 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!
Recent Posts
Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U. Over Kindle Use | Comment [51]
A California Dream: Saving State Universities With an Online Campus | Comment [22]
Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter? | Comment [7]
David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker | Comment [21]
Introducing Guest Blogger David Wiley | Comment [1]
Submit to Wired Campus
Tell us about stories we should be covering, and what you don't like.
Wired Campus Writers
Internet issues, new technology, security, computing
Jennifer Howard
libraries, publishing
Sara Lipka
piracy, student technology use
Marc Parry
distance education, security, the technology marketplace
Jeffrey R. Young
video, audio, how technology is changing scholarship and teaching
Need more tech news?
Read our complete IT section.
Categories
June 2, 2009
Archive Watch: Taking It Philosophically
Billed as “a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers,” PhilPapers is the brainchild of David Chalmers, a philosopher who directs the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and David Bourget, one of Mr. Chalmers’s graduate students. First sustained by ANU, the project now has a two-year grant from Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee and support from the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where Mr. Bourget is a rising postdoc.
Judged by the early numbers, PhilPapers has been a hit. It now has about 5,000 registered users, 60 percent to 70 percent of them graduate students and professors in philosophy, according to Mr. Bourget. Site traffic grew from 23,000 visits in February to 96,000 in May. The Chronicle asked Mr. Bourget for an update on how the experiment has unfolded so far and how it might spread. (Hint: This is not a model for philosophers alone.)
Q. What aspects of the site are working well?
A. We’re especially pleased with the steady stream of submissions to our repository we’ve been getting. We received about 2,200 submissions since we launched (four months ago). That’s quite high when you compare with other online archives, given the small size of the discipline and that we already have a lot of material in the index — people are not allowed to submit already existing items.
We’re also happy with the fruits of the new editorial structure we’ve just put in place two weeks ago. We solicited editors to help us classify all PhilPapers entries in some 3,000 fine-grained categories. We have now about 70 editors working with us, and the categorization is progressing at a good pace, though some areas are moving faster than others. On a good day we can categorize some 2,000 papers, or 1 percent of the index. Soon we will have covered most of the core areas of the discipline, and we will have a really useful platform for people to find articles on all the key topics. This is indispensable in philosophy because there isn’t enough regimentation in the terminology to be able to rely exclusively on search to cover a topic.
A. What would you like to change or add?
Q. Well, our discussion forums haven’t caught on as much as we were hoping. We would really like to see something like the forums be used systematically by professional academics to exchange ideas informally, but there are many obstacles to this that we’ve become more acutely aware of through our experience with the forums. So there is a need for change in this part of the site, but we don’t really have concrete plans yet. We’re going to give the current format more time before we turn our attention to this again.
There is a lot we want to add. One high-priority project is to set up a channel for publishers we currently can’t reach to submit their content in bulk. We also want to begin indexing the full text of articles, and to cross-link articles through citations. These improvements to our database will enable new services, e.g., impact factor statistics. We also plan to open up our index to third parties, and to add a number of new research and communication tools.
Q. Have other disciplines tried anything similar?
A. There are sites which provide subsets of PhilPapers’ services. For example, arXiv.org is a very successful online archive in the exact sciences, and PubMed a very comprehensive index of the literature in health sciences.
What’s distinctive of the PhilPapers approach is that we blend these two services together and integrate them with other services like content monitoring, community-managed classification, personalized bibliographies, authoring tools, etc. We try to exploit positive feedback loops between these different services, to make each of them better. As far as I know, there is no other site like PhilPapers in this respect.
It’s part of our aims to spread our technology to other disciplines where it might be needed. We’ve set up the DIVRE project for this purpose, and we’ve heard from a number of interested parties. The first release of DIVRE should be in one to two years from now. —Jennifer Howard
Posted on Tuesday June 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [3]March 27, 2009
Archive Watch: Rare Spanish Songs Go Online
More than 41,000 Spanish-language songs that go back to the early 1900s were placed online this week by the Chicano Studies Center, a research unit at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The recordings are from the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, the Los Angeles Times reported. It is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. The early works, the archives say, are “the foundation for Latino music today, since the singers and musicians who made these records helped popularize and propagate a number of traditions, including regional Mexican, Tejano, Chicano, and Mexican-American music.”
If you are not physically at UCLA, however, don’t expect to hear all the music. Due to copyright restrictions, only campus computers get full access. Off-campus users can hear 50 seconds of each song, see images of the record labels, and read background information about the recordings. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday March 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [2]January 20, 2009
Archive Watch: Bohemian Rhapsody
Part of an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.
