Digital Projects at SHARP 2015–Part I

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) has featured digital projects at its conferences for many years now. With the SHARP 2013 conference at the University of Pennsylvania, SHARP began the tradition of hosting a stand-alone digital projects showcase at its conferences. During a two-hour time slot, creators present and demonstrate their projects to attendees. SHARP 2015, held in Montreal this past July 7th through July 10th, offered attendees the following fourteen fascinating digital projects and tools:

• Jonathan Armoza, “Topic Words in Context (TWiC)”
• Belinda Barnet, Jason Ensor and Sydney Shep, “A Prototype for Using Xanadu Transclusive Relationships in Academic Texts”
• Troy J. Bassett, “At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901”
• Léon Robichaud, “Bibliographie de l’histoire de Montréal”
• Richard Cunningham, “Architectures of the Book Knowledge Base”
• Bertrand Gervais, “Arts et littératures numériques: du répertoire à l’agrégateur”
• Joshua McEvilla, “Facet-Searching the Shakespearian Drama”
• Jordan Michael Howell, “Digital Bibliography Quick Start”
• Hélène Huet, “Mapping Decadence”
• Mireille Laforce, “Des innovations pour faciliter le dépôt légal à Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec” ”
• Sophie Marcotte, “Le projet HyperRoy”
• Andrew Ross, Sierra Dye and Melissa Ann McAfee, “From Wandering Peddlers to Purveyors of Bit-Streams: The Rebirth of Scottish Chapbooks in the Twenty-First Century”
• Chantal Savoie, Pierre Barrette, Olivier Lapointe, “Le « Laboratoire de recherche sur la culture de grande consommation et la culture médiatique au Québec » : un ambitieux système de métadonnées pour mieux comprendre la culture populaire”
• Mélodie Simard-Houde, “Présentation de la plateforme numérique Médias 19”

Complete abstracts may be found here on the SHARP 2015 conference website.

This two-part post, however, will focus on a few projects most relevant to EMOB’s focus. Part I will focus on Joshua McEvilla’s “Facet-Searching the Shakespearian Drama” and Andrew Ross, Sierra Dye and Melissa Ann McAfee’s “From Wandering Peddlers to Purveyors of Bit-Streams: The Rebirth of Scottish Chapbooks in the Twenty-First Century.” Part II will cover Jordan Michael Howell’s “Digital Bibliography Quick Start” and Richard Cunningham’s “Architectures of the Book Knowledge Base.”

Joshua McEvilla‘s “Facet-Searching the Shakespearian Drama” showcased his An Online Reader of John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language, a resource aimed at encouraging the study of neglected seventeenth-century dramatic authors whose work and contributions have been overshadowed by the attention given to Shakespeare.

(Click to enlarge)

As the site’s introduction explains, John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655) is the first seventeenth-century book of quotations to draw its material exclusively from early modern dramas. As such, Cotgrave’s collection “provides a means of studying the original reception of the plays of Shakespeare with the plays of other dramatists” (Cotgrave home). In turn, Dr. McEvilla’s construction of a digital edition of Cotgrave’s work—complete with a concept-based faceted search tool (introduction and search tool), a full list of all the known plays from which the quotations are drawn, data tables, and much more—harnesses the power of the digital to transform this printed resource into a dynamic tool. Besides assisting researchers and encouraging study of neglected English seventeenth-century dramatic works, the Online Reader of John Cotgrave’s ETWL also seems useful for teaching English drama in an advanced undergraduate classroom or graduate course. For those with access to Early English Books Online (EEBO) and/or 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspaper Collection, McEvilla’s tool could serve as an important complement in assisting students understand the contexts for the drama contained in EEBO or in providing them with a guide for selecting texts in EEBO. That the bookseller Humphrey Moseley held the license to print Cotgrave’s work is also worthy of note. As David Kastan recounts in “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” Moseley played an important role in what he terms the “invention” of English literature (see Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Univ. of Mass Press, 2007, pp. 104-124).

Andrew Ross, Sierra Dye and Melissa Ann McAfee’s Scottish Chapbook Project at the University of Guelph draws from the university’s collection of Scottish chapbooks—the largest such collection in North America. A true exercise in collaboration, the digital project results from the cooperation of the university’s Archival and Special Collections and its Department of History”. Not only have librarians, faculty, and graduate students been involved, but undergraduate students (114 since 2013!) in Dr. Andrew Ross’s digital humanities course have helped to build various exhibits as the one depicted in this image.

Exhibit: A Groat’s Worth of Wit for a Penny

(Click to enlarge)

Besides the exhibits, the site also features teaching modules geared to high school instruction, thus extending the reach of this work beyond the university student population.

Among the site’s goals stated in the SHARP abstract is the aim of supporting “an ongoing analysis of the role of woodcut images for the popular readership in Scotland during the early modern period” as well as “the goals of the recently formed Chapbook Working Group of the UK Bibliographic Society.” At present one can browse 416 items, and more are being added regularly. The ultimate aim of this project is to integrate all the estimated extant 10,000 Scottish chapbooks in an interconnected site. Such a long-term goal of integration and interconnection is a promising one, especially in terms of centralizing sources and information on a given topic. As a related aside in terms of integration of projects, Benjamin Pauley’s Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker (see prior emob post, post, and post) is now being phased out, and its information being incorporated into the English Short Title Catalogue.

Please explore these tools and offer your comments and suggestions.

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Trial Access to ECCO and NCCO for SUNY Colleges + Essay Contests

The following announcement from Gale Cengage will interest faculty and students at SUNY schools. It’s a great opportunity to explore these resources and students’ responses to them.

We hope to hear about classroom experiences here on emob.
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This fall, Gale Cengage Learning is sponsoring an essay contest for SUNY students. Its purpose is to encourage primary source research using advanced databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO). We hope this experience with these key resources will help students prepare for a digital future.

We are offering free access to SUNY schools during fall 2013 through our new platform Artemis, which will contain both ECCO and NCCO. We hope you and your students will explore these tools to see how they enrich the learning environment. We also hope you will encourage your students to submit essays that incorporate these resources as part of the contest.

