Review: “‘She Wrote It, But…’: Erasures, Recoveries, and the Futures of Women’s Book History,” November 2016 Symposium, Texas A&M

Posted on behalf of Kate Ozment. EMOB is grateful to Kate Ozment, doctoral candidate, Department of English, Texas A&M University, and Co-Editor, Women in Book History Bibliography, for the following review.

In November 2016, Texas A&M University hosted a symposium titled “‘She Wrote It, But…’: Erasures, Recoveries, and the Futures of Women’s Book History.” The two-day event included a showcase of women-centered digital projects hosted by the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media and Culture, and a panel with speakers Margaret J. M. Ezell, Helen Smith, Laura Mandell, and Michelle Levy.

The panel brought together these four scholars to imagine how the intersection of book history and women could shape the future of areas such as material culture, digital humanities, and authorship. The panel’s discussions focused on the issues that stem from gender and materiality: recovery of women, manuscript and print, the place and capabilities of digital projects contrasted against traditional scholarship, and how women fit into book history’s larger historiography. The speakers’ topics clustered geographically in England and spanned chronologically from Early Modern through Romantic. Despite the temporal breadth, there were several threads that wove together to create a picture of the prospects of women’s studies and book history: the reality of increased representation of women’s writing; the possibilities of the archive; and the opportunities that de-centering the author has created for women’s labor.

Exploring the implications of increasing women’s representation was a major theme for both Mandell and Ezell. Mandell (IDHMC at Texas A&M) asked “Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Were There Any?” The answer is a resounding yes, despite poor representation in older editions of the Norton Anthology, and Mandell’s presentation outlined the women’s editing and reception. Women’s reputations seem to not have saved them from problematic framing, as Mandell noted that the poet Felicia Hemans was actually quite famous while she was being “forgotten.” Discussing her ongoing work with the Poetess Archive, Mandell noted the importance of digital projects in closing the gender gap for access and representation when traditional methods, such as print anthologies, have lagged behind.

This was a similar point for Ezell (Texas A&M), who offered a perspective on how the field has developed as we have increased the volume of women’s writing. Her paper, titled “I Wrote It But … What Was I Thinking?” discussed the shifts in attitude about the inclusion of women from the publication of her The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family in 1987. She has seen wholly male reading lists in graduate school evolve into the multiplicity of sources offered by the Orlando Project and Perdita Manuscripts. She also emphasized the challenges that such work will face to avoid cyclical erasure. Ezell has pushed at the limits of the methods feminist scholars have used to recover women writers, and there is significant weight to her call to meld digital repositories and tools with institutionalized scholarship to preserve the longevity of this work.

The materiality of women’s writing and returning to the archive also permeated the panel, emphasized by Levy and Smith in particular. Echoing Ezell’s call to return to the archive without agenda, Levy (Simon Fraser) emphasized that women have remained under-represented in anthologies. Looking at the Romantic period in her paper titled “Why We Need a History of Women’s Books,” she argued that even as women have increased in number, in volume of pages they still lag significantly behind their male counterparts. Levy also returned to Robert Darnton’s classic communications circuit, noting that such abstract models have led to a genderless book history and the belief that bibliographic codes are separate from our gendered history. Building off of the arguments in her article, “Do Women Have a Book History?”, she noted that whereas men have occupied all areas at all times in Darnton’s circuit, women have not, and she calls for further scrutiny of this asymmetry. Often, practices common to women writers such as self-financing collapse areas of the circuit, opening up new questions for how we understand the lifecycle of texts and authorship.

Also picking up classic book history articles, Smith (York) urged us to expand our conceptions of book history scholarship and embrace the “capaciousness” of D. F. McKenzie’s sociology of the text and the ways that the de-centering of the author figure allows us to recover women’s labor. Her paper, titled “Rethinking the Miscellany,” emphasized the uniqueness and diversity of the genre and how it defies easy categorization. Women’s writing often appeared in miscellanies, a term that Smith argues is deceptively orderly for such diverse collections. As compilers and translators, women’s labor is hard to grasp through archival records, but she concludes that their persistence on the margins deserves to be conceptualized more fully.

