Colonial North American Project at Harvard University

Harvard University has embarked on a remarkable multi-year project to digitize and make freely available all 17th and 18th century archival records and publications from all its campus repositories relating to life in colonial North America. This ambitious enterprise is called the Colonial North Amercian Project at Harvard University.

In addition to the collection itself, there are also a series of thematic essays which provide deeper insight into the contents of this digital library and archives.

It appears that the public interface is powered by the Omeka open source software.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) freely available

From the April 25, 02011 announcement on various mailing lists comes this exciting news from the digital humanities:

The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,231 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,231 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page images for keying and is permitting the release of the keyed texts in support of the Library’s commitment to the creation of open access cultural heritage archives. Gale has been a generous partner, according to Maria Bonn, Associate University Librarian for Publishing. “Gale’s support for the TCP’s ECCO project will enhance the research experience for 18th century scholars and students around the world.”

Note that the plain-text version can only be obtained through 18thConnect while the SGML/XML version has to be requested via the ECCO-TCP office. As of April 25, 02011 there is no link to the ECCO-TCP content on the 18thConnect site.

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research exhibition at the British Library

The British Library wants your opinion to count as part of its Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research exhibition. The exhibition runs between October 12, 02010 and July 16, 02011. Parts of it are online, including a selection of current Web sites that offer access to various free databases or new ways to organize research and connect to other researchers such as Mendeley. A selection of social networking and collaborative research tools are available. If you want to tweet about the exhibition, the hashtag is #blgk

Digital Content Quarterly Issue 3 (Summer 02010) from the UK JISC Strategic Content Alliance

The UK's JISC Strategic Content Alliance published its Summer 02010 Issue 3 of the Digital Content Quarterly in both interactive and non-interactive PDF versions. This is a superb publication which I highly recommend. Details and download links are found on the Strategic Content Alliance Blog.

What Is the Big Idea? asks The Chronicle of Higher Education

For its 10th anniversary issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education solicited a series of short essays from scholars and illustrators, asking them to define a single "idea of the coming decade, and why?" You can read their provocative, compelling and exciting thoughts in "What's the Big Idea?".

Jane Austen fans rejoice at new, international digital collection of her fiction manuscripts

A three-year joint project of the University of Oxford and King’s College London, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts is now thrilling her fans worldwide. According to the Web site Introduction,

The focus of the present digital edition is three-fold: the virtual reunification of this significant collection of fiction manuscripts by means of high-quality digital photographic images; the linking of these images to fully encoded and searchable diplomatic transcriptions; and the creation of as complete a record as possible of the conservation history and current physical state of these frail objects. Through virtual reunification, scholars and interested users are provided for the first time with the opportunity to compare the forms and texts of these dispersed manuscripts – their different physical construction, shifts in handwriting and presentation – to examine passages of erasure and revision, to question editorial readings in the transcriptions, and to make their own new discoveries about Austen’s working practices across her writing career.

Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication

According to the About page, Digital Humanities Now

"is a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.

Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.

Digital Humanities Now was created by Dan Cohen, assisted by Jeremy Boggs, and is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University."

And it's "passively edited by 350 scholars and organizations in the digital humanities and related fields."

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities official launch May 02010

The UCL (University College London, England) Centre for Digital Humanities held its internal launch in February 02010 and an official, invitation-only launch will be held on May 20, 02010. The Projects and Links pages contain many excellent resources, including on the former TEI by Example, a collaborative project to develop an online tutorial for learning TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), the gold SGML standard for marking up digitized manuscripts and printed works.

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UCLDH.

New issue of Faculty of Information Quarterly, University of Toronto

Volume 2, no. 2 of the Faculty of Information Quarterly from the University of Toronto is available. One of the articles is "The Librarian as Digital Humanist: The Collaborative Role of the Research Library in Digital Humanities Projects" by Leigh Cunningham and another is "Digital Preservation and Technological Obsolescence: A Risk Assessment Strategy" by Suzanne LeBlanc. The journal is published with the Open Journal Systems software developed by the Public Knowledge Project.