Two undergraduate essay awards ($250 each) and one graduate essay award ($500) will be offered for the best submissions on 18th-19th-century history and/or literature.

More information can be found at the link below: http://galesupport.com/suny/

Questions can be forwarded to Theresa DeBenedictis:

Theresa DeBenedictis
Gale, Cengage Learning
Theresa.debenedictis@cengage.com
1-800-877-4253 x 2229
Cell: 732-865-4249

“EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History” Roundtable I and II @ ASECS 2013

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) and the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) are co-sponsoring two roundtables at the upcoming American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference in Cleveland, 4-6 April 2013: “ECCO, EEBO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History I and II.

The idea for these sessions originated in earlier EMOB posts, especially Anna’s posting EEBO Interactions and Bibliography: Linking the Past to the Present” and the twenty-two comments her remarks prompted. The full Call for this roundtable can be viewed here. This space offers an opportunity to preview these two sessions and exchange ideas in advance of the sessions. The results of the Digital Humanities Caucus Technology Survey reports that members have found ASECS sessions devoted to these tools particularly useful, so we are hoping that many will not only attend these sessions but will also participate. For those who cannot attend, this forum will enable you to participate virtually, and a follow-up post summarizing the roundtables will enable you to obtain the highlights of the exchange.

The lineup for the two roundtables is as follows:

“EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History” (SHARP BSA Roundtable) I
Chair: Eleanor F. SHEVLIN (West Chester University)

• 1. Anna BATTIGELLI (SUNY Plattsburgh)
  
• 2. Kevin Joel BERLAND (Pennsylvania State University)
  
• 3. Laura RUNGE (University of South Florida)
  
• 4. Stephen KARIAN (University of Missouri)

“EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History” (SHARP BSA Roundtable) II
Chair: Anna BATTIGELLI (SUNY Plattsburgh)

• 1. Jacob HEIL (Texas A&M University)
  
• 2. Eleanor F. SHEVLIN (West Chester University)
  
• 3. Norbert SCHÜRER (California State University, Long Beach)
  
• 4. Rivka SWENSON (Virginia Commonwealth University)

Participants will be discussing a wide array of uses for these tools in pursing bibliographical issues and book-history matters. The discussions will address the ways these databases can be employed both for advanced research and for pedagogical purposes.

We invite the participants to provide the general focus of their remarks and attendees to suggest areas that they hope will be addressed.

British Newspaper Archive: Not Burney (yet), But Still Useful

Launched this past November, the British Newspaper Archives is a joint project of the British Library and brightsolid online publishing. Over the next decade, this partnership is slated to digitize over 40 million pages of the BL’s newspaper collection. The site anticipates a wide audience that includes not only scholars but amateur historians, genealogists and more.

While the project often digitizes the original paper copies, it has also digitized from the BL’s microfilm copies because the process is faster and enables more pages to be made available in a shorter amount of time. The quality of the pages, however, does suffer as the website admits; unfortunately, this emphasis on speed means that the accuracy of the search results is forever sacrificed. That said, one can view the OCR text and correct it:

When viewing an image, the OCR text can be viewed via the left nav All Articles option. You can select an individual article and then select Show Article text and the text. This addictive option can be accessed by simply clicking the list of sections displayed and applying your own corrections. By correcting the text, you will be adding to the quality of the data that can be searched by others. Please note that during the launch period updates to corrections will take longer to appear. (“Getting Started”)

The site’s descriptive information suggests that the collection dates primarily from the nineteenth century on, but there are 24 eighteenth-century provincial newspaper titles available in the current collection (full list appears below). As of yet, there are no eighteenth-century London papers. Like Burney, the British Newspaper Archives is a subscription database. Unlike Burney, though, provisions for individual subscriptions exist. The rates also seem quite reasonable and offer an array of plans (credits refer to the number of views; each view “costs” 5 credits; the view option enables you to download or printing):

• 12 Month Package (unlimited pages)
  Price: £79.95 GBP,       Valid For: 365 days       Credits: Unlimited*
• 30 Day Package (up to 600 pages)
  Price: £29.95 GBP       Valid For: 30 days      Credits: 3000
• 7 Day Package (up to 120 pages)
  Price: £9.95 GBP       Valid For: 7 days       Credits: 600
• 2 Day Package (up to 100 pages)
  Price: £6.95 GBP       Valid For: 2 days      Credits: 500

Potential users are also able to register using an email address and receive 15 free credits—-a very limited trial of sorts.

Searches can be conducted either as simple or advanced. The advanced search includes searching by “All of these words,” “Any of these words,” “Without these words,” and “Phrase.” You also have the option of applying filters such as dates, place of publication, publication title, or article type (advertisement, article, family notice, illustrated, miscellaneous). There is also the option of browsing by titles. Unfortunately, you cannot use the wildcard characters to help counteract the poor OCR, long “f,” or other typographical peculiarities that the Burney search interface provides. Nor does the BNA offer features similar to Burney’s search aids such as the “w” or “n” joined by a number to find two terms within a certain proximity of one another.

Search results can be ordered by relevance or by date (either by ascending or descending order), and a glimpse of the context in which the search term results occur are given. For example,

Ipswich Journal
Sat 10 Jan 1784 Suffolk, England
5 U F F O L K. 1 0 be Ll’. TT, ant! enlered upon immediatrly, THAT olil*aeculbmed Public Honic,
8343 Words
“SfMON PATERNOSTER of Wickhairi-market, to be agent for the faitl company for the town of Wiek- ham.market, and parts adjacent. The company infure lioufeS, bufrdings, … ?

As this example demonstrates, the context provides the OCR text with all its warts. Still, it helps the user decide if the article is worth viewing and assists in conserving the credits in one’s account.

CAVEAT: During my two-day exploration of the BNA, I encountered several cases in which I clicked to view an article only to discover the article was not on that page. Five credits were still deducted from my account and continued to be deducted as I browsed other pages in the issue. Once or twice I was not able to find the result at all; other times it appeared on a different page within that issue.