The second half of the symposium was a Digital Project Showcase, which exhibited some of the databases and digital tools available for work in this area. In addition to demonstrations of Voyant and Gelphi, participants looked through three women-centered digital projects: the Women in Book History Bibliography, edited by Cait Coker and Kate Ozment; the Poetess Archive, edited by Mandell; and Women’s Print History Project, 1750-1836, edited by Levy. The Women in Book History Bibliography is a newer project, launching in May 2016, which collects and curates lists of secondary sources on women’s writing and labor. As of November, it has collected 600 sources organized by time period and subject. Mandell’s Poetess Archive collects work by “poetesses,” defined as category and not a biological marker of the author. The archive hosts more than 4,000 bibliographic records for the years 1750-1900. Lastly, the Women’s Print History Project is an ongoing effort to provide data on women’s participation in print through the Romantic period. All three of these projects use bibliography as a feminist intervention into book history, blending old and new methods to continue to increase access to women’s labor and print.

The symposium was organized by Laura Estill and Margaret J. M. Ezell and sponsored by the Department of English, IDHMC, Women’s and Gender Studies, Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Early Modern Studies and New Modern British Studies Working Groups, and the Sara and John Lindsey Chair in Liberal Arts.

Advertisement

NEH-Funded KairosCamp Institutes

EMOB Members who also receive ASECS emails have no doubt already seen this announcement for a new institute series at West Virginia University aimed at providing both authors and editors with the training that will enable them to produce a variety of digital forms of scholarships. That the project is a joint effort of the journal Kairos and the English department and library at West Virginia is especially promising. So too is its targeting of authors and editors. Deadline for proposals is February 15th…

KairosCamp! A Digital Publishing Institute for Authors and Editors
24 July – 4 August 2017

Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Publishing Institute (DPI) at West Virginia University is proud to host two sets of institutes for authors and editors in the digital humanities over the 2017-18 academic years. KairosCamp’s goal is to help authors and editors produce digital scholarship in all forms. These workshops aim to help authors and editors build, edit, and maintain digital humanities projects. By offering hands-on workshops, we hope to spread best practices in scholarly multimedia production through sustainable and collaborative publication outlets. Feel free to check out our grant narrative, explaining what-all we have planned!

KairosCamp has been a long-time dream of the editors of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the longest, continuously running scholarly multimedia journal in the world. Kairos celebrated its 20th anniversary on January 1, 2016, and the staff of KairosCamp come from the staff and editorial board members of the journal. These digital writing studies and rhetoric scholars have the most significant amount of expertise when it comes to teaching and mentoring scholars to build scholarly projects grounded in digital media. The Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and the English Department at West Virginia University are excited to offer, through the generous support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, this first series of KairosCamps.

http://www.kairos.camp

National Endowment for the Humanities

West Virginia University Libraries
West Virginia University English Department
WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

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.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) — A Brief Update

Since the launch of the DPLA in April 2013, the staff under the direction of its director, Dan Cohen, have been pursuing various projects to determine best ways to develop this resource/tool further and broaden its serviceability. In an April 2015 whitepaper, “Using Large Digital Collections in Education: Meeting the Needs of Teachers and Students” authors Franky Abbott and Dan Cohen set forth one set of plans for making the DPLA valuable in K through 16 settings. The plans resulted from research supported by the Whiting Foundation and yielded a program that enlists the help of educators through another initiative funded by Whiting. The following 15 June 2015 “Call for Educators” on DPLA’s blog describes the kind of partnering with educators that DPLA is seeking to undertake:

The Digital Public Library of America is looking for excellent educators for its new Education Advisory Committee. We recently announced a new grant from the Whiting Foundation that funds the creation of new primary source-based education resources for student use with teacher guidance.