In the early 1860s, Walt Whitman wrote a poem, never finished, called “The Vault at Pfaff’s,” about a New York City saloon where “where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse.” Those “drinkers and laughers” included creative types like Whitman, the actor and writer Ada Clare, William Dean Howells, and Henry Clapp Jr., whose literary weekly, The Saturday Press, published fiction, poetry, and social commentary turned out by the “Pfaff’s bohemians” in the 1850s and 1860s.
You can find biographies of about 150 Pfaffians and an annotated bibliography of about 4,000 of their literary works at the Vault at Pfaff’s, an online archive dedicated to the collective creative scene Whitman described in his poem. The site went live in 2006. The Chronicle asked the site’s editorial director, Edward Whitley, an assistant professor of English at Lehigh University, to tell us more about the site and those he calls “America’s first bohemians.”
Q. What distinguishes the Vault at Pfaff’s from other digital archives?
A. Many digital archives in the humanities, such as the Walt Whitman Archive or the Blake archive, focus on the works of a single author. With the Vault at Pfaff’s, we’re trying to capture the dynamics of an entire community rather than a single individual. This gives us the benefit of being able to look at writers in a broad context, but it also means that we’re hard pressed to lavish attention on individual texts as the directors of the Whitman and Blake archives have been able to do. (I wrote a short essay for the Mickle St. Review about the differences between the Vault at Pfaff’s and sites like the Whitman archive.)
Q. What’s left to add? Do you see an end point?
A. Currently, we’ve written biographies for about 150 people who were connected to Pfaff’s in one way or another, but we’ve identified about 50 more people who we still need to include on the site. This means that we not only have to research and write biographies on these people, but that we also have to generate bibliographies of works by and about them and then try to track down digital editions of those works online. Once we do all that, we’d ideally like to create searchable (and, preferably, XML-encoded) versions of all these texts. I could imagine this project coming to an end at some point, but I’d be hard pressed to put a date on that now.
Q. Who uses the site? How much traffic does it get?
A. In 2008 we had over 114,000 visits to the site by over 39,000 unique visitors. As far as we can tell, it’s mostly scholars and students who are visiting the site, but we also hear from people outside of academia who stumble onto the site out of an interest in some aspect of American history and they end up falling in love with the Pfaffians.
Q. Does the site turn up in scholarly citations? How big a challenge is that for digital archives?
A. A recent essay in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by Amanda Gailey mentions the site, and a forthcoming book about antebellum politics and the Pfaff’s bohemians by historian Mark Lause mentions us as well, but those are the only citations that I’m aware of at this point. I’m a member of a newly formed professional organization called the Digital Americanists, and one of the issues that we frequently discuss is how to bridge the divide between print and digital scholarship. The default opinion among scholars and educated laypeople alike is that most information found on the Internet is untrustworthy. … The onus, then, is on those of us working in the digital humanities to set up peer-review mechanisms similar to those that govern scholarship in print so that people will know that they can trust our sites as much as they trust books published by a respected university press. Groups such as NINES are also working in this direction, and the Modern Language Association has issued a number of statements similarly supporting the peer review of digital scholarship. There’s enough momentum building from enough different places that digital scholarly projects will eventually get the credit they deserve.
Q. How does being involved in this kind of work affect a scholar’s chances for tenure and promotion?
A. When I started this project as an untenured assistant professor during my first year of employment, I vowed that I wouldn’t let myself become a test case for whether or not someone could get tenure based solely on digital scholarship. I’ve kept that promise over the past five years, and as tenure looms on the horizon I’m grateful that I’ve put the Vault at Pfaff’s aside often enough to work on publishing in traditional venues. Having said that, I can’t help but wonder how much further along I could be with this project if I’d dedicated myself to it 100 percent. One interesting side effect of having started this project so early on in the tenure clock, however, is that as a result of people discovering my scholarship online I’ve been invited to give talks and write articles that are related to the work I’ve done on the digital archive, and these talks and articles will have weight come tenure time. So while I’m not counting on this digital project to help me earn tenure, some tenure-worthy scholarship has emerged directly from it.
Q. How do you sustain the project?
A. Without the institutional support that Lehigh University has provided through the Digital Scholarship Center, this project would never have gotten off the ground. A strong institutional commitment to digital scholarship is absolutely essential to the survival of projects like this. Lehigh has also been very generous in providing additional funds to pay research assistants, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation gave us a grant a while back that really allowed us to get the bulk of the work done.
Q. What advice would you give someone who wanted to create a digital archive?
A. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. And be patient.