Here is a list of eighteenth-century titles currently available in BNA:


• Aberdeen Journal (105)
  
• Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (1989)
  
• Birmingham Gazette (8)
  
• Bristol Mercury (1)
  
• Caledonian Mercury (7309)
  
• Chelmsford Chronicle (329)
  
• Derby Mercury (2595)
  
• Hampshire Chronicle (1115)
  
• Hampshire Telegraph (11)
  
• Hereford Journal (982)
  
• Ipswich Journal (1203)
  
• Ipswich Journal, The (1296)
  
• Kentish Gazette (374)
  
• Leeds Intelligencer (2352)
  
• Manchester Mercury (223)
  
• Newcastle Courant (2561)
  
• Norfolk Chronicle (1109)
  
• Northampton Mercury (1625)
  
• Oxford Journal (2434)
  
• Reading Mercury (570)
  
• Salisbury and Winchester Journal (17)
  
• Scots Magazine, The (611)
  
• Sherborne Mercury (256)
  
• Sussex Advertiser (60)

Collaborative Reading: “The Joys, Possibilities, and Perils of the British Library’s Digital Burney Newspapers Collection”

Ashley Marshall and Rob Hume, “The Joys, Possibilities, and Perils of the British Library’s Digital Burney Newspapers Collection.” PBSA, 104:1 (2010): 5-52.

At forty-seven pages Ashley Marshall and Rob Hume’s article offers a substantive assessment of this relatively recent electronic resource for early modern studies. Early on the authors argue that “[d]igital Burney is amazing, but exploiting it fully is going to demand some serious rethinking and reorientation in both our research and our teaching (6-7). Their claim that this tool “will change the way we conduct our business” (7) possesses much merit; fulfilling digital Burney’s promise, however, will depend on far broader scholarly access than currently exists. Equally important, scholars need to acquire a firm understanding of its possible uses, search capabilities, and limitations. While Marshall and Hume’s piece cannot assist in matters of accessibility (though it could serve as support for the tool’s purchase), their essay does advance our knowledge of how this tool might be employed and how its features and limitations can best be navigated.

The article is usefully divided into five sections. The first considers the difficulties surrounding the use of newspapers for literary research. The next two parts detail various scholarly and pedagogical uses of newspapers afforded by digital Burney. The fourth section, making up nineteen of the article’s total pages and accompanied by five reproduced screen shots, identifies the external and internal shortcomings of the resource. The final part offers conclusions.

I. Conceptual Barriers to the Utilization of Newspapers

Noting that newspapers make a rare appearance in scholarship and teaching, this section examines the basis for such neglect.

A key reason stems from the simple fact that newspapers were virtually unavailable in the US until 1978 when the Early English Newspapers microfilm series made its debut. Even then, however, the series did little to bolster the already scant interest in historical newspapers among scholars. (7)

The reign of New Criticism and the subsequent heyday of Theory strongly discouraged the use of material drawn from newspaper content. If newspapers were consulted, the information sought was typically confined to obituaries, book and play reviews, and advertisements for books and cultural performances. (8)

That early newspapers either lack organized sections, including headlines, or feature very basic divisions often prove initially daunting to users. Especially in papers published before the 1760s, the lack of source information, the unacknowledged lifting and repetition of content across titles, sparseness of details, and partisan leanings also have made these newspapers seem strange and have done little to encourage their use (8-9).

Often scholars do not possess the knowledge needed to extract and draw conclusions about the values contained in many of these papers. Scant information about the circulation and readership of newspapers hinders a scholar’s ability to “analyze their implied readership, ideology, or socio-political agendas” (10). A broad gap exists between the literature we study and teach and the information found in these newspapers (11).

II. Research Uses

The authors supply three extended examples of possible ways that digital Burney can assist researchers.

Book Prices: Newspaper advertisements afford us a rich opportunity to compile prices for books not otherwise available (11-12). To illustrate, the authors supply prices derived from digital Burney for satire and then offer various insights this list affords. For one, the list reveals that prices for this genre ranged widely from low to high; the affordability and greater number of lower priced titles intimate that “[t]hese works were intended to reach and influence readers” (16). Additional examples of the price information newspapers can offer include

Collected works were considerably more expensive to buy than if one purchased the individual titles when initially published.

Newspapers “can turn up major fluctuations in price over time” for a given title(16).

Information in newspapers can enable us to reconstruct marketing strategies; for example, some advertisements reveal attempts to reach multiple markets by offering several formats at different prices (16-17).

As the authors assert, knowledge about book prices matters because “[i]f we are going to understand the works we study and the world in which they were produced and read, then the clearer we can be on price and what it implies about audience, the better” (17).

Reception and Reputation: Noting that dissemination contributes to our understanding of the reception and reputation of writers and their works, Marshall and Hume also caution that information drawn from digital Burney searches for prices, reprintings, marketing strategies, commentary or allusions to authors, and the like has its limitations. For one, newspapers until the late eighteenth century offer little in the way of cultural commentary; second, searching for authors’ name can be problematic for numerous reasons ranging from false hits (e.g., “Pope” yields a huge number of results, but many do not refer to the author) to problems with OCR failing to return anywhere near the actual number (18). Still, such searches can provide interesting information and, in turn, questions about the rise and diminishing of an author’s visibility in the papers, the geographic parameters of that visibility, and the contemporary existence of associations or groupings of authors (19-20).

Study of Individuals: The Case of John Rich: In this example the authors illustrate ways in which Burney can augment and shift our understanding of understudied individuals through an examination of theatre owner and manager, John Rich. In addition to discussing how Burney yielded fresh information about Rich, Marshall and Hume also discuss briefly the specific, various searches performed to yield hits for John Rich; they close this case study with a cautionary example of how newspapers, while often providing new facts and leads, can also on occasion provide false or erroneous information.

III. Teaching Uses

The authors divide their discussion of how digital Burney might be used in the classroom into two sections, one dealing with eighteenth-century economics and the other with the century’s Weltanschauung. Marshall and Hume preface their two pedagogical uses with a warning that students will need much prior preparation before attempting to use the resource. This preparation includes not only assistance with the intricacies and peculiarities of searching digital Burney but also with working with historical primary sources, especially sources as newspapers (24).

