCO, and the ESTC to contemplate how new forms of information produce new ways of thinking.We invite contributors to consider the broader implications and uses of existing and emerging early modern digital projects, including data mining, data visualization, corpus linguistics, GIS, and/or potential obsolescence, especially in comparison to insights possible through traditional archival research methods. Essays of 3000-8000 words are sought in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format by January 15, 2013 tojemcsfsu@gmail.com<mailto:jemcsfsu@gmail.com>.  All manuscripts must include a 100-200 word abstract. JEMCS adheres to MLA format, and submissions should be prepared accordingly.In addition, we would welcome brief reports (500-1500 words) that describe digital projects in progress in early modern studies (defined here as spanning from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), whether or not these projects have yet reached completion.  These reports, too, should be submitted in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format, using MLA style, by 15 January 2013 to  to jemcsfsu@gmail.com.

Devoney Looser, Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair and Professor of English
Co-Editor, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
Tate Hall 114
Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
573-884-7791
FAX: 573-882-5785
looserd@missouri.edu
http://www.devoneylooser.com