Week 7: Thematic Research Collections

This week, one our my classmates Brandon had us form groups and each look at different websites. My group was given the task of looking at the yellow nineties online. After looking at the website all week long, by the time I got to one of our readings for the week, Carole L. Palmer's "Thematic Research Collection" from A Companion to Digital Hummantities, I just kept thinking about the yellow ninties online most of the time I was reading it.   There are a few quotes from the article that I think lend itself well to the the design of the site. The first quote is under the heading "Characteristics of a Genre" and she states, "The thematic framework allows for coherent aggregartion of content." The yellow nineties online is very clear about what content they include in the site. They collect different pieces from the 1890s and include it all in the site. The have digital images of the journal The Yellow Book and The Pagan Review as well as commentary from the 1890s that gives an inclusive overview of the content.

Another section in the article titled "Contextual Mass" has two paragraphs that also are reflective of the site. Palmer says "All collections are built through the process of privledging some materials over others (Buckland 1995), and the constrcution of contectual mass takes place through careful, purposeful privledging." In these kind of thematic collections, all the information in presented in a way that makes sense to the researcher. In contrast, digital libraries organize things in a way that makes sense to the libraries, not necessarily to the people who are trying to do research there. The yellow nineties online is privledging two journals so far over others to digitize and including the commentary of the journals at the time in which they were published.

Under the same heading, Palmer also says, "Collections built on a contextual mass model create a system of interrelated sources where different types of materials and different subjects work together to support deep and multifaceted inquiriy in an area of research." The yellow nineties online not only includes the journal The Yellow Book but they also include its contemporary journal The Pagan Review as well as images from the time, stories and anecdotes of when the journal was published as criticism and commentary of the journal.

I did some more digging around and found that there are two more aspects about this site that I really enjoy. They seem to have accomplished a lot in a short time span, and are really looking to expand the site with submissions and even pedagogical approaches if anyone out there in the wide, wide web (shameless Susan Warner reference) teaches The Yellow Book.

There is a section at the bottom of the home page that we have seen on many sites that we have already looked at, "News & Events." In the case of Yellow 90's Online, they are such a new site that their news is not outdated like many of the sites we have previously looked at. They truly are updating their site all the time. It is unclear at this point whether they are a site with an closed deadline or if they want to keep the site open and active for as long as possible. At any rate, the first thing on their newsfeed is that their research assistant was featured in what appear to be the University Newspaper, Ryerson Today. I thought it was nice (being a GA myself) that they were recognizing the accomplishments of ALL those who work on the site. If you scroll on the newsfeeed to the second slide, the NINES is mentioned. Apparently, the Yellow 90's Online was accepted and went through the peer review for NINES and is now a part of that site! Crazy how all of the digital things we are discovering/exploring are all starting to inter-mingle with one another.

The second thing that I wanted to mention about this site is the "Essays on our Process" section in the About tab on the page. Here is what they say about this section of the site: "The essays collected here are written by members of The Yellow Nineties Online research team. They reflect on the issues involved in the digital editing of 1890s periodicals and consider the relationships between fin-de-siècle communication technology, magazine editing practices, and mass-media developments in the digital age." There are three of these essays on the page, the last two seem to speak to some of the issues that we have been discussing in lcass, namely that of preferring physical books to digital ones, and the isolations and estrangement that can come from the digital experience. It was nice to read that those who make digital project -and sucessful ones so far at that- share some of the same anxieties that we do as potential future DH scholars.