BigDIVA– A New Digital Tool by the Scholars of 18thConnect and MESA

Developed under the leadership and inspiration of Laura Mandell (Texas A&M and the scholar who brought us 18thConnect) and with the assistance of Tim Stinson at North Carolina State, BigDIVA is the acronym for Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application and will be unveiled October 16th. The tool provides a visual interface for “navigating scholarly, peer-reviewed humanities content” and enables users to traverse results quickly through its visualization of the returns. The tool filters out “noise” such as advertisements by booksellers or Twitter mentions, and it color codes the results according to material readily available to users and material for which users need permission to access.

BigDIVA is the newest project to emerge from the extended collaborative network of digital resource hubs that started with NINES grew to 18thConnect and then expanded to Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), REKn (Renaissance English Knowledgebase) and ModNets (Modernists) and that we have previously discussed in an EMOB post. As many will well know, Laura Mandel founded 18thConnect and then went on to help spur the formation of other hubs devoted to periods beyond her own period of work, the eighteenth century.  Tim Stinson is a medievalist and one of the founders of MESA.  Thus, much of the work undertaken by BigDIVA to date has focused on these two periods. Yet, like the extended network of historical digital hubs, this tool will serve the needs of Renaissance, twentieth-century, nineteenth-century scholars, too.

Unfortunately, The tool is open-source, but it is also being sold for use by proprietary databases, as Tim Stinson clarifies below (and thus not just available as a subscription-based tool as initial indicated).  You can  read more about BigDIVA here.

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Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) Receives Mellon Grant

ANNOUNCEMENT

English Professor Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), along with two co-PIs Professor Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna and Professor Richard Furuta, are very pleased to announce that Texas A&M has received a 2-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP, http://emop.tamu.edu ). The two other project leaders, Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, are book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library.

Over the next two years, eMOP will work to improve scholarly access to an extensive early modern text corpus. The overarching goal of eMOP is to develop new methods and tools to improve the digitization, transcription, and preservation of early modern texts.

The peculiarities of early printing technology make it difficult for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to discern discrete characters and, thus, to render readable digital output. By creating a database of early modern fonts, training the software that mechanically types page images (OCR) to read those typefaces, and creating crowd-sourced correction tools, eMOP promises to improve the quality of digital surrogates for early modern texts. Receiving this grant makes possible improving the machine-translation of digital page images with cutting-edge crowd-sourcing and OCR technologies, both guided by book history. Our goal is to further the digital preservation processes currently taking place in institutions, libraries, and museums globally.

The IDHMC, along with our participating institutions and individuals, will aggregate and re-tool many of the recent innovations in OCR in order to provide a stable community and expanded canon for future scholarly pursuits. Thanks to the efforts of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and its digital hubs, NINES, 18thConnect, ModNets, REKn and MESA, eMOP has received permissions to work with over 300,000 documents from Early English Books Online (EBBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), totaling 45 million page images of documents published before 1800.

The IDHMC is committed to the improvement and growth of digital projects and resources, and the Mellon Foundation’s grant to Texas A&M for the support of eMOP will enable us to fulfill our promise to the scholarly community to educate, preserve, and develop the future of humanities scholarship.

For further information, including webcasts describing the problem and the grant application as submitted, please see the eMOP website: http://emop.tamu.edu

For more information on our project partners, please see the following links.
ECCO at Gale-Cengage Learning
EBBO at ProQuest
Performant Software
SEASR
Professor Raghavan Manmatha at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The IMPACT project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of the Netherlands
PRImA at the University of Salford Manchester
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University
The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University
Cushing Memorial Library and Archives
The OCR Summit Meeting Participants

Aggregating Resources and Building Digital Humanities Networks

The ever-growing interest in digital resources for humanities research and teaching has coincided with an increased desire for central sites that enable scholars to learn about appropriate digital tools, applications, and software. Bamboo DiRT (Digital Research Tools), inspired by Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and part of Project Bamboo, is one site that fulfills this desire. Among the strengths of this directory of digital tools is the multiple ways to find resources. Clicking on the “View all” link, for instance, will take users to the site’s complete, annotated list of tools, from Adobe-based resources to Zotpress. The categories and tags page, accessible by clicking “Browse,” enables users to click on terms such as “data analysis” or “bibliographic management” and be taken to a descriptive list of relevant resources. On the I-want-to-do-X page, users can search for tools that will allow them to tackle particular tasks. These tasks range from analyzing data, to making screencasts or maps and transcribing handwritten or spoken texts. And users can also perform standard or advanced searches via keywords or phrases. More than just a directory, Bamboo DiRT allows registered users to comment on resources as well as share and recommend their own.

