For the last couple of years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with finding examples of early printed books that aren’t available as open-access digital facsimiles. Why have I been thinking about this? It started off with some frustration that we have a slew of digital copies of (ahem) Shakespeare’s First Folio and of the Gutenberg Bible (25 copies!). Why do we have so many of those and none of…. of…. um…. And so I started looking. The more time I spent looking, the more frustrated I grew about what wasn’t available. How could it be that there were no open facsimiles of Sidney’s ridiculously important sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella? Or Tottel’s miscellany? Or one of the most popular English plays, Mucedorus? These are foundational works in the development of their genres. In some cases, they survive in only a very small number of understandably restricted copies. Shouldn’t…
Tag: digitization
book history questions and digital facsimiles
Last weekend I attended a wonderful conference at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the History of Digital and Print Culture, “BH and DH: Book History and Digital Humanities.” It was a great gathering of people who live at the same intersection I’ve been stomping around. And it gave me a chance to think again about digital facsimiles of early printed books. As I said in my talk, book historians think about digital facsimiles mostly in terms of what they show (“hey, cool book! why is it using that funky typeface?”). But what if book historians were to ask BH questions of digital facsimiles—what if we were to treat them as objects to be studies instead of (transparent) objects of objects to be studied? Because I was part of a very fun roundtable, I could mostly ask questions and not insist on answers (best format ever). So here, without answers,…
what do digitized first folios do for us?
Last August, Emma Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio was published and I was and am delighted to have a piece in this one-stop-shopping introduction to F1. My contribution, to the surprise of no one, is on digitized copies of the First Folio. It’s a bibliographical and cultural-materialist inflected examination of what is available, how they present themselves, and what we might learn from them. “Digital First Folios” is a piece that I’m proud of and that I think is a useful contribution to conversations about digitization projects. And so I’m really happy that not only can you read it as part of the Companion, but that I can share it with you here on my site. You’ll have to read the piece for the details of my argument, but as a lure, here are some of my key points. Digitized F1s are presented nearly completely without any information about…
searching for a Blazing World
I’ve just come back from the annual conference for the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (more commonly known as RBMS, thank goodness, because that’s a mouthful). I was honored to be asked to be one of the speakers for the plenary on “A Broad and Deep Look at Outreach” and for my talk, I decided to look at how friendly and open the special collections digital landscape is. (Spoiler alert: not as radically open as it could be and should be! I’ve deposited my talk in MLA’s CORE if you’d like to read it, and I will post the link to the audio of the session once RBMS makes it available.) As part of my exploration, I decided to try searching for facsimiles of early editions of various books—part of what makes the digital landscape so frustrating is that there isn’t a centralized…
how do you use digital special collections?
I’ve been thinking about the digital landscape of special collections recently (hi, RBMS16!) and while I have lots of thoughts on how I come across and use the digital incarnations of rare books and manuscript libraries, I’m curious about what other people do. When I think of the digital landscape of these libraries, I’m thinking of everything from social media (institutional and personal accounts) to digital collections and exhibitions to user-generated websites and projects. How do you encounter and interact with that landscape? Are you looking for specific images? Are you browsing for pretty pictures? Are you following social media feeds for entertainment? Are you researching specific topics? Are you bored? Are you inspired to create your own work from it? Does it never, ever occur to you to look for or look at special collections online? I’d love it if you wanted to share your thoughts in the comments below, whether…