Electronic Scholarship:

New Publishing Formats in the Humanities
By Eric Pumroy

When we talk about the effect that electronic publishing has had on scholarship, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the major changes have come about in the natural and social sciences or in traditional library reference sources, such as encyclopedias and bibliographies. In fact, as information technologies have matured they are showing remarkable potential for changing the way students and scholars in the humanities do their research and teaching. Much of the cutting-edge work is being done at large research universities, but Bryn Mawr is involved in a number of important initiatives as buyer, tester, and creator of electronic texts.

The biggest collection of humanities texts now available over the web is Early English Books Online, a digitized version of approximately 125,000 books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in England or its dependencies before 1700. In response to requests from several faculty members, the library purchased access to this collection last year. Bryn Mawr students and faculty now can read virtually any English published work issued during the early modern period, with pages appearing just as they were printed. What is more, they can read these books from their dorm rooms, offices, or homes at any hour of the day, rather than being tied to a Special Collections Department with limited hours. Associate Professor of English Katherine Rowe, who has been encouraging her students to use EEBO for their projects, sees the increasing availability of online texts as democratizing scholarship, since anyone can now have ready access to early books that previously were available at only a few rare book libraries in the country.

Early English Books Online is only available commercially, but there are many important collections of books and manuscripts that anyone can get to over the web. The oldest of these sites is the Library of Congress American Memory Project, which maintains electronic versions of more than one hundred major collections in American history, some of them held by the Library itself, but many owned by institutions around the country. This is an eclectic collection, a place where you can find abolitionist pamphlets, sheet music, political broadsides, photographs of rural life, and almost anything else having to do with American society and culture. The url is: http://memory.loc.gov

A more focused initiative is The Making of America (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moa.new/), a joint project of the University of Michigan and Cornell University to digitize books printed in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. The Making of America currently includes about 11,000 titles, and is especially rich in texts on education, technology, politics and religion. A similar, but smaller scale project is the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South (http://docsouth.unc.edu/), a source of dozens of hard-to-find nineteenth and early twentieth century books about southern life, including slave narratives, writings of southern women, and accounts of the homefront during the Civil War.
One of the unexpected results of these projects is a dramatic change in the way that the books are used. Many of the books in The Making of America Project had not moved off the shelves in years, but now that they are online they are registering dozens of hits every day. The people reading the texts, of course, are no longer limited to the students and faculty at Michigan and Cornell, but may just as easily include high school students in Philadelphia, journalists in India, or scholars in Poland, as well as students at Bryn Mawr. The effect of the Web has been to dramatically widen the scope of collections a college student now has access to for her research.

While Bryn Mawr is not in a position to create digital collections on the same scale as major research universities, we have begun to work with the Haverford and Swarthmore College libraries to find ways of making our important special collections more widely accessible. Haverford is taking the lead by sponsoring the creation of a digital version of a portion of the Cope-Evans Family Papers in the library’s Quaker Collection. This pilot project is intended to help the tri-colleges figure out how to address the technical problems and to put in place the hardware and software we will need to take on new projects.

In the meantime, we at Bryn Mawr have worked with the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Texts and Images (SCETI) on a special project to digitize one of the college’s Books of Hours, a gorgeous late fifteenth century volume from northern France, donated to the college by Ethelinda Castle, ’08. The impetus for this work came from Assistant Professor of History Michael Powell, who wanted the students in his Medieval Christianity course to have the opportunity of working intensively with an authentic late medieval devotional text. The final product of the class will be a web publication of the manuscript, with the students’ accompanying essays on different aspects of the book. The book, without the essays at this point, can be viewed at Penn’s SCETI site: http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/codex/public/PageLevel/index.cfm?WorkID=105.

Clearly, the internet is living up to its potential for changing the way students and faculty locate and use historical texts. But now, it may be that it will change the way humanities scholars publish, as well. Several important experiments are currently underway to publish new works in history in electronic form, and Bryn Mawr is involved with two of them. The first, Gutenberg-e, is a project of the Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association to publish prize-winning new books in history in electronic form only, and to use the capability of the medium to include documentation and links to supplementary literature, images, music, video, and related web sites. One of the first books selected for Gutenberg-e was The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darien, 1640-1750, by Assistant Professor of History Ignacio Gallup-Diaz. Gutenberg-e is not free, so you will have to come to Bryn Mawr or another subscribing library to read his book.

We are also serving as a test site for a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses to publish electronic versions of the presses’ recent titles. Currently more than 500 titles are available. To view a sample, go to http://digital.library.upenn.edu/ebooks/. In this case, the presses are continuing to publish their books in traditional form alongside the ebooks. The ebooks are not yet generally available outside of Penn and the tri-colleges, since the project is intended to be a means of studying how electronic books are used in colleges and universities.

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