Economic Issues and the Value of Money: While the research section focused on book prices and dissemination, here the focus is broadened to using Burney to show “students … how things looked to eighteenth-century people” in terms of money–“a much neglected subject” (24). While we can simply tell students today’s monetary equivalents for sums of money mentioned in eighteenth-century literary works, the authors make the salient point that “hearing is not the same as comprehending” (26). What the authors recommend is having students search the prices of everyday items found in newspaper advertisements and calculate their modern monetary equivalents. As they note, their findings can radically shift our understanding about the economic references found in the literature being study and, in turn, carry implications that extend beyond the works.

Seeing the World through Eighteenth-Century Eyes: Near the end of this section, Marshall and Hume underscore that what they have been proposing means fundamentally “altering the way we teach” rather than merely supplementing our current methods (30). The crux of this shift entails replacing secondary with primary sources as the means by which students learn to “see[ ] the world through eighteenth-century eyes.” Among the suggested assignments is a rhetorical or ideological critique of a newspaper title during a set time or a comparative variation in which several titles are examined (27). Using ECCO as well as Burney, another possible assignment would have students explore an event or topical reference; commentary on Dr. Sacheverell’s trial, the 1745 Jacobite invasion, the 1730 trial of Colonel Francis Charteris for rape, the American war (as opposed to “Revolution”), or reviews of theatre performances represent just a few of the examples they offer (27-29). Yet another use involves investigating the reception of works based on newspaper commentary (29). Noting that the nature of the course—a survey will differ considerably from an honors seminar—will affect the assignment(s) used, the authors stress that the benefits of such exercises is not enhancing the interpretation of specific works but rather in “helping bring the works we study to life, in making real to twenty-first-century undergraduates the commitments and passions of eighteenth-century writers and readers” (29).

IV. External and Internal Problems

Before addressing particular kinds of problems, Marshall and Hume review the basic and advance search capabilities of digital Burney. As the authors rightly note, these two search types will already be familiar to ECCO users. Proximity searches–searches in which one uses a “W” to find occurrences of a term that follows another within a certain number of words (e.g., “Hogg w5 Giltspur” will uncover Hogg within five words of “Giltspur”) or an “N” to find occurrences of a term preceded or followed by another (e.g., “Hogg N20 Giltspur” will return cases of Hogg appearing either before or after “Giltspur” within twenty words of each other)–can be done using either the basic or advanced search. Both kinds of searches can be limited by date and publication titles; both handle wildcard searches (! represents either a blank or any single character; * represents multiple characters, and ? represents any single character); and both accommodate “fuzzy” searches (31-34). This discussion offers even more detailed advice, including remarks about potential outcomes from various search methods.

The first set of problems falls under the rubric “External Issues.” While issues such as incomplete runs have emerged in previous emob discussions and the EC/ASECS and ASECS round-tables on these research tools, the approach taken here differs in some respects from points raised in these forums. In addition to incomplete runs (the authors are rightfully thankful for their inclusion and also offer suggestions for locating copies not in the collection), Marshall and Hume discuss the difficulties encountered when searching for material referenced in published works due to the high error rates of citations for eighteenth-century newspapers (35-36). In doing so they also suggest ways to navigate these false citations.

Spread-Date Papers and Other Problems with the Documentation and Search Results:
A serious problem with the disastrous potential for being reproduced exponentially involves the dates digital Burney currently provides for individual issues of titles not published daily. For newspapers published weekly or twice or three times a week,

[i]f the search engine is used to go directly to a news item or advertisement, the only date the user will see is the wrong one. The correct one has to be found by taking a multi-click detour to bring up the first page of the issue and then resize it to read the printed date on the original paper–ifthe user realizes that this may be a spread-date [a title whose issues each cover a spread of days between publications] newspaper and knows to check. [Footnote 50 indicates that Gale is in the process of rectifying this problem; “Scott Dawson of Gale informs us that they have identified some 70,000 instances of the problem” as of July 2009 (my emphasis)]. (37)

Duplication is yet another problem and comes in several forms. The Burney collection contains duplicate copies of a given issue as well as duplicate runs of a given title, which at times will result in the appearance of more hits than actually occur (37-38). Another kind of “duplication” results from the habit of newspapers publishing copy identical to that found in other papers (38).

Acknowledging the problems stemming from OCR technology and the erratic search results these problems generate, Marshall and Hume briefly mention some of the issues already raised in previous emob postings. In terms of false negatives, they usefully remind us of the role played by the Burney search engine’s design. For example, if one’s search term appears across two pages, then that occurrence will be omitted from the results (41). Citing Jim May’s recent article, “Accessing the Inclusiveness of Searches in the Online Burney Newspapers Collection” (The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer N.S. 23:2 [May 2009]: 28-34), the authors ruefully report that their experiences with search results correspond to May’s claim “that anything from 20 to 50 percent (or more) of what can be found by manually eyeballing the full texts of newspapers will not show up in the list of results” (41).

Marshall and Hume offer three, serious cases of false negatives, most stemming from the poor condition of the original. Yet, they close this discussion with an example of “a dire problem in Burney’s presentation of Steele’s Tatler (1709-1711)” that arise from problems with the source material made available to Gale (42). In this case, “the first nine months’ worth of one of the foremost early eighteenth-century English periodicals has functionally been erased” because the source used mixed original Tatler issues with the front matter and other material from later book reprints (43-44). Rather than appear in digital Burney under the title “Tatler,” these pre-1710 issues instead appear under the title Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff. While the authors note that this problem could be lessened via “simple relabeling and cross-referencing” (44), the problem also underscores the importance of hands-on scholarly involvement in the preparation and execution of such digitization projects.

Some Interface Issues: Under this heading the authors detail “nine of our pet peeves” with the current interface (44).

1. While one can search or view results according to particular categories of publication such as “Classified Ads” or “Commercial News,” these sections are fairly meaningless, and an advertisement can easily appear under news or vice versa (44).