Q. Do you have a favorite among the Pfaff’s bohemians?
A. That’s like asking which of my children I love the most! If I had to choose, though, I must admit that there’s a special place in my heart for George S. McWatters, a New York City police office who chronicled his exploits in books with titles like Knots Untied: or, Ways and By-Ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives. But it’s not just the oddity of a police officer fraternizing with bohemians that makes the “literary policeman” (as he was known at the time) such an endearing character. When the ringleader of the Pfaff’s bohemians, Henry Clapp Jr., died penniless more than 10 years after the heyday of the Pfaff’s scene had come and gone, McWatters was there to make sure that Clapp’s remains were returned to his native Massachusetts and given a decent burial. Stories like this make me think that the writers and artists who visited Pfaff’s had a profound effect on one another. My hope is that the Vault at Pfaff’s will bring enough of these stories to the foreground so that we can imagine what life was like for America’s first bohemians.
—Jennifer Howard
Posted on Tuesday January 20, 2009 | Permalink | CommentDecember 12, 2008
Archive Watch: All Whitman, All Digital
In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.
The Chronicle asked Mr. Folsom to chat about how the archive has evolved and where it’s headed. This is the first in an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.
Q. How far have you gotten toward your original goal?
A. In one sense, we’re further along than I ever expected, but in another (more important) sense, we have a long, long way to go. We now have a wonderful scholarly edition of the various editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and we’re the only place scholars and students can go to examine the various editions side by side in facsimile, so that users can study not only Whitman’s textual changes from edition to edition, but his bookmaking changes as well—changes in typeface, page design and layout, placement of titles, and so on. We have been focusing in recent years on getting the thousands of Whitman’s poetry manuscripts—which have never been edited before and are unavailable in any print version—available in excellent facsimiles and reliable transcriptions.
Q. What’s left to add?
A. That’s the big question. The nature of digital work in the humanities is such that “conclusion” soon becomes an irrelevant or laughable concern. The very nature of digital projects is openness, not closure. The further we go on this project, the more we discover we have to do. In dealing with Whitman’s massive correspondence, for example, we quickly discovered that the old conception of what constitutes a writer’s correspondence—the letters he wrote—is an outmoded conception when we’re working in a digital instead of a print environment. Why not, for example, include the letters that were written TO Whitman as well as the letters he wrote? … Print environments are restricted because of space and costs, but digital environments can grow and grow.
Q. How much longer will it take?
A. Originally, Ken and I thought we’d spend five years or so on the project, but within a couple of years it became clear we had embarked on a career-long project that would in fact far exceed our own careers. Unlike a massive print project, which has to look toward a final publication date, digital humanities projects face no final publication date: every day is a publication date, as new material is added. … Our most severe critics turn out to be our best collaborators, since pointing out errors or omissions becomes a truly constructive thing to do in a digital environment.
Q. How has the work changed since the archive was created?
A. Originally we conceived the Whitman Archive as something that would be used primarily by scholars as a research tool. … We quickly discovered that many of our users were not scholars, but instead students at all levels, from junior high school through graduate school, as well as people from around the world who just loved Whitman’s work. … We have thousands of users in countries around the world—from Asia to Europe to South America—and many of those users have been requesting translations of Whitman’s work into multiple languages. There’s a long history of Whitman translations, and we’re now embarking on a huge translation section of the archive, where eventually we will offer a kind of history of Whitman’s translation into and reception in cultures around the world. … So we are recruiting editors to oversee the various language groups. This in itself is a career-long project for a large group of scholars.
Q. What are you proudest of? What would you do differently, if you could?
A. I’m proud to be part of team of scholars who are truly collaborative. I think one of the real strengths of digital humanities is that it creates teamwork in a field where isolated individual scholarship has long been the norm. We have a large and growing team of editors at the Whitman Archive, and I find the close collaboration—among scholars, between faculty and graduate students who work on the archive, between scholars and technical staff—to be exhilarating, a new model for how work can get done in the humanities. I don’t know that I would do anything differently, since the digital world is such a malleable space to work in, where anything you’d like to do differently, you can, in fact, figure out a way to DO!
Q. What advice would you give someone who wanted to start a digital archive?
A. Hook up right from the start with an outstanding center for digital humanities. … Ken Price and I began this project with no expertise in digital environments whatsoever. We had the good fortune to be taken in by the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. … If you get off track early, it is very difficult to adjust later, but a good digital humanities center will help you avoid mistakes and make sure you are building a viable project that can grow and develop effectively. … I think eventually most universities will develop digital humanities centers, but many universities have already fallen far behind the game, and scholars who work in such places need to contact established centers to seek guidance and support.
Q. What will the archives of the future look like — 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now?
A. I’ve given up predicting digital futures, since no one could have imagined 10 years ago what the digital environment would turn out to be today. The archives of the future will be larger, vaster, more interconnected, more powerful, easier to navigate. Every day on the Whitman Archive, we have the strong sense that we’re creating our future, hazy as it may at times seem. —Jennifer Howard
Posted on Friday December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]