We are currently recruiting a small group of enthusiastic humanities educators in grades 6-14* to collaborate with us on this project. Members of this group will:
•build and review primary source sets (curated collections of primary sources about people, places, events, or ideas) and related teacher guides
•give feedback on the tools students and teachers will use to generate their own sets on DPLA’s website
•help DPLA develop and revise its strategy for education resource development and promotion in 2015-2016

If selected, participants are committing to:
•attend a 2-day in-person meeting on July 29-July, 30 2015 (arriving the night of July 28) in Boston, Massachusetts
•attend three virtual meetings (September 2015, November 2015, and January 2016)
•attend a 2-day in-person meeting in March 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts (dates to be selected in consultation with participants)

Participants will receive a $1,500 stipend for participation as well as full reimbursement for travel costs.

DPLA has also been receiving significant funding from additional sources for other efforts–including funding its “hubs,” both its content ones (“large libraries, museums, archives, or other digital repositories that maintain a one-to-one relationship with the DPLA and assist in providing and maintaining metadata for content”) and its service ones (“state, regional, or other collaborations that host, aggregate, or otherwise bring together digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions”). In a big boost to its hub development, the DPLA has recently received $1.9 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation); it will use this support to advance their efforts in “connecting online collections from coast to coast by 2017” (“Digital Public Library of America makes push to serve all 50 states by 2017.”)

Universal Short Title Catalog (USTC)

The Universal Short Title Catalog (USTC) holds records for European books printed through the sixteenth century.  Records list locations of original copies.  If open-access digital copies are available, these are also noted.

The USTC web site describes itself as “a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.”

The project also offers 6-8 week internships at St. Andrews for

qualified scholars wishing to gain experience of work with a major bibliographical project. Successful applicants will receive instruction in rare books cataloguing and have the chance for hands-on experience with the University Library’s uncatalogued 17th century collections.  In addition to physical bibliography, the internship will involve extensive practice in the manipulation of digital resources. A certificate of completion or letter of reference will be made available to those successfully completing the internship. They also attend our annual book conference, held at the end of June (this coming year, 19-21 June 2014).

Please see St. Andrews’  internship page for details.  Plans are underway to expand coverage into the seventeenth century.

UC Riverside wins $405,000 Mellon Foundation Grant for ESTC

The UC Riverside Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) has won $405,000 to build software that will help edit and curate the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC).

In the past, the CBSR won $48,500 from the Mellon Foundation for curating and expanding the ESTC.  The goal of the new grant is to allow scholars to help curate the ESTC by adding information to entries.  According to a  write-up in UCR Today,

Approval from ESTC staff will be required for changes suggested to core catalog data, which must remain intact for use by librarians . . .The new software will allow additional information provided by researchers to be recorded in different data fields, with safeguards designed to prevent errors.

Congratulations to the staff at CBSR for this tremendous accomplishment.  For more information, see ucrtoday.ucr.edu.

Book History and Digital Humanities: SHARP at #MLA 14 #s738

The recent MLA 2014 conference featured numerous sessions dealing with digital humanities in its various incarnations. More than a few of those sessions dealt with the interrelationships between new and old technologies, including Session 738, a stimulating roundtable sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) and organized by Lise Jalliant (University of Newcastle). Unfortunately, Lise was not able to attend MLA as planned, so Eleanor Shevlin served as chair in her stead.

Designed to “shed light on the digital future of book history and the bibliographical roots of digital humanities” (MLA special session proposal), the “Book History and Digital Humanities” roundtable featured six projects that attest to the close interrelationships between the two fields. The presentations were delivered in the chronological order of the projects. Not only did these projects illustrate the ways in which the digital and book historical are tightly intertwined, but they also demonstrated various technological advances as they highlighted what a new generation of digital capabilities and thinking are affording scholarship.

Greg Hickman, head of the University of Iowa’s Special Collections and Archives, opened the session by discussing the Atlas of Early Printing, an interactive map that provides a visualization of printing’s spread during the incunabula period. The 2013 version Greg demonstrated offers a technological advance over the map’s flash-based design launched in 2008 and has been primed to operate effectively on mobile devices as well as desktops.