2. The inability to perform case sensitive searches (45).

3. The inability to control the elimination of “stop” words such as “the,” “a,” or “be” when one is seeking hits for a specific phrase or string of words (45).

4. The numerous clicks one must endure to confirm the paper, date, day; the best solution to this problem would be for Gale to offer the title and spread date on each and every display page (45).

5. Related to (4), “that title and date would appear with whatever one printed from page to page.” As the authors note, the need to record manually this information on printed copy of a given page encourages the occurrence of errors, many of which will be multiplied as erroneous citations in future publications (45).

6. The Browse Publication Title inefficiently results in “a set of links to what are reported as “[X number of] issues” chopped into [X–often in the thousands] chunks of News Advertisements, Business News, etc.” and consequently requires the user to guess where “the desired date might fall.” While using the “Publication Search” is a better approach, this search is not without its problems (46).

7. The inability to search efficiently for “Other papers for the same date.” Currently, without such a dedicated search feature for this option, one must conduct an “Advanced Search” using “Publication Date”; if multiple dates are sought, one must repeat the process for each date desired (47).

8. The confusion between the “Previous/Next Article” (“article” here is a misnomer) and “Previous/Next Page”; the first navigates results found, while the second, which appears directly above the newspaper’s text, will take the user to the next page in the issue being viewed (47).

9. Although one has three options of searching for particular issues of a given title, the three processes differ in their operations, primarily in whether they accept or not the inclusion of an opening article (“the”) in a newspaper’s title (47, 49).

Following the “pet peeves” list, the authors offer useful information and advice about the intricacies in printing one’s results. Such information is particular valuable, for as the authors also note, digital Burney’s “printing facility is neither self-evident nor at present particularly well explained” (50). Especially vexing is the failure of several print options to include title and date details.

V. Observations and Conclusions

Admitting that hindsight makes for easy criticism, Marshall and Hume nonetheless correctly claim that many of the problems identified in Burney might have been avoided if scholars with appropriate expertise had been closely consulted in the preparatory stages of this significant tool (50). Similarly, if the interface and search features had been tested by actual, potential users, many of the snags in searching might have been eliminated in advance of the tool’s official release. They also draw attention to the commercial nature of the enterprise. Although they do not mention affordable access here or elsewhere, they do stress the high expense and the subsequent expectation among purchasers that “when significant problems emerge … they need to be seriously addressed” (51). The efforts underway to correct the dating errors in spread-date newspapers is no doubt an example of a serious problem that is receiving attention.

Despite existing problems Marshall and Hume celebrate the wondrous possibilities that digital Burney does afford. While they clearly view research and scholarship as the realms in which digital Burney’s transformative effects will first be felt, they also reiterate the radical alterations it will eventually bring to teaching and classroom practices (52).

ASECS Summary of “Some Noisy Feedback” Roundtable, Albuquerque 3/18/10

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

Chair: Anna Battigelli (SUNY Plattsburgh)   Panelists: Sayre Greenfield (University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg), Stephen Karian (Marquette University), James E. May (Penn State University—DuBois), Eleanor Shevlin (West Chester University), Michael Suarez (Rare Book School, University of Virginia).  Respondents: Jo-Anne Hogan, (ProQuest), Brian Geiger (ESTC, University of California, Riverside), and Scott Dawson (Gale/Cengage).

The following offers a summary of the roundtable that took place, Thursday,  March 18, 2010  at the ASECS 2010 conference in Albuquerque, N.M.  This session was the second part of a two-part series, the first part having been a roundtable discussion chaired by Eleanor Shevlin at the EC/ASECS meeting in Bethlehem, Pa in October 2009.  Copies of Eleanor’s summary of the EC/ASECS session (published in the Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer and also on this blog) were distributed at the outset of this session.  Many thanks to the members of the audience who so cheerfully presented themselves at an early hour on the conference’s first day.

Sayre Greenfield opened discussion with detailed working solutions to problems caused by ECCO’s OCR (optical character recognition) software.  He recommended that Gale provide an ECCO OCR troubleshooting page on their web site and noted that blogs like this one would be sure to start that process (see below).  Aided by Deidre Stuffer, he found ways to correct for errors stemming from the following letter combinations that OCR typically mistranslates: s, ss, and ct.  Using the word, fishmonger, he substituted for the s every other letter, then substituted numbers, and finally the wildcard question mark.  Advice from his search results, including how best to use the question mark as a wildcard, can be found on the ECCO OCR Troubleshooting Page on the “Pages” section of this blog.  He warned that using the question mark for any medial or initial s is problematic if one is using variables elsewhere, adding that ECCO does not allow wildcards for the first letter of a word.  Additionally, letters surrounding the s seem to affect how the OCR reads the s.  The double ss, for example, frequently morphs into fl, transforming passion into paflion. Word searching within a text also proved problematic.  Though he found 32 instances of passion or passions when he read John Tottie’s A View of Reason and Passion, his electronic search using passion* yielded only half of these.  Turning to ct, he found that OCR often reads ct as t, so that objection becomes objetion.  These results suggest that ECCO would help users by strengthening its web site, which currently recommends fuzzy searches to address OCR problems.  Fuzzy searches create too many false positive results.  Including a more robust help page on this issue is necessary.  (For now, see Sayre’s ECCO OCR Troubleshooting Page on this blog.)

Steve Karian began by acknowledging the indispensability of ESTC for bibliometrics, but he also identified four problems that need to be addressed if the ESTC is to become the powerful tool it can be for the twenty-first century.  The first is the ESTC’s unit of measurement: the ESTC record.  Users often equate an ESTC record with an imprint, title, edition, or an issue.  Because of variations in the correlation of record to item, one cannot simply assume that two parallel sets of search “hits” can be compared reliably.  As he puts it, “one is constantly comparing apples to oranges.”  Additionally, field records vary, limiting or complicating the kinds of searches that can be done.  These need to be standardized if searching is to become reliable.  The two ESTCs—one at UC-Riverside, the other at the British Library—use the same data but different interfaces.  Dates are complicated because they appear in two MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloguing) fields.  Steve recommended deleting the MARC record entirely and replacing it with a new database structure, one designed to expand and grow.  He called for a new stage of innovation, allowing the ESTC to transform itself from a bibliographical catalogue into a bibliographical database.  Only through such a transformation will the ESTC become the powerful tool it promises to be.

