history of the book

Ben Pauley, Building New Tools for Digital Bibliography @ NUDHL, Fri, 1/11/13, 12-2pm, AKiH

Michael J. Kramer

 “Building New Tools for Digital Bibliography: Constructing a Defoe Attributions Database for the Defoe Society”

Dr. Ben Pauley, Associate Professor, Eastern Connecticut State University

Friday, January 11, from 12 to 2 pm in the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute seminar room, Kresge 2-360.

Lunch served!!

And don’t miss…

Unlocking the English Short Title Catalogue: New Tools for Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Bibliography and Book History

A Digital Humanities Presentation to Students and Faculty by Ben Pauley, Associate Professor, Eastern Connecticut State University, NU Library Forum Room,
Thursday, January 10, 2013, 3:30 – 5:00 – Refreshments will be served.

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is the most comprehensive guide in existence to the output to published books in the English-speaking world during the era of handpress printing. With nearly 500,000 bibliographic records and information on more than three million library holdings, it is both the best census that we have of early British and American print and the best available guide to locating extant copies of those items.

Begun in the late 1970s, the ESTC was conceived from the first as an electronic resource, one that would leverage new developments in library technology to facilitate collaboration among scholars and librarians worldwide and one—crucially—that could be continuously revised and refined. In recent years, however, it has become clear that the ESTC is in need of fundamental transformation if it is to keep pace with a scholarly landscape that is being transformed by digitization.

Professor Pauley’s talk will highlight the challenges and opportunities facing the ESTC in its fourth decade, and will present the recommendations of a Mellon-funded planning committee for redesigning the ESTC as a 21st-century research tool. As envisioned, the new ESTC will stand at the intersection of librarianship, bibliography, and the digital Humanities, facilitating new kinds of enquiry in fields such as literary and cultural history, bibliography, and the history of the book.

This event is sponsored by Northwestern University Library’s Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation, NUL Special Libraries, and WCAS Department of English

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Professor Ben Pauley (Ph.D. Northwestern, 2004) specializes in eighteenth-century literature, with an emphasis on the works of Daniel Defoe. In addition to publishing essays and presenting papers in eighteenth-century literary studies, he has been involved in several digital projects, particularly concerning bibliography. He is the editor and administrator of Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker (www.easternct.edu/~pauleyb/c18booktracker), an index of freely-available facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions. He was co-principal investigator, with Brian Geiger (Director, Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, University of California-Riverside), of “Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books,” a recipient of a Google Digital Humanities Research Award for 2010–11 and 2011-12. He is a member of the board of the Defoe Society, serves on the technical review board for 18thConnect, and is an advisor to the recently-launched 18th-Century Common, a public Humanities portal for research in eighteenth-century studies.

 

X-Post: Notes on McGann’s Radiant Textuality

Michael J. Kramer

X-posted from Issues in Digital History.

I am going to write a longer commentary on Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (Palgrave, 2001) in an upcoming post, but a few sections of his preface and introduction (“Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000) are striking for how relevant they remain over ten years after he wrote the book:

McGann organizes his book around two main arguments:

The first is that understanding the structure of digital space requires a disciplined aesthetic intelligence. Because our most developed models for that kind of intelligence are textual models, we would be foolish indeed not to study those models in the closest possible ways. Our minds think in textual codes. Because the most advanced forms of textual codings are what we call ‘poetical,’ the study and application of digital codings summons us to new investigations into our textual inheritance (xi).

McGann’s second argument is as follows:

Digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials, and on certain specialized problems in computational stylistics and linguistics. In this respect the work rarely engages those questions about interpretation and self-aware reflection that are the central concerns for most humanities scholars and educators. Digital technology has remained instrumental in serving the technical and precritical occupations of librarians and archivists and editors. But the general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works—until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures [italics in original] (xi-xii).

Here is McGann asking 11 years ago that we not view the computer in opposition to the book, but as a continuation of the history of the book. Perhaps more crucially, he argues that we should fit what would become known, a few short years later, as the digital humanities (not yet a popular term for the field in 2001) into the critical traditions of inquiry that are the precinct of modern humanities scholars:

We have to break away from questions like ‘will the computer replace the book?’ So much more interesting are the intellectual opportunities that open at a revelatory historical moment such as we are passing through. These opportunities come with special privileges for certain key disciplines—now, for engineering, for the sciences, for certain areas of philosophy (studies in logic), and the social sciences (cognitive modeling). But unapparent as it may at first seem, scholarship devoted to aesthetic materials has never been more needed than at this historical moment (xii).

To the end of developing “scholarship devoted to aesthetic materials,” McGann posits the following imagined debate between a pro-digital humanities scholar and an anti-digital humanities scholar:

Computational systems…are designed to negotiate disambiguated, fully commensurable signifying structures.

‘Indeed! And so why should machines of that kind hold any positive interest for humanities scholars, whose attention is always focused on human ambiguities and incommensurables?’

‘Indeed! But why not also ask: How shall these machines be made to operate in a world that functions through such ambiguities and incommensurable?’ (xiv).

Finally, McGann notices how the digital humanities potentially reunites what Nietzsche divided into the “Lower Criticism” of philology with the “Higher Criticism” of historicism and aesthetic inquiry. The digital does not reduce the critical insights of “Higher Criticism,” McGann believes; rather, it asks, perhaps even demands, that humanities scholars reimagine the higher levels of advanced critical inquiry in relation to the fundamentally transformed foundations of “Lower Criticism” when those foundations of text, source, evidence, archive are placed into the digital medium:

In our day the authority of this Nietzschean break has greatly diminished. Modern computational tools are extremely apt to execute one of the two permanent functions of scholarly criticism—the editorial and the archival function, the remembrance of things past. So great is their aptitude in this foundational area that we stand on the edge of a period that will see the complete editorial transformation of our inherited cultural archive. That event is neither a possibility nor a likelihood; it is a certainty. As it emerges around us, it exposes our need for critical tools of the same material and formal order that can execute our other permanent scholarly function: to imagine what we don’t know in a disciplined and deliberated fashion. How can digital tools be made into prothetic extensions of that demand for critical reflection? (18).