Atlas of Early Printing

Unlike the two-dimensional print maps from which it draws its inspiration, the Atlas contains information related to the spread of print such as the locations of paper mills, universities, trade routes. Users can select all or any of this additional information to create specific contextualizations about the ways the press and printing took hold throughout Europe in the decades leading up to the sixteenth century.

Interested in using technology for purposes beyond gathering, organizing, and explaining information, Michael Gavin, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina, discussed using computer simulation to create a more generative way of working with information. Specifically, Gavin, drawing from Joshua Epstein’s work in agent-based computational simulation to model early modern print culture and to “grow information” about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century book trade issues including censorship and the effects readers exercised on printers and booksellers. The use of such computer modeling focuses on simulating social behavior to generate and test information; if the model is right, then it should not crash.

The director of NINES and professor of English at University of Virginia, Andrew Stauffer, made a cogent plea for the imperiled status of nineteenth-century printed books. Individual copies of nineteenth-century books, often still in the stacks or in the process of being de-accessioned (if not already removed), possess rich, layered histories and the evidence of their multiple temporalities. In an effort to preserve the histories of these works “hidden in plain sight,” In addition to advocating for the primacy of the printed work as a site embodying distinct, irreplaceable data, Stauffer is developing a crowd-sourcing project that will ask academic institutions, other holding bodies and individuals to use Instagram and other forms of technology to capture digitally this heritage and make it accessible.

Matthew Laven, the Associate Program Coordinator of the Mellon-funded “Cross Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities for the 21st Century” at St. Lawrence University, addressed the question “What is a digital bibliography of a book?” through his work on a dynamic, visually-enriched publishing history of Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927) for the Willa Cather Archive. Acting as a case study for the digital representations of both various material artifacts (e.g., manuscripts, printed translations, unusual editions) and textual variances, the project also seeks to convey the bibliographical ties among the various artifacts and is informed by a Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)-based ontology.

Hannah McGregor, a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, spoke about constructing an innovative methodological approach to studying periodicals that she and Paul Hjartarson, professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, have been developing in collaboration with the Editing Modernism in Canada research group. A key working hypothesis of this project is that periodicals are ideally situated for digital remediation as relational databases because they themselves resemble databases (that the word “magazine” also meant a storehouse bespeaks this similarity). While middlebrow magazines serve as the project’s focal point, McGregor drew her examples from the Western Home Monthly and Pictorial Review. The issue of labeling—what to call different items, the problem of categories and categorization—has been a vexed point and one no doubt complicated by the multiplicities of genres and the nature of periodical materials (think of the Burney 17th and 18th Century Newspaper Collection). This issue of labeling underscored the ways in which coding is important intellectual labor.

The final participant, Elizabeth Wilson-Gordon, professor of English at King’s University College in Alberta, presented the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). A collaborative effort involving Canadian, U.K. and U.S., institutions, the project seeks to advance research in the history of modernist presses and publishing. Wilson-Gordon used Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press to illustrate the capabilities of MAPP. The Hogarth Press offered an especially rich example because of the insights its history affords about Woolf and her work but also because of its importance to interwar publishing and its longevity throughout the twentieth century. Like many of the other projects discussed, MAPP illustrated the importance of collaboration and communities of scholars working in tandem. The launch of the Hogarth Press open-access portion of MAPP is slated for 2017.

The Book History and Digital Humanities session was one of three excellent panels sponsored by SHARP. SHARP’s liaison to MLA, Greg Barnhisel has written a full account of the other two, equally invigorating sessions for the spring issue of SHARP News: the official SHARP panel, Session # 501 Books and the Law, and Session #398 Virginia Woolf and Book History, co-sponsored with the Virginia Woolf Society.

2013 ODH Project Directors Meeting

The NEH has just announced its 2013 Office of Digital Humanities Meeting will take place on Friday, October 4, 2013, at NEH Headquarters in Washington, DC.

As in the past, the meeting will feature 3-minute Lightning-Round presentations from ODH grantees. This year thirty-two grant recipients from 2013 will be presenting–almost all of those who received a grant this year. EMOB will be reporting on these presentations in a subsequent Fall post. See an earlier post for reporting on past NEH awards.