Jim May discussed the Burney Collection, which he argued should be called the Burney Collection of Newspapers, Periodicals, and Other Printed Matter.  Its material was first collected by Charles Burney, subsequently increased by the British Library, and eventually microfilmed before being turned over to Gale/Cengage.  It includes material dating back to the 1620s and beyond  1800 and material printed in Barbados, India, Ireland, and North America.  Citing James Tierney’s comments at the Bethlehem meeting, Jim noted that the collection includes 237 newspapers and 161 periodicals, 60 of which are partially available in Adam Matthews Eighteenth-Century Journals series or ProQuest’s British Periodicals.  Burney allows one to read an entire issue or study issues by year or month, and it offers searching, though this is problematic.  According to Jim’s results, searching sometimes yields only 10% of the relevant items.  Searching for “Tatler” between 1708 and 1712 yields 80 hits.  Though he has found hundreds of advertisements of Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England, only few of these can be found through an electronic search.  Similarly, only a third or fewer of The London Evening Posts published 1760-61 turn up when you search for “London Evening”.  Robert Hume and Ashley Marshall have an essay forthcoming in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America discussing Burney and noting, among other problems, how definite and indefinite articles interfere with searches.  Jim also cited Simon Tanner’s article in D-Lib Magazine (July/August 2009), which found the following accuracy rates for Burney: character 75%, word 65%, significant word 48.4%, capitalized word 47.4.% and number 59.3%.   The magnification feature enlarges pages by 100% and would be more useful if it magnified by 33%.  Spread dates are misrepresented, due to the lack of editorial apparatus explaining when newspapers were actually issued.  Burney’s lack of editorial apparatus, cross references, comments, and so forth is a deficit.  Having a scholarly editor–perhaps a graduate student or postdoc intership– would improve its utility.  Also needed is a review of the entire database.  A page dedicated to errors encountered by users would help, something EEBO is now working on with in its “EEBO Interactions, A Social Network.”

Eleanor Shevlin identified three pressing needs: 1) fostering greater awareness of the context of texts; 2) encouraging collaboration among users; and 3) cultivating greater access to these electronic resources.  She pointed to the need for bibliographical training in order to use these resources accurately and called for an examination of the cognitive effects these tools have on research processes.  Specifically, she wondered how EEBO’s TCP transcriptions or ECCO’s searching mechanism affects research methodology.  Noting that these tools provide opportunities to correct bibliographical inaccuracies, she urged the need for a more standardized process through which corrections could be forwarded to the ESTC or to commercial databases.  She also cited examples of productive collaboration among members of the bibliographic community, including her own experience correcting an error in Kansas’s Spencer Research library, a correction made possible by sending ECCO’s image of the British Library’s copy of a text to Kansas.  Finally, she noted that access continues to be a problem.  Scholars in the U.S. work at a notable disadvantage compared to scholars in the U.K. who typically have access to ECCO and ECCO II through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).  ASECS President Peter Reill’s recent calls for feedback regarding access suggests that the issue is at least on the radar of those who can help, either through negotiations for large-scale access or  individual subscriptions.

Michael Suarez warned against the illusion of comprehensiveness in database searches.  Users are frequently unaware of what is missing in these databases, and the databases’ selectivity impoverishes word searches as tools for analysis.  Turning to the task of text-mining, he expressed skepticism regarding the mentalities of mining.  Where sustained engagement with individual texts allows for work linking texts to their culture and to other texts, textual extraction can produce radically decontextualized results.  Because these database tools are easy to use, we are, he warned, insufficiently uneasy with what they actually accomplish.  Suarez insisted that textual analysis demands an effort to fuse horizons between text and reader, a fusion that involves a reader’s deep engagement with a text’s historical context and with a text’s relationship to other texts.  Such contextualization, as James Boyd White would agree, is essential to a functional and robust literary hermeneutics.  Additionally, text-mining tools encourage scholars to work in even greater isolation, away from libraries and other scholars.  Precisely because the digital future will change the way we think, Suarez called for a greater bibliographical literacy in order to make these promising tools work properly.

Panelists’ Responses:

Jo-Anne Hogan (ProQuest)  agreed with Michael’s concern regarding the impact of these digitization projects.  She added that EEBO routinely receives emails pointing out errors, asking for missing items, and making recommendations, and that it works to incorporate these suggestions.  But she also noted a growing digital divide: concerns voiced at conferences like ASECS differed from those at conferences on the digital humanities.  At the latter, attendants ask EEBO to produce more tools for text-mining.  It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the competing requests received.  Money matters in these issues, and will always be a factor.  She agreed that more could be done to align the bibliographic data in EEBO with that in the ESTC and pointed out that efforts are under way to make that happen.  She also introduced the prospect of a social networking site for EEBO intended to facilitate communication between scholars and users so corrections can be reported and more contextual information can be made available.  We hope to hear more from her about this on this blog in the near future.  Access, she concluded, continues to be a concern, agreeing with Eleanor that it is unfortunate not to have a model for broad access in the U.S.  Personal subscriptions seem unlikely because such subscriptions cannot cover costs, at least not at subscription rates individuals are willing to pay. She hoped there might be a point in the future when ProQuest can provide broader access, but she could not guarantee such a thing.  More promising is the prospect that about half of the books in EEBO will soon be available for purchase at reasonable rates via Print on Demand.

