L-100. Digital Approaches to Bibliography & Book History - Advance Reading List

• Preliminary Advices

  We expect that this class will include students with a range of backgrounds and expertise. This reading list is meant to provide at least the beginnings of a common set of concepts and vocabulary for the class. There is a good chance, however, that you will see some items on the list below with which you’re already very familiar. If that’s the case, you should certainly move on to things you don’t already know. (Bibliographers likely don’t need to review Gaskell any more than catalogers need to review the MARC specification. Developers might need only a quick glance at the d3.js documentation, while others might stare at it for a long time in perplexity.)

  Readings marked with an asterisk should be considered required for all students. Other readings may be considered “Recommended,” with the understanding that you should prioritize those recommended readings that are in fields least familiar to you.

• Bibliography and Library Cataloging

  Alston, Robin. “The History of ESTC.” Age of Johnson 15 (2004): 269-329. Available online (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine) at https://web.archive.org/web/20090518013849/http://www.r-alston.co.uk/review.htm

  Amory, Hugh. “Pseudodoxia Bibliographica, or When is a Book Not a Book? When It’s a Record.” The Scholar & the Database: Papers Presented on 4 November 1999 at the CERL Conference Hosted by the Royal Library, Brussels. Ed. Lotta Hellinga, 2 (2001): 1-14. Available online at http://documents.cerl.org/publications/cerl_papers_ii.pdf

  *Ascher, J. P. “Progressing Toward Bibliography; or: Organic Growth in the Bibliographic Record.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage 10.2 (2009): 95-110.

  Blayney, Peter W. M., The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991). In his comments on the reading list for Rare Book School’s course in Analytical Bibliography, Stephen Tabor calls Blayney’s slim book (available from the Folger Library’s online shop), “Page for page, [perhaps] the best introduction to the bibliography of early modern books ever written.” Like Stevenson’s The Problem of the Missale Speciale (below), this provides a view of the applications of methods in analytical bibliography that can now be assisted by computers. Blayney’s book is slim and written for a non-specialist audience (or, rather, provides a surprisingly gentle introduction to specialists’ questions for readers who thought they were just buying a souvenir).

  Bowers, Fredson. Principles of Bibliographic Description. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1994. Students interested in a more extended treatment of the differences among edition, impression, issue, and state could read chapter 2. Students wishing to deepen, solidify, or refresh their understanding of the collational formulae used in descriptive bibliographies could consult chapters 5 and 7. Bowers may be a bit much to try to undertake solo: Rare Book School offers two separate classes in descriptive bibliography that grapple at length with the issues discussed in this book. If you find it overwhelming, don’t despair. But do read Gaskell.

  Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995. Recommended for students without much prior experience in descriptive or analytical bibliography. Gaskell provides a clear, manageable introduction to matters of physical bibliography. Key chapters for the hand-press period (before 1800) include “Composition,” “Imposition,” and “Presswork.” For the crucial distinctions among edition, impression, issue, and state, see “Identification,” pp. 313–20. For a serviceable crash course in understanding collational formulae, see pp. 328–332. (To go whole hog, see Bowers.)

  *Greg, W.W.  “What is Bibliography?” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 12 (1911–13): 39–53.  As the name suggests, problematizes the concept of Bibliography as a ‘science’ that must be defined. Recommended for all students. Available online at: http://library.oxfordjournals.org/content/TBS-12/1/39.full.pdf

  *International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Final Report (2009). Of particular interest are chapters 3, 4, and 5.

  *Library of Congress. Bibliographic Framework as a Web of Data: Linked Data Model and Supporting Services (2012). BIBFRAME is positioned as a replacement for MARC.

  Library of Congress. MARC Standards. For a high-level overview of MARC, see http://www.loc.gov/marc/96principl.html. Students who are unfamiliar with MARC will also find it illuminating to look into the details of at least a selection of MARC bibliographic fields (e.g., 100, 245, and 260): http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/

  *McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapter 1 is essential reading for all students.  Available online at: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/98031000.pdf. Entire book is worth a read for those interested in bibliography in general and beyond the study of rare books.

  McKitterick, David. “‘Not in STC’: Opportunities and Challenges in the ESTC.” The Library 6.2 (2005): 178–194.

  Stevenson, Allan. The Problem of the Missale Speciale. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1967. This text provides one of the most complete records of a thorough application of Analytical methods to bibliographic studies. Pay particular attention to Chapters 1–3, which describe examination methodologies (applied by Stevenson and others by hand) that can now be digitally assisted.

  *Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing,” Studies in Bibliography 30 (1977): 1–56. Available online.

  Weiss, Adrian. “Font Analysis as a Bibliographical Method: the Elizabethan Play-Quarto Printers and Compositors.”  Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 95–164.

• Digital Surrogates of Printed Books

  *Gadd, Ian. “The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online.” Literature Compass 6.3 (2009): 680–92.

  Jackson, William A. “Some Limitations of Microfilm.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 35 (1941): 281–88.

  Kichuk, Diana. “Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO).” Literary and Linguistic Computing: Journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing 22.3 (2007): 291–303.

