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.

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Scholarly Communication, Monetary Networks, and the Control of Knowledge

Since its inception EMOB has examined access to various commercial databases and related issues concerning the production and distribution of knowledge in our digital age. As an academic blog, EMOB employs a form of social media to engage in scholarly discussion and exchange. Recently as the co-authors of this blog, we both received emails asking us to verify our profiles for the ACI Scholarly Blog Index to ensure accuracy and completeness and, in turn, to expand the reach of our blog. We were told that “[a]s gratitude for completing your Author Profile, you’ll receive free access to premium features in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index for your own research needs.”

The invitation itself as well as the promise of “free access” to premium version and tools prompted some investigation. I had been following discussions of Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and other social communication networks for academics, and the ACI Scholarly Blog Index seemed to promote itself in similar ways—especially in terms of assisting scholars and promoting their work as well as the spread of knowledge.

A commercial entity but free to search,the ACI Scholarly Blog Index describes itself as follows:

ACI Scholarly Blog Index is an editorially created and curated index of scholarly social media. Authors are selected for inclusion based on their academic credentials as well as the scope and quality of their writing. Metadata, taxonomies, and proprietary Author Profile Cards are appended to each publication. An elegantly sophisticated search interface easily surfaces highly relevant articles. Post-search filtering allows researchers to further hone in on appropriate articles. ( ACI Scholarly Blog Index)

Using the line, “You know us by the company that we keep,” ACI identifies its “allies” as LexisNexis, ProQuest, and Thomson Reuters and asserts, ”This is our time. This is the Age of Research, Powered by Social Media” (ACI).

ACI’s choice of “regime” to herald its presence is telling–and perhaps quite apt given the word’s meanings and connotations. “Regime” is typically defined as either a kind of government associated with authoritarian rule or a “system or planned way of doing things, especially one imposed from above” (Oxford Dictionaries). While there is no question that scholars today are working in a very different era from even just a few decades ago, what is still up for question is how much control we have and will have over the production and distribution of knowledge. The new ways in which knowledge is being commodified does often seem as if we are operating in a new regime in which the exchange of ideas and ownership of scholarship have shifted from the control of academics to commercial entities.

That ACI’s abstracts of scholarly blogs are now “indexed in EBSCO Discovery Service, ProQuest Summon, and OCLC WorldCat” indicate the inroads that ACI Scholarly Blog index has made since its establishment within the past year or two (ACI). At this point, libraries seem to be the most acquainted with this new tool, and ACI has been making the circuit of various library and information science conferences for over a year now—and possibly longer. It also crops on university library websites as part of “new database trials,” and LYRASIS, a nonprofit organization whose members are library and information science professionals, is offering a 20% discount to subscribe to ACI Scholarly Blog Index, though a cursory search has not turned up the subscription fees for the premium version and its tools (probably a sliding fee based on several factors).

While the ACI Scholarly Blog Index is not the same as scholarly communication networks such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley (which was purchased by Elsevier for £65 million in 2013), some of the concerns about these academic networking sites increasingly being expressed are arguably relevant. As most know by now, Academia.edu, although founded by Richard Price, who earned a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, and bearing an the domain name “.edu”, is nevertheless ultimately an entity funded by venture capitalists. Similarly, ResearchGate, which bears the domain “.net”, is also funded by venture capitalist monies as well as funding from Bill Gates of Microsoft fame.

A few weeks ago, David Matthews, a Times Higher Education (THE) reporter who covers, among other topics, the relationship among businesses and universities wrote a thought-provoking article on the topic, “Do Academic Social Networks Share Academics’ Interests?” (THE April 7, 2016). As his title indicates, the piece questions whether such scholarly networks are truly serving academics and draws attention to potential problems and detrimental effects their commercial foundation poses.

Matthews’s piece is certainly not the first to raise such questions. Many EMOB readers may have seen Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s blog post “Academia, Not Edu” that appeared last October (Planned Obsolence.net October 26, 2015. While Matthews covers three academic social network sites, Fitzpatrick focuses on Academia.edu. That ResearchGate is far more popular among those in the sciences and social sciences is no doubt one reason for her doing so. As the Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, Fitzpatrick urges scholars of literature, English Studies, and foreign languages to put their energies into building MLA Commons, established about four whose partial purpose resembles Academic.edu’s ostensible misison with multiple other benefits including arguably the key boon of being controlled by scholars themselves.

Similarly, Janneke Adema, a member of the Centre for Disruptive Media, posted the full text of her piece “Don’t Give Your Labour To Academia.edu, Use It To Strengthen The Academic Commons” on her blog on April 7, 2016, after a portion appeared in conjunction with Matthews’s article on the THE website. Adema served as chair of the one-day “Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?” Conference, organized by the Centre for Disruptive Media held 8 December 2015 at Coventry University and who featured the following participants: Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France) Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US) Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK) David Parry (Saint Joseph University, US). Not surprisingly, Fitzpatrick was among them.

