The panels split into two different sessions, so I’m in a session on developing open-source collections and resources.
First presentation is Robert Kieft and John Anderies talking about putting a reference source of Quaker biography into a wiki format. Bob observes that the library still is and will remain a “book mine”, but that he anticipates stable commercial arrangements, stable technological platforms, to support extensive digitization of resources held by libraries within the next two decades. His recommendations: colleges need to develop a common infrastructure for supporting digital resources, and ditch our institutional parochialism around libraries and information. Must collaborate with research universities and national institutions involved with libraries and archives. Our local collections need to be much more attentive to regional and national uses. Must satisfy our users’ desire to work in networked contexts. Must obtain the financial resources to do all of what we need to do. Must publish the unique or unusual holdings in library collections to the web.
The DQB (Dictionary of Quaker Biography): intended to publish Haverford’s unique resources to a digital and networked environment. John Anderies describes the original published resource: home-grown created in the 1950s and 1960s, large, frequently cited and used. Problem: it’s 50-60 years out of date, heavily uses secondary sources, perhaps too narrow in its focus, and can be consulted only at three institutions in the world. Goal of digitization: safeguard the printed copies, preserve the text. Allow text to grow, improve, be corrected. Make it more authoritative and scholarly. Disseminate the content, allow more uses, promote distributed participation, especially to partner up with other Quaker repositories. Connect to relevant content in other repositories, formats.
Using a wiki format, very much on the Wikipedia standard. Outreach to a lot of other repositories (esp. geneaological) but also integration with the local catalog and links to other digitization ongoing at Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr.
Issues so far: the work of automating entries, integrating fielded data, automating citational information, connection to authority sources, and overall editorial policy & oversight over contributors. How much to follow the precedents being set by other wiki users, particularly Wikipedia?
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Chris Blackwell presented on building an open-access Homeric resource.
Digital editions of Homeric texts, translations, images of manuscripts, direct access to the “scholarly primitives”, collaborative infrastructure for building end-user applications using the data. Using GPL and Creative Commons licenses for what they do.
Using a lot of resources that are in the public domain. Interesting chart on textual variations in editions of texts, sharp post-Gutenberg fall-off generally–but Homer, Iliad, is completely different: the most variations in editions visible in antiquity, consistent reduction in variation ever since. Trying to use the resource to reopen the multitextual character of Homeric texts, to allow all the variations to exist in the same resource space.
“As many Homers as you can”: a snarky comment made by a critic of the project that they’ve adopted as a credo. Reversing the trend towards having the single authoritative “correct” version. Using XML to encode polytonic Greek characters to improve forward (and backward) mobility to multiple platforms.
Personal note: I think this is a really clear and interesting idea about why to put a resource in a digital format that extends somewhat beyond the more straightforward (though crucial) priorities in the Quaker Biography project. Here we’re really moving into rethinking what we do to texts and resources as scholars.
Also very interesting: it’s a post-tenure project for the participants, but they have not been able to get faculty from Ph.D-granting institutions to participate.
That could be incidental, but I don’t think so: it points to the extent to which scholars who stand at the center of older practices often being actively disinterested in anything that would unsettle their monopolies.
The photographs of original texts in the project are amazing in both quality and interface design and usability.
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Dana Ward of Pitzer College talked about producing online resources on anarchism.
Came out of a content-based approach to teaching Internet literacy in the relatively early history of the Web. Decided to focus that approach on anarchist literature, which he was already collecting and studying. Lots of ongoing student participation. Talks about the kind of interesting discoveries that students can make when they’re working with primary materials in a way where they have the opportunity to make original connections, find patterns that haven’t been previously discussed or understood, and so on.
Personal note: looking at the archive, it looks to me like a much older style of building online resources: more top-down in its creation and maintenance, not really set-up for robust kinds of collaboration coming from other angles, though student work and learning were a crucial part of how it got built. In a curious way, these kinds of archives can be almost easier to retrieve information from, but the moment an active steward is no longer around to keep it going, coordinate entries, they have a tendency to grow cobwebs and fall into disuse. There are a lot of resources that look and feel like this one that were useful in the early history of the Web and now can’t be found or used.
I also think there’s a complicated issue about archives that are maintained by advocates or protectors of the material they archive. I’m not saying professional archivists loathe or are not interested in the work they collect and maintain, and the Wikipedia model of adversarial content creation often produces a weak kind of compromise knowledge as opposed to something distinctive. But there’s a way in which an archive of materials on anarchism maintained by people with a sympathetic interest in anarchism has a heuristic that doesn’t track the movement of anarchism in and out of related (even antagonistic) social and political movements. (For example, an archive on anarchism, if it were maintained in a wiki model, might connect to libertarianism at various moments. This one does that through material on Bookchin, for example, but that’s “left-libertarianism”.) Anyway, nevertheless, any archive is a good archive.
I also like the pedagogical aspect of the project, the kinds of interesting things that can happen when students are working with raw or primary material without the filtering of a secondary authority.