2cultures.net(.au)

The BT Archive is held, with limited public access, in central London and is by any standard a collection of national and international importance, recognised by UNESCO. This large and remarkable collection details the history of Britain’s leading role in the development of telecommunications and the impact of this technology on society.

With Jisc funding, the New Connections project, a partnership between the University of Coventry, BT Archives and The National Archives, has catalogued, digitised and developed a searchable online archive of almost half a million photographs, images, documents and correspondence assembled by BT and its predecessors over 165 years.

The project team has organised two free events for people to find out more about the project and the forthcoming online collection:

- London, 15 May, 1-4pm

- Coventry, 21 May, 1-4.30pm

You’ll find out about the story behind the project, how you can view, access and utilise these uniquely important historical records, and how academics have been working with the material to create case studies on linguistics, problem-based learning scenarios and design to enhance the learning experience of users.

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Today Jisc and Ithaka S+R are launching “Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content”, a new report aimed at helping digital projects to thrive.

This report, which provides a close look at three institutions (UCL, Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales) in the United Kingdom confirms:

• How fragmented the digital landscape is at universities and within other organizations
• How there are examples of good practice within and outside higher education that all can learn from but that greater co-ordination is required to deliver this at a UK level
• How little the topic of post-build sustainability comes up at the higher levels of administration
• How risk is present within the current system, concerning the sustainability of digital content.

“It’s a wakeup call for us all,” said Andrew Green, chief executive and librarian at the National Library of Wales. “It’s essential reading for anyone in the business of access to digital content.”

The report, complete with effective recommendations includes a Sustainability Health Check Tool for Digital Content Projects, which helps people to ascertain what tools or resources projects could use to be even more successful.

With funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) in the United Kingdom, the Canadian Heritage Information Network, and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States, Ithaka S+R is conducting a multi-year research program to shed light on common challenges associated with sustaining digital projects beyond implementation and provide guidance and tools to help administrators, project leaders, librarians, and funders ensure that projects continue to grow. This report is the first in the series.

For more on sustainability and related issues, go to the SCA blog.

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Last September, the Bodleian Library organised a conference entitle Revolutionising Early Modern Studies? The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2012 to mark a decade of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP)’s work producing searchable, full-text transcriptions of works in Early English Books Online (EEBO).

JISC was pleased to support this conference by sponsoring two students bursaries. In return we asked the students to blog about their impressions and thoughts on the issues raised at the conference.

This first post is by Jacob J S Halford, University of Warwick.

There are few scholars who would deny that the terrain of academic scholarship is being changed radically by digitisation. Like any new thing embedded in digitisation is both optimism and fear concerning its use and potential abuse. There will always be those who laud novelty and its apparent improvement upon the old methods and resources, for such people the digital documents created by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership are a powerful new tool that will revolutionise the world. Others are, however, less praising in their evaluation of it; with digital tools, such as the EEBO-TCP, seen as threats to the tradition and craft of historical research; a threat to the book as a material object, an easy way for people to gain a shallow knowledge of texts, and a means to allow bad copies of books to become entrenched by users as the platonic copy of the book.

The Oxford conference on the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership was so stimulating because despite being full of converts and prophets of this technological development, it still considered the different perspectives and problems that the more ‘traditional’ type of scholars who see digitisation as a danger may harbour. Speakers from the conference highlighted both the giddying heights and possibilities that the resources created by the EEBO-TCP and ProQuest resources give whilst remaining conscious of the limitations and problems that they may also present its users. In doing so it provided a wonderful opportunity for scholars in the early modern period to reflect on the implications and ramifications of digital resources and the methods that we use to interrogate them without getting too caught up in abstract theoretical knots. The following are a few insights that I gained from the conference.

Research Potential

Many of the papers highlighted the potential research that can be done using the EEBO-TCP texts. The team of researchers from CREME at Lancaster University for instance highlighted the way in which EEBO-TCP texts can be used for corpus linguistic analysis of historical texts on a scale never before seen and some of the powerful corpus linguistic tools that are being used to interrogate the texts. Others such as Simon Davies, Peter Auger, and myself, highlighted how using key-word searches enabled researchers to consider a greater breadth of sources then would have been possible pre-EEBO-TCP. Others were using the EEBO-TCP texts as a springboard for larger projects such as creating critical editions of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, or creating a database of poetic form.

EEBO and Teaching

One of the most enlightening sessions was the EEBO and teaching strand with Heather Froehlich, Mark Hutchings and Leah Knight. They elucidated upon the ways in which EEBO and the searchable, key-stroked texts allowed educators to use texts with students in new and exciting ways. Heather demonstrated the wealth of tools that her students were using to trace patterns within texts. Mark Hutchings spoke about how, at the University of Reading, the existence of key-stroked texts gave students the chance to consider editors’ impact on how texts are read, with each student using a key-stroked text as the starting point for their own edition. Leah Knight finished the session with a passionate paper that explored the pitfalls and benefits of EEBO, derived from using it over the past ten years of teaching using EEBO with her students.