Finally, this issue has been attracting attention beyond the confines of academic communities. In a December 17, 2015 digital post on the The Atlantic, Laura McKenna wrote an essay on “The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing” . While its title offers little indication, the piece focuses heavily on Academic.edu. It offers both the concerns noted here as well as the ways the site has enabled scholars from countries without the resources to purchase the necessary books and databases access to the world’s search. McKenna also discusses Price’s plans to “improve the accuracy of the peer-review process” and other innovations he hopes to bring to academic publishing.

While the above discussion overviews the growing interest in questioning digital tools and sites created for scholars and the academic market, it does not address fully what’s at stake. Control over ideas and publications and who can access this material represent crucial issues being questioned, but these issues are not the full story. Will these sites be erroneously seen as replacing existing, more traditional tools before the function of these tools have admittedly become obsolete? My co-author’s department was approached by her institution’s librarian for English this past week inquiring whether the MLA Bibliography should be cancelled. Clearly, someone thought such a tool was no longer needed. While MLA Commons may eventually incorporate or host this work, that has yet to happen. (I am not oblivious to the fact that question about retaining the MLA Bibliography arose because of financial pressures!). Equally concerning is control and access to the data that the use of these sites and tools are amassing. With the increased emphasis on the impact one’s research has in broader quarters, data on hits, access, and more could become increasingly important in evaluating scholars, their productivity, influence and more. Many academics themselves are already using the analytic features of Academic.edu and the like for such purposes (disclosure–I have on occasion), and the information can admittedly be valuable. While we already lack at least some transparency about the collection of such data, more questions and concerns would certainly arise if this information was under commercial control.

In short, do we want to harness the digital era and its many opportunities to benefit knowledge production in as many ways possible, or will we be content to work with the strictures accorded by a new regime of scholarly production, communication, and distribution?

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.

Digital Projects at SHARP 2015 — Part 2 ArchBook

In a previous post we presented an overview of the SHARP 2015 Digital Showcase, with a focus on two projects and a promise to follow up with a discussion of two additional ones. This post partially fulfills that promise with a look at Richard Cunningham’s presentation of ArchBook: “Architectures of the Book Knowledge Base” at SHARP 2015. (A post on Jordan Michael Howell’s “Digital Bibliography Quick Start” will be available shortly).

Attractively designed, ArchBook is a resource focused on “specific design features in the history of the book.”

It seeks, however, to be more than a digital version of a work such as Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book. Thus, rather than aim for full coverage of book architecture or design terminology from A to Z, the site offers in-depth articles devoted to selected elements in the history of the book. Each essay or entry charts a given feature’s initial appearance in the history of the book through its historical transformations and, in some cases, eventual vanishing. Likening their approach to Raymond William’s Keywords, the editors note that the articles are crafted to spur responses, further thought, and additional investigation. The idea for the resource emerged from work by the Textual Studies team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environment (INKE) project in 2009; grants from SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) secured by Inke and Alan Galey (University of Toronto) funded the project through 2013. Thus, while ArchBook had not been previously demonstrated at a SHARP conference, it is a resource that has been around for a while. (Indeed I have used it in my courses since 2013.)

To date, eleven “entries” or essays have been begun, and nine completed. Alan Galey’s Openings bears the earliest publishing date, 3 January 2012, and Laura Estell’s Commonplace Markers and Quotation Marks is the most recent entry, having been published in January 2014. Other topics covered include Decorated Letters, Flaps, Girdle Books (in progress), Grangerizing, Manicules, Pages (in progress), Table of Contents, Varorium Commentary, and Volvelles. As seen in this view from the Manicules page, each entry consists of five sections navigable by tabs: Definition, Historical Overview, Spotlight, Notes, and Works Cited. (Note: the sixth tab shown, Post-Publication, does not appear for all entries; moreover, this link is broken. However, the project blog does feature a post about manicules).

This entry’s historical scope extends from the classical era through iAnnotate’s stylized manicule designed for digital reading needs; such extended temporal coverage typifies the essays. Multimodal, the essays are also accompanied by images, and additional images appear in the 116-item image database.

The entries have evidently shaped the far more extensive glossary. Many terms from the essays are briefly defined in this section, including some of the entry topics. For instance, the glossary features an explanation for a “volvelle” (or wheel chart; it “consists of one or more layers of parchment or paper discs or other Over 125 items are defined, and they span a surprisingly broad range of topics. Alongside entries for watermarks, signatures, fascicle, gutter, gathering, one will also find definitions for PDF, commonplace book, presentation copy, plate, and multiple words related to typography and printing.