In addition to these lightening rounds, Dr. Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, will give one of two keynote addresses. His talk is titled “Adjacencies, Virtuous and Vicious, in the Digital Spaces of Libraries.”
Abstract: This talk will explore how techniques of discovery — scanning shelves, exploring digital texts and catalogues — may change the nature of research conducted in Libraries. The argument: with the advent of massively searchable digital corpora, the uses and advantages of “nearness” in Libraries will change.

Dr. Amanda French, Center for History and New Media at George Mason, will deliver the second keynote, “On Projects, and THATCamp”
Abstract: Since its start in 2008, THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, has seen more than 170 events held or planned worldwide and has provided digital training and professional development to more than 6000 people, most of them humanities scholars, students, or professionals. Whether we consider it one project or many, THATCamp has become an essential feature of the digital humanities landscape, and it is time for some perspective on it.

While there is no charge to attend, one must register. For more details and to register to attend, please visit the ODH webpage.

SHARP 2013 Digital Projects and Tools Showcase

In mid-July the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) met for its twenty-first annual conference, “Geographies of the Book,” in Philadelphia. Hosted by University of Pennsylvania, the conference included a three-hour, stand-alone digital showcase on Saturday, July 20th. Before I turn to the sixteen projects featured in the showcase, a few words about the history of digital sessions at SHARP are in order.

The tradition of showcasing digital projects at SHARP conferences was begun by Dr. Katherine Harris (San Jose University) for the 2008 conference held in Oxford, England. Currently serving as the E-Resources Review Editor for SHARP News, Dr. Harris continued to organize showcases for subsequent conferences. These highly popular sessions ran concurrently with other sessions. Although the 2011 Washington, DC organizers had attempted to find space to hold a stand-alone session that would not compete with other panels, space limitations prevented this desire from becoming a reality. A successful digital project session for the DC conference, however, was organized once again by Kathy Harris. Yet, the 2013 Digital Showcase at Penn marked the first time that the demonstrations of new digital projects and tools at SHARP had a dedicated time slot of its own as well as a setting well-suited to such an exhibition.

With a dedicated three-hour running time, the digital showcase ran from 12:30 to 3:30 pm; it competed for attention with parallel programming only during its final hour. The showcase’s location in Penn’s Houston Hall’s Hall of Flags easily accommodated 16 six-foot tables, each with its own monitor, and afforded the room for numerous attendees to navigate the various stations with ease.

Mitch Fraas (UPenn) demonstrates his project.
Photo credit: Alex Franklin (Univ. of Oxford)

Alan Galey (UToronto) demonstrates his project.
Photo credit: Alex Franklin (Univ. of Oxford)

The following is a list of the sixteen projects:

• The Book History BiblioGraph
  Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University, USA), Tom Mole (McGill University, Canada)
• END: The Early Novels Database
  [not yet public]
  Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College, USA)
• Reading in 1950s South Africa: Records of the Cape Libraries Extension Association
  Patricia G. Clark (Westminster College, USA)
• Visualizing Antebellum Reprinting Networks
  Ryan Cordell (Northeastern University, USA)
• Expanding the Republic of Letters: India and the Circulation of Ideas in the Late Eighteenth Century
  Mitch Fraas (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Image Matching on Early Modern Printed Illustrations
  Alexandra Franklin (University of Oxford, UK)
• The Borders of the Book: Visualizing Paratexts and Marginalia in Multiple Copies and Editions
  Alan Galey (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Atlases of the Rhode Island and Dutch Book Trades”
  Jordan Goffin (Providence Public Library, USA), Michael Putter (Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Book History and the Early Modern OCR Project
  Jacob Heil (Texas A&M University, USA)
• Mapping Sheila Watson’s Paris: Using a Geo-Location Smartphone App to Retrace Walks the Canadian Modernist Records in Her Journal
  Paul Hjartarson (University of Alberta, Canada), Harvey Quamen (University of Alberta, Canada)
• The Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707
  Alastair Mann (University of Stirling, Scotland)
• Mapping Creative Women in the History of Book Publishing: A Contrasting Geography
  Brigitte Marguerite Ouvry-Vial (Université du Maine, France)
• Mapping Printers’ Lives and Letters
  Sydney Shep (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Flora Feltham (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Sara Bryan
  (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)[not attending]
• Geographical Content, Geographical Context: Mapping the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle(s)
  Rebecca Pomeroy Shores (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
• ARC and Collex: Federated Resources for the Study of Book History
  Timothy Stinson (North Carolina State University, USA)
• The Eighteenth-Century English Grammars Database: A New Resource for the History of the Book and Linguistic Historiography”
  Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Manchester, UK)