The limitations of EEBO

Not everyone at the conference highlighted the benefits of the EEBO key-stroked texts. Some drew attention to some of the limitations it has as a resource. There will always be a fair share of pedants at any gathering who spend, in my opinion, far too much time searching through everything with fine-grained combs for errors. The EEBO conference was a great place for such pedants to come together and share in the minute errors they have spotted in the transcription of the texts. The efforts of these people should be praised as it takes a degree of fastidiousness that I will never possess to notice the obscure mistakes made by the transcribers and such work is a helpful reminder that the EEBO-TCP texts, like anything else, are not a perfect resource. As the presentation by Rebecca Welzenbach from the EEBO-TCP team reminded us, these texts are made by humans and whilst the error threshold is set at 99.995%, errors will, and do, still occur. Perhaps all users of EEBO-TCP texts should remember Martin Mueller’s words concerning them: “Messy at the edges is better then nothing.”

Final Thoughts

Now that the dust has settled and the multitudinous ideas from the conference have had time to distil in my mind, I am more able to reflect clearly on the question the conference posed namely: is EEBO-TCP is revolutionising early modern studies? Whilst I remain optimistic that the EEBO-TCP corpus provides an exciting resource that allows different questions to be asked about the past I am, however, less naive in this optimism. I realise that the digital humanities, whatever that even means, is not a tool that will replace the more traditional forms of research. It is not a surrogate for archival research, close reading of texts, and a deep awareness of the social and political contexts of books and documents that only time, effort, and knowledge can provide, but it is a powerful tool that provides new perspectives and different forms of analysis of texts. These new analytical strategies are not threats to historical research but they can, and must, be used to complement and enrich our current modes of analysis. Of course, one could say digital humanties is simply a current fad that will pass away, as neon tights did in the 80s and Tamgotchis and Pokemon did in the 90s, that conventional forms of scholarship will prevail against modern trends in the long term. Yet, from looking at the research being done using tools displayed during the conference I can’t help but think that those who chose to neglect them, who fail to utilise these fruits of modernity, are depriving themselves of a form of analysis that can enrich any study of the early modern period, and do so at their own expense and loss.

I would like to thank the supporters of the EEBO-TCP 2012 conference namely, JISC, ProQuest, and the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book for generously providing me with a bursary to attend the conference.

Thank you, Jacob!

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It is customary for many digitisation projects to undertake user consultation activities during their development as a way to ensure that the content that is being digitised is relevant to the needs of target users. And so it should be.

However, while this activity is useful to ascertain the potential use that people might make of the content, in itself it doesn’t necessarily guarantee actual use of the content.

We need to raise the stakes of what to expect from digital content creation in relation to its use and the impact it can make.

Innovative approaches that are often adopted in the technology deployed for large scale digitisation projects, workflows or project management style, need be mirrored by innovative embedding activities from the outset of a project, so that resources start getting used soon after they become available online, at least by a core group of users – of course there will always be unexpected ways in which content will be used.

The opportunities for incorporating innovative embedding activities during a project are plentiful, especially with regard to how digitised collections can be used within teaching and learning.

- OpenLives, part of the current JISC Content programme 2011-13, Strand A: Digitisation and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), has digitised oral testimonies, images and other ephemera that had been gathered through a previous research project on the experience of Spanish migrants to the UK and returning migrants to Spain.

The project’s blog describes how the team is embedding open research data in teaching and learning by creating OERs on research skills for oral history. Year 2 students have also been involved in creating interactive magazines based on the life experiences of the émigrés. A new module will be available at the University of Leeds based on the newly digitized collection, Discovering Spanish Voices Abroad in a Digital World. The project is lead by the University of Southampton in partnership with Portsmouth and Leeds.

- D-TRACES (Dance teaching resource and collaborative engagement spaces), funded under a previous JISC programme on Impact and embedding of digitized resources) incorporated the use of the Siobhan Davies digital dance archive in students’ Personal Development Plan (PDP), initiating the trend for students to keep digital scrap books and a blog about their work. The impact of this work is documented in the project’s final case study.

This inspired ArchitectUS (University of Birmingham) – which is digitising and creating OER from architectural drawings and models from a number of architectural practices – to follow D-TRACES’s example, as discussed in their blog.

- the University of East London has created a module on Performing the Archive based on the JISC-funded Online Theatre History Archive (OTHA), which investigates the use of archival research to document performance practices. Part of the students’ coursework is to create a documentary theatre performance responding to the OTHA material.

Digitisation is now mature activity but more could be done to encourage imaginative take-up of content from the outset of a project – ultimately this is why we digitise.

There are well-established digital resources out there that are being used in teaching, but we don’t necessarily know how. Let us know if you’re using them in your teaching and how. Thank you!

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If you use digitised newspapers or other large-scale digital collections in your work, research or for personal interest, then please fill in the survey at https://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=15519.

This survey is part of a research project being undertaken at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which aims to learn more about users of large scale digitised collections, and in particular digitised newspaper collections. The project is considering the impact of large collections of digitised material upon researchers, the public and the cultural sector, and is very interested to gather opinions from users of these collections.

The project is looking in particular at the British Library’s 19th Century Newspaper Collection, and this survey is one of a number of methods that are being used to gather data on how researchers are using the collection, how they access, view and store digital material, and the impact that digitised resources are having upon their work.

Additionally, if you have been involved in creating or managing large-scale digital collections, then the experience of your users would be invaluable; anything that you can do to disseminate this survey more widely would therefore be greatly appreciated.

The closing date for this survey is Friday 14th September. It contains 40 questions, and will take no more than 30 minutes to complete. Participation is, of course, entirely voluntary and anonymous.

If you have any questions, you can contact Paul Gooding at paul.gooding.10@ucl.ac.uk

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