ArchBook shows much promise, but it also displays some of the issues we have discussed on EMOB over the years. The thought-provoking, well-researched entries benefit greatly from the long view each takes of its given topic, the accompanying images, and the references provided for further reading. The essays clearly took time to craft, and the time factor perhaps explains why only nine have been completed since the project’s inception in 2009. While there are detailed instructions for authors about entries, few have evidently answered the call to contribute. Similarly, the post-publication tab mentioned above seems to have failed to take off. ArchBook’s home page explains that “each ArchBook entry contains a post-publication discussion section with links to the project blog and related wikis, where readers are invited to continue the discussion,” yet no such exchange has been forthcoming. We have discussed the difficulties of generating exchange in digital resources devoted to that purpose many times on EMOB. We have highlighted the challenges most clearly perhaps in our multiple posts on EEBO Interactions, whose ultimate demise we noted in a post dated March 2013. We have also discussed the problems of sustaining such archives and resources, be it a matter of funding or the economics of time. Perhaps the decision to showcase ArchBook at SHARP 2015 was an effort to both publicize and to gain more users, responders, and entry authors for what is already a highly useful resource. Perhaps this post will also assist in attracting more notice to ArchBook.

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.”)

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.

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.

Virtual Paul’s Cross Project website is now available for exploration!

About a year ago, EMOB devoted a post to several NEH-funded digital projects. John N. Wall, Project Director and Professor of English Literature at NC State University, has let us know that the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project website is now available for exploration at http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu. We provide below the press release announcing its availability and invite EMOB readers to explore and comment.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project uses visual and acoustic modeling technology to recreate the experience of John Donne’s Paul’s Cross sermon for November 5th, 1622. The goal of this project is to integrate what we know, or can surmise, about the look and sound of this space, destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, and about the course of activities as they unfolded on the occasion of a Paul’s Cross sermon, so that we may experience a major public event of early modern London as it unfolded in real time and in the context of its original surroundings.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project has been supported by a Digital Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project has sought the highest degree of accuracy in this recreation. To do so, it combines visual imagery from the 16th and 17th centuries with measurements of these buildings made during archaeological surveys of their foundations, still in the ground in today’s London. The visual presentation also integrates into the appearance of the visual model the look of a November day in London, with overcast skies and an atmosphere thick with smoke. The acoustic simulation recreates the acoustic properties of Paul’s Churchyard, incorporating information about the dispersive, absorptive or reflective qualities of the buildings and the spaces between them.

This website allows us to explore the northeast corner of Paul’s Churchyard, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, on November 5th, 1622, and to hear John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day, all two hours of it, in the space of its original delivery and in the context of church bells and the random ambient noises of dogs, birds, horses, and crowds of up to 5,000 people.
There is a Concise Guide to the whole site here.

In keeping with the desire for authenticity, the text of Donne’s sermon was taken from a manuscript prepared within days of the sermon’s original delivery that contains corrections in Donne’s own handwriting. It was recorded by a professional actor using an original pronunciation script and interpreting contemporary accounts of Donne’s preaching style.

For John Donne’s Paul’s Cross sermon for November 5th, 1622 (in 15-minute segments), as heard from 2 different positions in the Churchyard, go here.

On the website, the user can learn how the visual and acoustic models were created and explore the political and social background of Donne’s sermon. In addition to the complete recordings of Donne’s Gunpowder Day sermon, one can also explore the question of audibility of the unamplified human voice in Paul’s Churchyard by sampling excerpts from the sermon as heard from eight different locations across the Churchyard and in the presence of four different sizes of crowd.

For excerpts of the sermon from eight different locations and in the presence of different sizes of crowd go here.

The website also houses an archive of materials that contributed to the recreation, including visual records of the buildings, high resolution files of the manuscript and first printed versions of Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day 1622, and contemporary accounts of Donne’s preaching style. In addition, the website includes an acoustic analysis of the Churchyard, discussion of the challenges of interpreting historic depictions of the Cathedral and its environs, and a review of the liturgical context of outdoor preaching in the early modern age.

To see the visual model in detail on a fly around video go here. This is especially dramatic if viewed in HD video and at Full Screen display.
This Project is the work of an international team of scholars, engineers, actors, and linguists. In addition to the Project Director, they include David Hill, Associate Professor of Architecture at NC State University; Joshua Stephens, Jordan Grey, Chelsea Sacks, and Craig Johnson, graduate students in architecture at NC State University; John Schofield, Archaeologist at St Paul’s Cathedral and author of St Paul’s Cathedral Before Wren (2011); David Crystal, linguist; Ben Crystal, actor; Ben Markham and Matthew Azevedo, acoustic engineers with Acentech, Inc; and members of the faculty in linguistics and their graduate students at NC State University, especially professors Walt Wolfram, Erik Thomas, Robin Dodsworth, and Jeff Mielke.

Wall’s team is now planning a second stage of this Project, with the goal of completing the visual model of Paul’s Churchyard, including a complete model of St Paul’s Cathedral as it looked in the early 1620’s, during John Donne’s tenure as Dean of the cathedral. This visual model will be the basis for an acoustic model of the cathedral’s interior, especially the Choir, which will be the site for restaging a full day of worship services, including Bible readings, prayers, liturgies from the Book of Common Prayer, sermons, and music composed by the professional musicians on the cathedral’s staff for performance by the cathedral’s organist and its choir of men and boys. They will be competing for our attention, as they did in the 1620’s, with the noise of crowds who gathered in the cathedral’s nave, known as Paul’s Walk, to see and be seen and to exchange the latest gossip of the day.

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