  *Martin, Shawn. “EEBO, Microfilm, and Umberto Eco: Historical Lessons and Future Directions for Building Electronic Collections.” Microform and Imaging Review 36.4 (2007): 159–64. Available online at: http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/66/

• Digital Methods

  Center for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), Manchester. Multi-Spectral Imaging page:https://chiccmanchester.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/spectral-imaging-chicc/.

  Cosentino, Antonino.  “Panoramic Infrared Reflectography: Technical Recommendations.”  International Journal of Conservation Science, Volume 5, Issue 1, January-March 2014: 51-60.  Provides a technical review of a low-cost (relatively) method for setting up a local Multi-Spectral system.  Available at: http://www.ijcs.uaic.ro/public/IJCS-14-05-Cosentino.pdf.

  Cosentino, Antonino.  “Macro Photography for Reflectance Transformation Imaging: A Practical Guide to the Highlights Method.” E-conservation Journal 1, 2013, pp. 70-85.  Available at: http://www.e-conservation.org/issue-1/20-macro-photography-for-reflectance-transformation-imaging.

  Bergman, Uwe. “X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging of the Archimedes Palimpsest: A Technical Summary.” Available online at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/gen/com/images/technical%20summary_final.pdf.

  Kelly, J.S. and Lindblom, B.S. Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents. Taylor & Francis: New York, 2006.  Read chapter 14 only.

  *Salerno, E., Tonazzini, A., and Bedini, L. “Digital image analysis to enhance underwritten text in the Archimedes Palimpsest.” International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) 9:2–4 (April 2007): 79–87.

  *Stahmer, Carl. “Digital Analytical Bibliography: Ballad Sheet Forensics, Preservation, and the Digital Archive.” Forthcoming, Huntington Library Quarterly. Available online at: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/carlworking/stahmer_digital_forensics.pdf.

  Torabi, Katayoun, Jessica Durgan, and Bryan Tarpley. “Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M University: Using Aletheia to Train Tesseract.” ACM Press (2013).

• Some Digital Bibliographical/Book Historical Projects (A not-especially-systematic starter list)

  Much of our discussion will use the work being done around the English Short Title Catalogue and the Early Modern OCR Project as a case study in some of the issues that surround digital approaches to bibliography and book history, so all students should spend some time looking at those sites. Students are encouraged to browse other sites listed here, as well, to get a sense of different approaches that different projects have taken.

  Atlas of Early Printing: http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu

  Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads Online: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

  Dr. Williams’s Center for Dissenting Studies Dissenting Academies Online: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html

  Note, too, their use of the open source Integrated Library System Koha to recreate holdings and borrowing records for the libraries under consideration, available at: http://vls.english.qmul.ac.uk

  *Early Modern OCR Project: http://emop.tamu.edu

  Early Modern Print Project: http://earlyprint.wustl.edu/

  English Broadside Ballad Archive: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu

  *English Short Title Catalogue: http://estc.bl.uk

  Incunabula Short Title Catalog: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html

  Short Title Catalogue, Flanders (STCV): http://www.vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheek.be/en/stcv

  Short Title Catalogue, Netherlands (STCN): http://www.kb.nl/en/organisation/research-expertise/for-libraries/short-title-catalogue-netherlands-stcn

  Universal Short Title Catalog: http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php

  Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD 16):  www.gateway-bayern.de/index_vd16.html

  Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD 17): http://www.vd17.de

  Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines, http://viraltexts.org. See, in particular, a paper on their duplicate detection methods: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf.

• Linked Open Data libraries

  British National Bibliography: http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html#basicbnb

  OCLC Worldcat: http://oclc.org/data/data-sets-services.en.html

  VIAF www.viaf.org

  Library of Congress Linked Data Linked Data Services: http://id.loc.gov/

• Toolkit of existing and soon-to-be-released applications

  http://dirtdirectory.org/ – A directory of DH tools

  http://palladio.designhumanities.org/#/ – a visualization platform that requires already structured data (spreadsheet).

  http://bookworm.culturomics.org/ – visualizes data from a text library (xml or ascii).

  http://d3js.org/ –  a .js package for visualizing semi-structured data. Uses document DOM (html, xml, etc.) as basis for visualization.

  http://voyeurtools.org/ – you supply texts by URL list and it grabs them, does some DOM crawling and LSA to extract data, and then visualizes.

  http://www.juxtasoftware.org/ – collation tool

  https://www.zotero.org/ – annotation

  http://cdh.sc.edu/projects/paragon – USC Paragon visual collation tool

  http://traviz.vizcovery.org/ – TraVis is JS Library for text graphing and collation

  http://visualizingvariation.ca/ – Visualizing Variation is a set of tools for visualizing textual variatons.

  http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html – A host of tools for analyzing and comparing texts sets.

  https://code.google.com/p/wordsimilarity/ – a toolset for visualization semantic structure and word use patterns of texts.  Can be used as an attribution discernment tool when applied across a corpus.

  http://jonreeve.com/dev/etym/etym.php – vectors words in a text to origin languages.

  http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml – Stanford Named Entitiy Recognizer.

  https://www.overviewproject.org/ – Uses topic modeling to order/cluster texts into groups by semantic similarity.

  http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature.htm – performs a stylistic analysis of texts with an eye towards attribution.

  http://tapor.ca/ – a large, online toolset of text analysis tools.

  http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/index.php – java toolset for topic modeling and clustering.