Confronting the digital: Or how academic history writing lost the plot

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 9-23

  Hitchcock, Tim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Digital history; Digital humanities; OCR; Referencing; Scholarship; Search; Standards

Indexed keywords

EID: 84873650358     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800413X13515292098070     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. In a corporate blog post, on 5 August 2010 (8:26 a.m.), Leonid Taycher, a software engineer employed by Google, claimed there were 129,864,880 books in the world. See Leonid Taycher, 'Books of the World, Stand up and Be Counted! All 129,864,880 of You' (http://booksearch.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html).
2. Google Books Search (http://booksearch.blogspot.co.uk/).
3. The legal mire that has overtaken the Google Books Settlement in the United States is likely to have a significant impact on the development of this new digital environment, but moves in both Europe and the US to create 'national digital libraries' and continuing commercial and state interest in the wider project suggest that there will be no substantial let up in the pace of digitization in the near future. For the issues associated with the Google Books Settlement, see.
4. James Grimmelmann, 'The Elephantine Google Books Settlement', 24 August 2011 (http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=james_grimmelmann).
5. The relatively paucity of non-Western materials available in a digital format is particularly noteworthy, suggesting that the very process of digitization is effectively reproducing a kind of Western cultural hegemony that would not be acceptable if it was a product of selfconscious policy.
6. See Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk/bkshp?hl=en&tab=wp).
7. Early English Books Online (EEBO) (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home).
8. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) (http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/eighteenth-century-collections-online.aspx).
9. The Times Digital Archive (http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times.aspx/).
10. British Library's Newspaper Collections (http://www.bl.uk/welcome/newspapers.html).
11. Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/).
12. Million Book Project (http://archive.org/details/millionbooks).
13. Parliamentary Papers (http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/index.jsp).
14. Nineteenth Century Censuses (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/census-records.htm).
15. The Clergy of the Church of England Database (http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/index.html).
16. Old Bailey Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/).
17. Even the small subset of primary sources for British history from 1500 to 1900 available through the Connected Histories site (http://www.connectedhistories.org/Default.aspx), which currently (6 December 2011) excludes all books and includes only larger collections that meet a minimum standard of academic presentation, runs to over ten billion words of text and 140,000 images. It should be noted that the author has spent the last twelve years helping to create four substantial web resources: the Old Bailey Online.
18. London Lives, 1690-1800, (http://www.londonlives.org/).
19. Connected Histories, and Locating London's Past (http://www.locatinglondon.org/index.html) and is fully implicated in the process and project.
20. This is not to denigrate the many, primarily small-scale, digitization projects led by academics, and generally directed towards addressing specific research questions. Transcribe Bentham (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/).
21. The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1).
22. The Electronic Enlightenment (http://www.e-enlightenment.com/), to take just three examples among many others, represent a high academic standard, created in pursuit of answers to serious academic questions. But, by their nature, and in comparison to the large commercial digitization projects, they represent a small part of a wider online landscape of historical materials.
23. Many of the librarians and archivists involved in the wider process of digitization are employed by universities or major research libraries and would consider themselves 'academics', but the widespread adoption of the term 'alt-ac' (alternative-academic) to describe the careers of the people involved reflects the distance between the professional academic discipline of history and the people most fully engaged in the wider project.
24. See Bethany Nowviskie, '#alt-ac: Alternate Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars', 3 January 2010 (http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/, accessed 4 May 2012).
25. Valerie Johnson and David Thomas, 'New Universes or Black Holes? Does Digital Change Anything?', in Toni Weller (ed.), History in the Digital Age (Oxon. and London, forthcoming 2012).
26. This excludes figures for the British Library (which were not available), and money generated for organizations such as the National Archives by participating in commercial digital projects. It should be noted that even this ten-year total is dwarfed by the amount spent each year supporting more traditional forms of humanist scholarship. 8. See.
27. Nancy L. Maron and Matthew Loy, 'Funding for Sustainability: How Funders' Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources', June 2011, p. 9, note 3 (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/contentalliance/sandrfundingforsustainability.pdf).
28. Of the NOF projects, approximately 15 per cent were located in universities and a further 20 per cent in recognized academic institutions such as the National Archives and British Library, but projects across the programme suffered a similar rate of failure.
29. The Je-S system went live in May 2003, and the first use of the system by the AHRB/C was recorded in June 2005. See Je-S Help (https://je-s.rcuk.ac.uk/Handbook/index.htm#pages/JeSHelpdesk.htm).
30. It is difficult to access local and subject-specific information in this area, but for a general overview of the patterns of concentration of journal publishing across the academy see.
