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.