Chain, chain, chain, the new CHAIN of digital humanities organizations

An important announcement about a new meta-organization of digital humanities organizations, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks or CHAIN (via DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02009 11 12):

A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and
Humanities:

• arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)



• ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)




• CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)



• centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)



• DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)



• NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)



• Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)



• TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum forareas of shared interest to its participants, including:

• advocacy for an improved digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;



• development of sustainable business models;



• promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;



• promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;



• development of a shared service infrastructure;



• coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;



• interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;



• widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing

A wonderful Web site titled Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing brings to life some of the many stories behind the writing and production of Canadian books. According to the Overview page:

The aim of this website is to highlight archival documents relating to Canadian publishing history. These documents – letters, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, artwork, audio interviews, financial records, and many other materials – are found in publishers’ and authors’ fonds and collections at McMaster University Library, Queen’s University Archives, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Emerging and senior scholars from across Canada have written over 90 case studies – short essays – based on these materials. Authors were asked to consult the archives and choose documents to help them tell a story relating to Canadian publishing. The site was launched on 8 October 2009.

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 02009 10 19

Center of Oral History & Digital Storytelling, Concordia University, Canada

Since I started my archival career in part as an oral historian, I'm delighted to see a revitalization of this important tool through examples at and a software application under development by the Center of Oral History & Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Canada. The Oral History Research Lab is finishing work on software for building oral history collections that it calls Stories Matter. Although described as open source software, the application uses Adobe AIR, but can run on Windows, Mac or Linux platforms. According to the Stories Matter blog post (2009 07 05),

"In its current state, Stories Matter is free, open source software that is compatible with MacIntosh and PC operating systems. It allows for the archiving of digital video and audio materials, enabling users to annotate, analyze, evaluate and export materials, as well as tag, index, search, and browse within interviews, sessions, and clips or across entire collections. ... the development of Phase II of Stories Matter, which will begin on July 15th. Its purpose is to enable increased collaboration among oral historians by providing an intuitive online database tool that can assist group projects and encourage public engagement. Phase II of Stories Matter is scheduled to be completed in December of 2009, with a public launch to follow shortly thereafter."

Among its projects are the Working Class Public History Website and the Sturgeon Falls Mill Closing Project.

Session videos from The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age, Texas A&M University, February 02009

Videos of sessions from The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age, a symposium at Texas A&M University, February 11 to 13, 02009, are available.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, BC, Canada, June 02009

The 2009 Digital Humanities Summer Institute being held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, from June 8 to 12, 02009 is now open for registration.

November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here

The November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here. The focus of this issue is digital scholarly communication.

Roman de la Rose Digital Library

Quoting from the announcement on the DIGLIB mailing list (02008 11 12):

The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are pleased to announce the Roman de la Rose Digital Library available at http://romandelarose.org.

The creation of this resource and the digitization of the manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France was made possible through generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of the Roman de la Rose Digital Library is to create a digital library of all extant manuscript copies of the Roman de la Rose, of which at least 270 are known to exist. We expect to have full digital surrogates of about 150 of these manuscripts available here by the end of 2009. This Library features new content and enhanced functionality, and builds upon the previously developed prototype Roman de la Rose: Digital Surrogates of Medieval Manuscripts. There is an associated blog available at http://romandelarose.blogspot.com

The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, 1846-1871

Reminiscent of the large-scale documentary editions of Presidential papers published in the United States, The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island British Columbia, 1846-1871 was formally launched on November 3, 02008 by the University of Victoria in a former Supreme Court of British Columbia courtroom in the Maritime Museum of British Columbia. I was privileged to have been invited. The Web site carries on and expands upon the work of University of Victoria emeritus professor James Hendrickson who began the monumental task of transcribing all the outgoing and incoming letters (despatches) between the British Colonial Office in London and the colonial governments of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. The initial set of XML-based transcriptions, migrated from an older machine-readable format called Waterloo Script, covers the seminal year of 1858 when the colony of British Columbia was established in response to the Fraser River Gold Rush. The site is still under construction and one important aspect of the despatches, the attachments (usually maps), have yet to be digitized and added. The Colonial Despatches site is a model project in many ways and my hope is that we will see many other examples of its kind in Canada.