7AAVDH05: Digital Publishing in the Humanities

Readings for this class

• Tanya Clement, Sara Steger, John Unsworth, and Kirsten Uszkalo, “How Not to Read a Million Books” (October 2008)
• Julia Flanders, “Data and Wisdom: Electronic Editing and the Quantification of Knowledge”, Literary and Linguistic Computing 24:1, April 2009, 53–62
• Michael Neuman, “You Can't Always Get What You Want: Deep Encoding of Manuscripts and the Limits of Retrieval”, Research in Humanities Computing, volume 5 (1996), 209–219

In the classroom

Open Google Books and look for books by Jane Austen:

• Which ones you can read entirely?
• Which ones you can only read partially?
• For which one you can read the underlying plain text?
• In which language are they written?

Now go in Europeana and look for books by Jane Austen

• Which ones you can read entirely?
• Which ones you can only read partially?
• For which one you can read the underlying plain text?
• In which language are they written?

Now try to answer to the following questions:

• When the use of Google Books is to be preferred to Europeana? When the contrary?
• Why Europeana is doing what it is doing? Which are the ethical implication?
• Europeana is been thought as the answer to Google Books: in which sense?

Further readings

• Crane, Gregory. What Do You Do with a Million Books? D-Lib Magazine 12.3 (March, 2006).
• Kelly, K. Scan this book . The New York Times (online edition, 14 May 2006)
• Kichuk, Diana. Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO) . Literary and Linguistic Computing 22.3 (2007): 291-303.
• D. Sculley and Bradley M. Pasanek Meaning and mining: the impact of implicit assumptions in data mining for the humanities Literary Linguistic Computing (2008) 23.4 (2008): 409-42
• R. Darnton, Google and the Future of Books , in The New York Review of Books, vol. 56, n. 2, 12 February 2009.
• W. Skidelsky, Google's plan for world's biggest online library: philanthropy or act of piracy? , in The Observer 30 August 2009.