Scott Dawson (Gale) agreed with Sayre’s suggestion that a Help screen dedicated to OCR problems  is an idea to consider seriously.  He added that Gale would look into post-OCR checks that might correct results.  18thConnect will help by testing new OCR software on ECCO page images, and that might solve problems.  Turning to Steve’s comments about ESTC, Scott noted that ECCO depends on ESTC for metadata, and that Gale is working with ESTC to add a link within the ECCO Full Citation to report problems with a given record.  He agreed with Jim May that Burney presents additional obstacles to getting accurate OCR  results.  Gale has been working with the British Library to resolve the issue of spread dates and hopes to have an update in the next few months.  On the issue of access raised by Eleanor, Scott mentioned that ECCO is concerned about the issue, but that by providing access to more than 500 institutions globally, it has helped make early modern printed material more accessible than is possible through hard copy or microfilm.  Tiered pricing and consortia-designed contracts help non-ARL institutions find ways to subscribe to ECCO.  He greed with Michael Suarez that ECCO is incomplete, even with the 50,000 titles added through ECCO II.   Gale is not planning an ECCO III.  But the possibility of linking missing titles to ECCO is being considered.

Brian Geiger (ESTC) outlined two main areas of work at the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR), which manages the North American branch of the ESTC.  First, they continue to upgrade and add records to the ESTC.  They are processing OPAC extracts from libraries, and recently began on an extract from Oxford University that resulted in some 200,000 records that will be matched against the file.  These OPAC extracts provide shelf marks (or call numbers) for existing items, and have turned up tens of thousands of new copies and hundreds of entirely new items.  They are adding urls from online collections.  EEBO, ECCO and TCP are matched, though not yet displayed by the public version at the British Library.  Brian has requested urls from Google and will do the same from Internet Archive.  They are digitizing title pages from paper reports submitted over the last two decades and will attach those images to the appropriate records, allowing users to compare a title page to its MARC record.  They hope to have many of the title pages in the ESTC by 2011.  And they have enhanced some 180,000 MARC records from title pages in ECCO.  Second, the ESTC has started to assess how to transform the project from an online catalog to a flexible and interactive database-driven research tool.  Brian corroborated Steve Karian’s assessment that this new resource should be built on relational databases, and noted with appreciation the value of the kind of collaborative thinking Steve offered about the project’s future.  Brian emphasized that a number of partner projects and institutions should be involved in the redesign, to ensure that the new project meets a variety of user needs and to try to plan for the sharing of information across platforms.  He mentioned some of the features that he thought should be included, among them user editing of bibliographic data and metadata and tools to send information to users about updates or changes to records.  He ended by pointing out that development of the database will require resources and the next stage of the ESTC’s evolution will be contingent on funding.  The ESTC is currently engaged in grant development.  It will be in a better position to discuss specific solutions once funding is secured.

ASECS Session: “ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection: Some “Noisy Feedback” (roundtable)

Thursday, March 18,  9:45 – 11:15 a.m.

“ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection: Some ‘Noisy Feedback’(Roundtable)    Alvarado E

Chair:    Anna BATTIGELLI, State University of New York, Plattsburgh

1.    Sayre GREENFIELD, University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg

2.    Stephen KARIAN, Marquette University

3.    James E. MAY, Pennsylvania State University, DuBois

4.    Eleanor F. SHEVLIN, West Chester University

5.    Michael F. SUAREZ, S.J., Rare Book School, University of Virginia

RESPONDENTS: ScottDAWSON,Gale/Cengage; Brian GEIGER, ESTC: Jo-Anne HOGAN, Proquest

Collaboration, Costs, and Digital Resources

On February 19 and 20 Yale will host a graduate student symposium, The Past’s Digital Presence Conference: Database, Archive and Knowledge Work in the Humanities. A quick survey of the conference program and available abstracts indicate several topics that dovetail with issues or subjects that have engaged emob. Jessica Weare’s paper, “The Dark Tide: Digital Preservation, Interpretive Loss, and the Google Books Project”, for instance, examines the discarding of material evidence in the process of digitizing, Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide. Similarly, Scott Spillman and Julia Mansfield’s presentation, “Mapping Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Networks”, discusses their work on Benjamin Franklin’s letters and their relationship within the Republic of Letters. The conference’s purpose also addresses many of the questions we have been posing on this blog:

■ How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities?
■ If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media?
■ What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete?
■ What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use?
■ What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them?
■ Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked?

Peter Stallybrass is offering the keynote, and Jacqueline Goldsby will be the colloquium speaker, while Willard McCartney, Rolena Adorno, and others will appear on the closing roundtable. Such a lineup points to the range of perspectives represented. The conference is free to all affiliated with a university.

Among the places this conference has been announced is the JISC Digitisation News section of the UK Digitisation Programme website, and its announcement emphasizes the participation of students “from around the globe.”

Collaboration as it occurs across boundaries is the implicit topic of this posting, and I wish to use reports from the JISC website both as a springboard and as a contrast in the discussing the topic.

A 2008-2009 JISC report, Enriching Digital Resources 2008-2009, Enriching Digital Content program—a strand of the JISC Online Content Program—features a podcast with Ben Showers. Because of the national nature of JISC, the program described offers a unified, coherent approach to advancing digital resources for its higher institutions of education; it represents a collaborative agenda. In this podcast Showers explains the purpose of the program: Rather than fund the creation of new resources, the program invested £1.8 million to enhance and enrich existing digital content while also developing a system for universities and colleges to vet and recognize this work. He then turns to explaining the following four key benefits of this program:
• “unlocking the hidden—making things that are hard to access easy” to obtain and preserve. To illustrate, he uses CORRAL (UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks) project as an example of opening up primary data to make it not only much more available but also to preserve it.
• enhancing experiences of students. Here Showers exemplifies the Enlightening Science project at Sussex that offers students opportunities to watch video re-enactments of Newton’s experiments and read original texts by Newton and others.
• speeding up research—once a document has been digitized, there is no need to repeat the process. The document will now be available for all other researchers to use.
• widening participation—engaging broader audiences including not only faculty and students within Britain’s educational community but also participants globally.

Turning to the new goals for the 2009-2011 program cycle, Showers notes an emphasis on the “clustering” of content, that is bringing various projects together and establishing, when appropriate, links among them. Another focus is further building skills and strategies within institutions to deliver digital content effectively. Finally, he mentions the strengthening of transatlantic partnerships, and here the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is given as an example. Of course, there is a long history of scholarly collaboration between the NEH and British institutions—perhaps most notably the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC).

