Week 5: The NINES in all it's wonderful glory

This week in our further exploration of the DH and nineteenth century studies, we were asked to explore the NINES, Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online.

·   The site itself can seem to be comprised of an overwhelming amount of information, however, once you start to navigate what NINES is all about, it becomes clear that the site serves more than one purpose. Some of the issues that people in our class seem to be having week to week, it that there are many sites that just seem to be digitizing large amounts of texts (books, images, periodicals, magazines, newspapers, etc) but they are not really doing anything new. This led to a wonderful debate this week when speaking about NINES since my fine colleague AJ Schmitz brought up his concern with these large database type sites. AJ was wondering what NINES was really doing that made it a cite-able, new type of scholarship. The word Scholarship is in their title after all, one could assume that we would be coming across it on the site. I think what was at the heart of AJ's concern was that, he did not know what the NINES was offering to original scholarship other than that they complied a lot of peer-reviewed sites and information all in one place. But what did they DO other than that??

·   My argument in response to that question is that without some of these sites and archives that work to place large amounts of texts online for us, there are some things that can be viewed and discovered that would not be possible in a non-digital realm. Take the William Blake Archive for instance. Without this particular archive, there is no way that people who would be denied access to very fragile and rare pieces of different editions of Blake's work in order to have a rich comparison. Thanks to this archive, I am able to be sitting in my pajamas drinking my coffee, and see 4 different copies of the 1811 and 1818 copies of Milton, A Poem from four different libraries, in the US and abroad. Without this site, and the compilation of the works, I would be without striking images that differentiate from editions and copies. In addition, the website itself adds to the scholarship by providing new information that was not there before.

So what is NINES? Instead of trying to eloquently trying to sum up the entire site, I will let NINES say it in their own words:

"NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Our activities are driven by three primary goals:

·         to serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American;

·         to support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials;

·         to develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis."

NINES uses the Collex interface as the searching method; Juxta which is for collating and collecting, and Ivanhoe which is a game-play software that will work with the websites already listed on NINES.

NINES has this interesting set-up where there are many things happening on the homepage, that some of the tools get under-utilized. For instance, on the homepage there are tags to show the most searched and discussed topics, a search bar, a featured object, recent news, A scroll list of at the peer-reviewed sites, and the top tabs. One of the top tabs is the "Community" tab. There are 18 groups with 89 total items, but most of them have 0 exhibits and 0 discussions, or maybe 2 exhibits and 4 discussions. If these discussion forums were brought more to the forefront of the site, people in classrooms might actually realize that they could use this interface for their classes and posts for discussions, but they do not advertise it enough so that people know it is there.

Week 4: website discovery!

 

This week I am focusing on some of the websites that are considered "commercial websites." The two websites that stood out to me were the Gale site and the NCCO (Nineteenth-Century Collections Online) site. Gale is a site that is clearly is looking for a profit, yet I can understand having to offset the cost of digitising such a large body of work. It is important not only to digitize as the periodicals and newspapers of the nineteenth century, but also to answer some of the questions that were raised in class (Digitizing the Victorians) this week.

 

One of those questions was, "does it matter if the text that is shown is the full page as it appeared in the original newspaper/periodical?" I would answer that it is important. Not for some of the reasons that were mentioned, such as what if was around influenced the author of a particular piece (examples of Dickens's work changing because he saw a news piece about an orphan named Pip was thrown around) but because I think that pieces should be considered in their full context as they were meant to be.

 

There were many books that we read today in full that were originally serialized in periodicals or newspapers. I know that there are probably a lot of Victorian examples of such works (Dickens of course comes to mind) but the one I am most familiar with is Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The fact that this work was serialized originally is important because it *should* change how we read the book as  a whole. If someone wonders why Stowe seems to be repeating her storyline over and over within the novel, it is because originally the book was read week to week and she was reminding her readers what had happened previously. As modern readers, we can be annoyed by the repetition, but readers of that time would have found it essential to understanding the book as a whole. Another reason I think that reading it within the context is such a good idea is because of the fact that the surrounding material does matter only for historical reasons. I am not so interested in how Stowe might have been influenced by what articles were around her work, but more about the editorial reasoning behind what they chose to include right around each section of her work. If it was an abolitionist newspaper, they might have included news of an upcoming rally. If it was more of a neutral newspaper, and it was a re-printing of her work it is possible that there might have been an advertisement of an Anti-Tom novel that were also popular at the time. This is important in a New Historical perspective as we consider what the historical implications of serializing were.

 

As far as the NCCO site is concerned, hmmm how do I love this site? Let me count the ways. Okay bad literary example aside, I really did like this site. They had informative video that let you see behind the scenes and into the how the website is designed and How Much Work really goes into digitizing all the works. The site was easy to navigate and I felt that unlike some of the sites that we have looked at already, this site really went beyond to be as user-friendly as possible. They were also very forthcoming about how their site works and how they digitize the periodicals and nineteenth century works. There were even "fact sheets" provided for different sections.





Week 3 Response - Opening the Victorian Library

After our first weeks discussion, it became clear that defining the Digital Humanities would be something that we created together all semester through our readings and exploration of the different websites. Although we all attempted to come up with our own definitions, here is what I came to realize. DH is not one specific thing, it is the combination of things born digital, things in print that are digitized, archives, collections, etc.
The articles for this weeks reading dealt mostly with the digitizing of libraries and digital libraries in general. The other two readings, both about Victorian literature discuss digital journals and digital resources for nineteenth studies. The two websites for Victorian Hubs seemed antiquated to our modern day standards. As I explored them outside of class it became clear that the websites were set up in order to place a large amount of information on the web, but have not really been updated since then in any real capacity. They are examples of the earlier type of websites that were created in an effort to digitize nineteenth century texts and resources. The newer websites that are examples of open digital libraries show how there can be a large amount of information displayed in a way that is still user friendly. Sites like Open Library and the Hathi Trust are sites that also allow the user to see how they update and run their sites whereas Google Books does not really explain how they scan all of their book in order to digitize them.
In the Besser article entitled “The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Libraries” felt overwhelming once I first finished reading it. It tried to explain metadata through the use of imaging and also how digital libraries were started and were they are headed in the future. The Walsh article was good for a survey of where publishing came from and where both DH and Victorian studies are going. One question that came to my mind is how exactly is digital information innovative? There seem to be different phases of DH, both to re-create core functions and not just to duplicate but to move beyond the digital realm as well. There also seemed to be an issue that most of the articles that dealt with copyrights and how to stop the use of unauthorized texts, the re-covery of texts, physical books vs. digital libraries. Another issue with the digitizing of libraries is the cost of upkeep for all the databases. One thing to keep in mind as we go forward with preparing to write our own proposals for grants is how long we would want the information on our sites to be available.