Eight of the sixteen projects deal directly with the early modern period, and at least two–Mark Algee-Hewitt and Tom Mole’s Bibliograph and Tim Stinson’s ARC and Collex–extend beyond the historical confines of the early modern but possess specific relevance to the period. I have counted Alan Galey’s The Borders of the Book: Visualizing Paratexts and Marginalia in Multiple Copies and Editions among the early modern projects because his work relies on texts from this period. Yet, his work on digital visualizations of differences in paratextual features and different readers’ marginalia found in multiple copies of the same books has larger application, too. All of the projects, no matter what the period, embody approaches and strategies afforded by the digital that can help advance work in book history and related fields. The projects are also at various stages–and you will notice that some have links, and some don’t because they are either in very early stages or simply not ready for widespread release. Bibliograph, for instance, is currently a prototype, with a beta version in the works for testing; the project launch date is aimed for 2014 or 2015.

END: Early Novels Database is a collaborative project involving several Philadelphia academic institutions but still in the midst of digitization and construction. In contrast, the Eighteenth-Century English Grammars Database is, in one sense, “complete, but as Professor Yáñez-Bouza noted, it is also “an open-end project because one can always add more grammars and some of the fields could be completed with more information had we the resources to look into contemporary book reviews and sales catalogues (e.g. the fields Price and Target Audience).”

Several of the projects have made previous appearances in EMOB posts. A post last June mentioned ARC (Advanced Research Consortium), and it is very good to see the progress since then. The Mellon grant that the Early Modern OCR Project (see the entry for Jacob Heil) received was announced in a post last fall. More recently, EMOB devoted a post to the image-matching software developed at the Bodleian that Alex Franklin presented at SHARP. Finally, the Mapping the Republic of Letters project the EMOB discussed in a post several years ago, served as the inspiration for Mitch Fraas’s Expanding the Republic of Letters: India and the Circulation of Ideas in the Late Eighteenth Century.

Explore and comment!

Digital Humanities Data Curation Workshops

Readers may be interested in the following announcement:

Digital Humanities Data Curation, a series of three-day workshops, will provide a strong introductory grounding in data curation concepts and practices, focusing on the special issues and challenges of data curation in the humanities. Workshops are aimed at humanities researchers — whether traditional faculty or alternative (alt-ac) professionals — as well as librarians, archivists, cultural heritage specialists, other information professionals, and advanced graduate students.

Applications are now being accepted for the second Digital Humanities Data Curation Institute workshop, to be held at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland, October 16-18, 2013. Visit the Institute website (http://dhcuration.org/institute) to complete an application by August 7.

As the materials and analytical practices of humanities research become increasingly digital, the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of information science, librarianship, and archival science — which come together in the research, and practice of data curation — will become more vital to humanists.

Carrying out computational research with digital materials requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of humanities data. More fully integrating data curation into digital research involves fluency with topics such as disciplinary research cultures, publication, information sharing, and reward practices, descriptive standards, metadata formats, and the technical characteristics of digital data.

Organized by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at GSLIS, this workshop series is generously funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Megan Senseney

Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Phone: 217-244-5574

Email: mfsense2@illinois.edu

Visit the website at http://dhcuration.org/institute.

We would welcome hearing about these workshops from participants.