Indeed, through collaborative digital grants offered by JISC and NEH several transatlantic projects are underway or near completion, including the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a collaborative effort involving Oxford University and the Folger Library, and the St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative, undertaken by Southampton University and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Charlottesville, VA, to advance scholarship on slavery. There are several others as well.

Both the goals and benefits detailed by Showers are ones that would attract the support of diverse parties, and they do parallel many arguments being made on this side of the Atlantic for such work, including ones advanced by the NEH. Moreover, this and other JISC reports suggest that JISC has also helped broker mutually beneficial relationships between British universities and commercial vendors such as Cengage-Gale and ProQuest. Yet another JISC report, The Value of Money, offers arguments that we need to be making and also points the obstacles and divides affecting various types of collaboration in the United States.

After offering the following figures on the return of money invested in the JISC,

• For each £1 spent by JISC on the provision of e-resources, the return to the community in value of time saved in information gathering is at least £18.

• For every £1 of the JISC services budget, the education and research community receives £9 of demonstrable value.

• For every £1 JISC spent on securing national agreements for e-resources, the saving to the community was more than £26.

the report summary offers the following remarks:

These are the figures revealed by a recently-published Value for Money report on JISC services. Although many countries have centrally provided research and education networks, and some have provided supplementary services, no other country has a comparable single body providing an integrated range of network services, content services, advice, support and development programmes.

The cost-effectiveness of JISC is again highlighted in two sidebars:

These figures suggest that for every £1 JISC spent on securing national agreements for e-resources, the saving to the community was more than £26
and
The added value, equivalent to more than £156m per year, suggests the community is gaining 1.4 million person/days, by using e-resources rather than paper-based information.

The end of the summary further reinforces why investments in JISC benefit the UK as a whole:

The value of JISC activities extends beyond the benefits identified here. Education and research are high-value commodities that play an important role in the UK economy and underpin the UK’s global economic position.

The JISC’s “Value of Money” report contains the types of arguments and data that we in the US need to be making. While our system of higher education does not operate under the centralized system that characterizes that of the UK, the push for more transparent reporting on and assessment of what our various universities and colleges are delivering perhaps provides an opportunity for new forms of collaboration. Through national scholarly societies, the NEH, Mellon Foundation, ALA, and more, we need to supply some “noisy feedback” from a dollars-and-cents/sense perspective about what investing in digital resources means not just for our institutions of higher learning but also for our society.

Unequal Access and Commercial Databases

In his role as the president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Peter Reill has recently written the ASECS membership about issues extremely relevant to this blog’s purpose: the increasing importance of commercial databases to scholarship and the reality of unequal access to these tools. As we have been discussing on emob, databases such EEBO, ECCO, Burney, and the like enrich our ability to do historical and other forms of research in ways that simply weren’t possible before. At the same time, a lack of access to these resources seriously hampers the types and scope of projects that one can undertake. While these resources have definitely made more texts accessible to more scholars, those who lack access are now at a far greater disadvantage than scholars previously were. Interest in interdisciplinary work, book history and print culture studies, material culture, transatlantic studies and global perspectives continues to grow within and across fields, and these resources foster such work. These tools also offer new directions for more traditional approaches. Given the inherently historical nature of eighteenth-century and early modern studies, the access that these databases afford to facsimiles of primary documents is crucial.

Peter will be attending a meeting hosted by the Mellon Foundation to address access in February. We thought it would be helpful to create a series of posts that will supply some feedback to the questions Mellon posed to attendees (and that Peter, in turn, posed to ASECS members).

To initiate this series of postings, this post is devoted to the following three questions:

How important is access to commercial databases to scholars in your field?

How are scholars’ careers affected when they are at institutions that do not subscribe to those resources?

Which databases are likely to be of greatest value to the broadest segment of your membership?

A Message from ASECS President, Peter Reill

[h/t: C18-L; x-posted on The Long Eighteenth]

[Hi everyone, I don’t mean to hijack discussion, but I thought this message from Peter Reill was extremely relevant to the conversations we’ve been having here and on the Long 18th about the digital divide and the problems of unequal access to scholarly resources.  If you feel strongly about this, please contact Peter at the email address listed below.  Best, DM]

Dear Colleagues:

I am writing to ask for you help and guidance concerning an issue that is becoming increasingly important as the digital revolution in scholarship gathers momentum. I have been asked to attend a meeting hosted by the Mellon Foundation that addresses the question of the increasingly unequal access of scholars to digital resource databases that are critical to pursuing research in their fields. I have become more aware of this problem after a meeting of the ISECS executive meeting where our Japanese colleagues asked for help to access ECCO. And the more I talk with people newly hired at universities or colleges unable to afford the fees charged by specialist databases the more important this issue has become for me. As I ponder the implications of this tendency, it is clear that it’s solution is even  more crucial for recent graduates who have yet to get a permanent position and independent scholars who cannot afford to subscribe to specialist databases.

It is a problem very few address. The Mellon meeting, which will be held in February asks us, members of societies “focused on clearly delineated areas and primarily concerned with advancing scholarship in their fields” to answer a number of queries that are both scholarly and organizational in character. I hope that those of you concerned with these issues would send me your thoughts about them. It is my plan to propose your ideas that I will outline in the next Newsletter, which will appear before the meeting, giving you another chance to express you views on the subject and any others relevant to the issue.

The questions the Mellon proposes are: “How important is access to commercial databases to scholars in your field, and how are scholars’
careers affected when they are at institutions that do not subscribe to those resources? Which databases are likely to be of greatest value to the broadest segment of your membership? How well situated is your society to serve as a conduit to these resources, and what would be required to make that possible?”

Are these questions sufficient? Are there any more issues I should be raising? What kinds of solutions do you propose?

I look forward to your responses and to using them to highlight an important issue for all of us.

Yours,

Peter

My email address is;

reill@humnet.ucla.edu