31. Corinne M. Flick (in cooperation with the Oxford Internet Institute), Geographies of the World's Knowledge (Oxford, 2011), http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/convoco_geographies_en.pdf, pp.14-19.
32. Internationally the largest players are Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and Taylor and Francis.
33. The most common system used for this 'graphical mapping' is called Olive. See http://www.olivesoftware.com/.
34. Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz and Pich Hemy Ros, 'Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness', D-Lib Magazine, 15(7/8) (2009), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html.
35. The Burney Collection is being highlighted here only because of the existence of a detailed assessment. It is largely typical of other sites providing OCRd text, and better than many.
36. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection of newspapers (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/elib/databases/newspapers/burney).
37. Daily Advertiser (London, England), Saturday 16 May 1778.
38. Issue 14784, Gale Document Number: Z2000162519.
39. This selection of raw OCR was constructed by stringing together snippets of text exposed as part of the search results in Connected Histories. It is impossible to link directly to this text as the system of licensing used by Gale Cengage embeds local access data within the URL. An accurate transcription of this text would read: '"It is supposed that we have actually 40 Frigates at Sea for the Protection of our Trade. The St. Domingo Fleet is safely arrived at La Rochelle with a rich Cargo.
40. Its Arrival is the more agreeable to the Merchants, as there was not a Ship of the whole Fleet insured. Extract of a Letter from Mr. Coxwood, mate of the Ulster, Victualler from Cork for New-York, dated Boston, March 30.
41. th of January we fell in with an American Privateer, commanded by Captain Bailey, called the Flower of the Sea, of 26 Guns and 180 Men, to which Vessel we were obliged to strike after discharging our Guns, six four Pounders. We were towed into this Place by the Privateer the 23d instant, after a very dangerous Passage, having carried away all our Masts."'
42. According to Wikipedia, the statute acreage of the administrative county of Hertfordshire in 1891 was 406,932. The relevant article footnotes the census report for this date. See 'Administrative counties of England' in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_counties_of_England#Area_and_population, accessed 6 December 2011).
43. Interestingly, more sophisticated users who knew the digital landscape and original sources more fully might have relied on the highly academic and comprehensive edition of this material available through Histpop: The Online Historical Population Reports Project (http://www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/Show?page=Home), a site that gives full access to the original census reports. But if they had done this, they would have been confronted with three different areas for Hertfordshire in 1891 - for the ancient county, the administrative county (used in Wikipedia) and the registration county.
44. See, for example, Arel Dornfest and Tara Calishain, Google Hacks: Tips and Tools for Smarter Searching, 3rd edn (Sebastopol, CA, 2006).
45. David Viney, Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There (London, 2008).
46. For an accessible account of these developments, and of the evolution of the Google algorithm more generally, see Steven Levy, 'Exclusive: How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web', Wired, 22 February 2010 (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/).
47. Google's description of this process makes a positive virtue of its ever hanging results: 'When you perform a search, the results are often displayed with the information: About XXXX results (X seconds). Google's calculation of the total number of search results is an estimate. We understand that a ballpark figure is valuable, and by providing an estimate rather than an exact account, we can return quality search results faster. In addition, when you click on the next page of search results, the total number of search results can change.
48. Google's search index is constantly changing, and your second search results page may come from a slightly different version of the index than the first page.' (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70920).
49. These searches were undertaken from my home computer located in Muswell Hill, UK, on 8 December 2011 and, as explained in the text, cannot be repeated or effectively cited.
50. See Geoffrey Nunberg, 'Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck', Language Log, 29 August 2009 (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701).
51. See the BISG webpage advertising the BISAC subject headings, 2011 edition (http://www.bisg.org/publications/product.php?p=149, accessed December 2011).
52. It is perhaps invidious to point out any single example, but it was only when the Clergy of the Church of England Database project attempted to use the detailed information contained in the Royal Historical Society's Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England (Frederic A. Young, vol. 1, 1979, vol. 2, 1991) that the inconsistent character of many entries became apparent.
53. One looks to the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association or the British Academy, or for a clear steer from the major academic presses and journals.
54. Lewis Mumford, 'The Sky Line "Mother Jacob's Home Remedies"', New Yorker, 1 December 1962, p. 148 (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1962/12/01/1962_12_01_148_TNY_CARDS_000269697).
55. This observation was made as an aside directed at urban planners in a review of a book by Jane Jacobs. It was located following a halfremembered reference in an article in a popular newspaper I have since thrown away, and a Google search on the phrase 'questions that computers can answer'.
56. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London, 2005).
57. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak and Erez Lieberman Aiden, 'Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books', Science (published online ahead of print, 16 December 2010, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full).