Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have you covered! Here are 3 relatively recent pieces I wrote—I hope you enjoy them and share them. “When Is A Source Not A Source?” (link) This past November, I gave a presentation at the Stanford Primary Source Symposium, the theme of which was “The Phenomenology of the Source.” My talk focused on a question that has been bothering me for a while now: how do we treat digital facsimiles of early print as source material? I’ll give you a preview of my rousing conclusion: So, when is a source not a source? If we go by what we see evidenced in…
Tag: digitization
digitization and scale: a kuni-ezu map
Look at this amazing map: I’m not a Japanese scholar, so I’m not going to have a good explanation of this, but my understanding is that it’s an 1837 version of a 16th-century map of the Ōmi prefecture. It’s part of the map collections at Stanford and it was just recently digitized, in advance of the Primary Source Symposium, where it was the focus of a talk by Kären Wigen. ((As a relevant aside, the symposium was a delightful chance to learn more about a whole lot of stuff I didn’t know much about and to get to know scholars outside my usual early modern books circle, so my thanks to Elaine Treharne and Kathryn Starkey for the invitation.)) The map is gorgeous, as is its digitization. Look at the texture captured when you zoom in (click on the map to go play with it yourself; it’s a CC BY-NC license, so go…
questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects
Some days you wake up and you see announcements of a new project to digitize a collection of primary source materials. Perhaps an archive that covers centuries of technological and commercial changes, perhaps a collection of newspapers that encompasses the history of African-American politics and culture, just to name a couple of purely hypothetical examples. I don’t know any details about such agreements and neither do you, unless you happen to be one of the top-level executives at one of the holding institutions for these collections or at one of the companies doing the digitization. And because we don’t know any details, we don’t know whether such projects are great or not. But we can—and we should—ask some questions when we hear about them: Who financially benefits from such agreements? It is certainly the company doing the digitization and the institution holding the documents, otherwise neither would be doing it. But…
resources: digital First Folios
I’ve written about digitizing Shakespeare’s First Folio before, looking at the interfaces of the many different copies out there. But I’m turning my attention to this again for my contribution on the subject for the in-progress Cambridge Companion to the First Folio, edited by Emma Smith. In my article, I’ll be thinking about why there are so many libraries digitizing this same book over and over again and what these many projects can teach us about what we look for from the First Folio and from digital tools. But to do that, I revisited the 13—!!!!—digitized copies currently out there on the interwebs and created a list identifying each copy and its various relevant features for both the interface and the book itself. Some exciting news since I last looked: Miami has reimaged theirs, created a new interface, and released the images as public domain! Bodleain’s already awesome F1 got even…
how to destroy special collections with social media
I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was in full swing, and the weather was in all its hot, glorious humidity. I wanted to keep things light as well as make some points I feel very strongly about: the importance of librarians and researchers using social media to help sustain special collections libraries. Below are the slides and my notes for my July 29th talk. Since RBS records and shares the audio of their talks (go browse through past RBS lectures and listen!) I have, with their permission, also embedded the audio of my talk here so that you can listen and read along if you’d like (there are some variations between the two, though nothing substantive—I’ll leave…