Perhaps because Bamboo DiRT is relatively new (publically debuting in 2012), comments and tips from users of various tools have, thus far, been sparse. Such contributions would complement the very brief yet still quite serviceable descriptions. Offering another variation of a digital clearinghouse, Josh Honn, a Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation and admiring user of Bamboo DiRT, has built his own resource hub, a Delicious “stack”. Currently consisting of 131 links to digital research software, applications, and tools, Honn’s Digital Scholarly Research Tools offers more commentary on various resources than Bamboo DiRT presently does, and it also often provides videos on specific tools. Although the stack benefits from its dynamic format, it lacks Bamboo DiRT’s multiple paths for finding tools.

Another development is the networked site. One such network is the UK’s Connected Histories. A collaborative project undertaken by the University of Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the University of Sheffield, this site currently contains fifteen separate resources including London Lives and John Strype’s Survey of London Online. A recipient of JISC funding, Connected Historiesenables cross-searching across the various databases. Some of its resources (for example, the 17th and 18th Century Burney collection), however, require subscriptions, so although US and other non-UK users can access much of Connected Histories, searching some databases are limited to subscription holders. This video offers an introduction to this network.

A similar development is the extended network that takes NINES, the nineteenth-century resource hub, as its inspiration. 18thConnect, discussed most recently in the previous post, was the first period resource to expand NINES coverage beyond the nineteenth century. Now, inspired by NINES and often funded by Mellon, other digital resource hubs devoted to particular historical periods are being created: Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), REKn (Renaissance English Knowledgebase) and ModNets (Modernists). These sites are still in the planning and development stages, so there does not seem to be that much information available at the moment. Yet, one can read about REKn in this piece “Prototyping the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and Professional Reading Environment (PReE), Past, Present, and Future Concerns: A Digital Humanities Project Narrative” and in this University of Victoria blog announcement REKn Joins World-leading NINES Initiative, ARC. Similarly, information about MESA, directed by directed by Dot Porter from Indiana University and Timothy Stinson at North Carolina State University, is available in a North Carolina State University’s blog announcement,“Modernizing the Medieval”, and in this announcement of a MESA – ARC (Advanced Research Consortium) meeting this past fall.

What do EMOB readers think about these developments? Would readers like interoperability among the various segments of the extended NINES network similar to that found in Connected Histories? Should professional scholarly organizations do more to publicize these clearinghouses for new resources, tools, and software and to promote these networked sites of databases and archives? Especially given the increasing eye towards transatlantic studies and more comparative global approaches, should our national professional societies do more for the scholars it represents by playing a leading role in encouraging the networking of international projects and resources?

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

Text Creation Partnership makes 18th century texts freely available to the public

This announcement is making the rounds of listservs and the like, and it should be of interest to emob readers:

(Ann Arbor, MI—April 25, 2011) — The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,229 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,229 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page images for keying and is permitting the release of the keyed texts in support of the Library’s commitment to the creation of open access cultural heritage archives. Gale has been a generous partner, according to Maria Bonn, Associate University Librarian for Publishing. “Gale’s support for the TCP’s ECCO project will enhance the research experience for 18th century scholars and students around the world.”

Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Miami University of Ohio, says, “The 2,229 ECCO texts that have been typed by the Text Creation Partnership, from Pope’s Essay on Man to a ‘Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,’ are gems.”

Mandell, a key collaborator on 18thConnect, an online resource initiative in 18th century studies, says that the TCP is “a groundbreaking partnership that is creating the highest quality 18th century scholarship in digital form.”

This announcement marks another milestone in the work of the TCP, a partnership between the University of Michigan and Oxford University, which since 1999 has collaborated with scholars, commercial publishers, and university libraries to produce scholar-ready (that is, TEI-compliant, SGML/XML enhanced) text editions of works from digital image collections, including ECCO, Early English Books Online (EEBO) from ProQuest, and Evans Early American Imprint from Readex.

The TCP has also just published 4,180 texts from the second phase of its EEBO project, having already converted 25,355 books in its first phase, leaving 39,000 yet to be keyed and encoded. According to Ari Friedlander, TCP Outreach Coordinator, the EEBO-TCP project is much larger than ECCO-TCP because pre-1700 works are more difficult to capture with optical character recognition (OCR) than ECCO’s 18th-century texts, and therefore depend entirely on the TCP’s manual conversion for the creation of fully searchable editions.

Friedlander explains that, for a limited period, the EEBO-TCP digital editions are available only to subscribers—ten years from their initial release—as per TCP’s agreement with the publisher. Eventually all TCP-created titles will be freely available to scholars, researchers, and readers everywhere under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (PDM).

Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, says that large projects such as those undertaken by the TCP are only possible when the full range of library, scholarly, and publishing resources are brought together. “The TCP illustrates the dynamic role played by today’s academic research library in encouraging library collaboration, forging public/private partnerships, and ensuring open access to our shared cultural and scholarly record.”

More than 125 libraries participate in the TCP, as does the Joint Information Systems (JISC), which represents many British libraries and educational institutions.

To learn more about the Text Creation Partnership, visit http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp. To learn more about ECCO, visit http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/