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.

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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.
AB

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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

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Is Launched

About a year ago, Anna reported on plans to launch the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) by April 2013 in a post that can be found here. While launch dates are often delayed, it is an auspicious sign that the DPLA will go live Thursday, April 18th, at 12 noon (ET). The festivities slated to take place in Boston in honor of the DPLA’s going live, however, have understandably been canceled due to the tragic bombings earlier this week (see the message from Dan Cohen, the DPLA’s Executive Director).

Since he first championed the idea for the DPLA several years ago, Robert Darnton has kept us abreast of progress and plans “to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge” through articles he has written for The New York Review of Books (NYRB 25 April 2013). Thus, it should come as no surprise that he has marked the launch of the DPLA with another informative piece. Framing the DPLA as a convergence of the American strands of utopianism and pragmatism, Darnton sees the project as one deeply rooted in the eighteenth century and as holding the potential to “realize the dream of Jefferson and Franklin.”

Darnton’s article also offers a pithy summary of events that led to the development of DPLA, basics about how the software works, plans for sustaining the DPLA’s growth, notes about the well-respected foundations funding the first three years of the DPLA, and a description of the distributive management model DPLA has embraced in which operations are spread out across the country. As emob tweeted two weeks ago, Darnton sees legal obstacles as the key hindrance to the growth of the DPLA.

The DPLA has already attracted a host of impressive partners including Harvard, The Smithsonian Institution, ARTstor, University of Virginia libraries, the New York Public Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the National Archives. It is with great interest that we will be tracking its progress.

“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.

CFP: EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History

American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) 2013 conference, Cleveland, Ohio, April 4 -7.

EEBO, ECCO, and Burney as Tools for Bibliography and Book History (Roundtable)
(Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) and the Bibliography Society of America (BSA) Organizers: Eleanor F. Shevlin and Anna Battigelli

ProQuest‘s Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale‘s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and its Burney 17th- and 18th-Century Newspaper Collection are transforming the landscape of eighteenth-century scholarship and teaching. While these commercial databases are well known for affording unprecedented access to early modern works, their full potential has yet to be realized. Aimed at advancing these tools’ usefulness, this roundtable seeks four to five ten-minute presentations that demonstrate ways in which these textabases can further work in book history and bibliography. Possible topics include using EEBO, ECCO, and/or Burney textbases to uncover, amend, or enhance information about the creation, production, circulation, or consumption of texts in the long eighteenth century; employing these tools to illustrate the importance of bibliographical knowledge and practices; applying their search capabilities to trace details about authors, printers, booksellers, paratextual elements, distribution networks, illustrations, translators (and translations), readers, pricing, and more; exploring the ways these digital tools are affecting or even reconfiguring the methodologies and research practices of book historians and bibliographers. Presentations that focus on EEBO Interactions (EI), a scholarly networking forum available to both EEBO subscribers and nonsubscribers, are especially welcomed. So too are examples of classroom exercises, course assignments, or advanced undergraduate or graduate seminars designed around one or more of these databases.

Abstracts of 250-words should be emailed to Eleanor Shevlin (eshevlin “AT” wcupa.edu) and Anna Battigelli (a.battigelli “AT” att.net). Proposers need not be members of SHARP or BSA to submit, but panelists must be members of both ASECS and either BSA or SHARP in order to present. For questions about SHARP membership, please direct inquiries to Eleanor Shevlin at eshevlin “AT” wcupa.edu. For questions about BSA membership,please direct inquiries to Catherine Parisian at catherine.parisian “AT” uncp.edu.

Digital Life Spans and Library Access

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

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

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

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

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

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

CFP: JEMCS Special Issue on the Early Modern Digital

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

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

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

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

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

ASECS Conference Report: THATCamp

This year my trip to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) annual meeting was a little different.  I started by heading off to camp!  Alas, this camp didn’t involve bug spray, stories around the campfire or overindulging in marshmallows—but I did get to play with computers.  My camp was THATCamp, also known as The Humanities and Technology camp, or “unconference.”

Started in 2008 by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the THATCAmp movement has expanded into a number of regional, international and topic-specific meetings.  THATCamps are informal, non-hierarchical get-togethers that privilege hands-on learning and impromptu discussion (see the THATCamp site for a more detailed description).  This year’s ASECS THATCamp was organized by George Williams and Seth Denbo of the ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus, in conjunction with the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHCM) at Texas A & M.  Held the Wednesday before ASECS started in the conference hotel, the day-long workshop was free of charge.

As is customary for a THATCAmp, ours begin with a collaborative organizational session.  Many participants had posted ideas for discussion on the THATCamp/ASECS site ahead of time; other proposals for sessions were soon added to the mix, written up on a shared Google Document and projected on the wall. Participants then voted on the final topics and the schedule for the day was set.  There were enough participants and ideas to run two concurrent meetings.

It was noted early on that the sessions seem to have naturally divided themselves into tool-based and idea-based streams, though this is a dichotomy that I personally reject (along with the over-used designations “hard” and “soft”). Because these were held at tables in the same room, there was no shame in switching midstream.  Some participants kept collaboratively written notes on a Google Document, while others (including me) tweeted the sessions using the hashtags #thatcamp and #asecs12 (unfortunately, I don’t think these were specifically archived and may now be lost in the Twitterverse).

The first session I attended was “Remixing Scholarship,” a discussion of the new forms and possibilities of collaborative research we might embrace in the digital age, as well as the new problems that arise with these practices.  Romantic, singular forms of authorship are still the norm in the academy, and many T&P committees are wary of non-print publications.  We discussed not only how to change this institutional prejudice, but also acknowledged the real personal barriers that must be overcome, admitting that frankly, some work does not need to be shared until it is complete and that some research projects are best tackled by one individual.  The point is to have options, of course, and to have a wide variety of practices and products acknowledged as valuable.  Organizations such as ASECS can play an important role in setting standards and creating benchmarks by which to evaluate digital work in our field.  In the meantime, we can continue to share the T&P criteria adopted by departments who are open to work in new media.

The next session, “Brainstorming a Professional Organization’s Online Presence” focused on thinking about ways that the ASECS website might become more user-friendly, interactive and reflective of contemporary digital design principals.  We also briefly touched on the ways the Digital Humanities Caucus can best serve the organization and communicate with its members.  We wrapped up with several action points, including an ASECS member survey that the DH Caucus will be working on in the next months.

Pedagogy is always a valued and popular topic at THATCamps, and the ASECS one was no exception.  Our table’s discussion centered mostly on the often overlooked area of graduate students and DH.  Many treatments of this assume high interest and high skills, but not all students come to graduate programs with digital experience.  Yet because the digital humanities are becoming in many ways just the humanities, it seems ill advised for grad students to enter their fields (much less their respective job markets) ignorant of the new methodologies (much less burgeoning forms and structures of knowledge) available to, and perhaps eventually demanded of them.  I don’t think we solved this problem in our hour of talk, but it was useful to begin to exchange ideas.

The last session I attended was a workshop led by Tonya Howe on Omeka, a digital archiving tool.  Again, the short time period allowed us only to scratch the surface of this tool.  However, introductions such as these are useful in that they enable one to pursue a tool or technology more completely in his or her own time.  I may do so, or I may not; I haven’t yet decided if Omeka is something I’d use in my classroom or for my research.  However, next time I am talking to a grad student or colleague about their digital archiving needs, I’ll have something to suggest, and next time a fellow scholar tells me about her Omeka collection, I’ll know what she means.

THATCamp was followed by a demonstration of 18thConnect by Director Laura Mandell.

I was exhausted by a day of intense computing and even more intense discussion.  But that’s what makes THATCamp an unconference.  You never get talked at; every session is what each participant makes it.  And whether the topic was DH theory or hands-on hacking, my fellow participants made the  #ASECS12 #thatcamp almost better than campfires and marshmallows.

ASECS 2012 Panels on Digital Humanities and Book History/Print Culture Topics

The following ASECS 2012 panels deal with relevant EMOB topics such as digital humanities, print culture, bibliography, reading, libraries, and more. The selection process entailed reviewing panel titles devoted to one of these topics, so some individual papers on other panels may well deserve a place on this roster. Please feel free to add to our list! In addition, we should stress that there are many other excellent sessions and papers that do not fall under these general headings; the entire program promises a very rich, rewarding conference. See the program for full details.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012
THATCamp: “Research, Editing, and Publishing via 18thConnect.org” Pecan (all day workshop); to register, click here.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

1. “Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Print/Visual/Material Culture” – I Llano

17. “Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Print/Visual/Material Culture” – II Llano

20. “Best Practices in Digital Pedagogy” Regency East

30. “Slavery, the Book, and Enlightenment Rights Theory” Bowie A

41. “Why We Argue about the Way We Read” (Roundtable) Bowie C

52. “Materializing Verse” – I Live Oak

54. “Funding, Grants, Hiring, Programs: Sharing Advice on How to Get Things Done in Hard Times” (Roundtable) Pecan

67. “Materializing Verse” – II Frio

69. “Digital Approaches to Library History” Regency East (The Bibliographical Society of America)

70. “Reading Texts and Contexts in the Eighteenth Century” (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing —SHARP) Guadalupe

Friday, March 23, 2012

84. “Visualization and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture” Frio

85. “Women’s History of Achievement: What’s in the Archive?” Nueces

104. “Diggable Data, Scalable Reading and New Humanities Scholarship” (Digital Humanities Caucus) Regency East

108. “Authors and Readers in the Eighteenth Century” – I (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing—SHARP) Pecos

112. “Teaching the Eighteenth-Century: A Poster Session” – II Regency Ballroom Foyer (several posters feature digital approaches/tools)

121. “Digital Humanities and the Archives” (Roundtable) (Digital Humanities Caucus) Regency East

133. “Authors and Readers in the Eighteenth Century” – II (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing —SHARP) Pecos

135. “Poetry and the Archive” (Roundtable) Blanco

139. “A Digital Humanities Experiment, Year One: Aphra Behn Online” (Roundtable) Regency East

144. “Copyright: Contexts and Contests” (The Bibliographical Society of America) Frios

Saturday, March 24, 2012

145. “Allan Ramsay: Poet, Printer, Editor, Song Collector, Scots Revivalist” Guadalupe

149. “Publishing the Past: History and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture” – I Frio

170. Publishing the Past: History and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture” – II Frio

207. “The Scottish Invention of English Copyright” Pecan

Free Trial of Gale Cengage’s British Literary Manuscripts Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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