DRH 99 Selected papers from Digital Resources for the Humanities 1999

Citation

Holland, M. (2002), "DRH 99 Selected papers from Digital Resources for the Humanities 1999", The Electronic Library, Vol. 20 No. 6, pp. 516-517. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2002.20.6.516.3

Digital Evidence: Selected Papers for DRH2000

Edited by Michael Fraser, Nigel Williamson and Marilyn Deegan

Office for Humanities Communication

London

2001

230 pp.

ISBN 1897791151

£25:00 paperback

Digital libraries, Literature, History, Art

DRH 99 and DRH 2000 comprise selected papers from the Digitisation in the Humanities Conferences. They are numbers 13 and 14 in a series published by the Office for Humanities Communication; more information is available from their Web site (www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/ohc/). DRH 99 contains 11 papers and DRH 2000 contains 20 papers organised into five themes:

1. 1.

   (1) Representing the evidence.

2. 2.

   (2) Presenting the evidence.

3. 3.

   (3) Visual evidence.

4. 4.

   (4) Textual evidence.

5. 5.

   (5) Learning from evidence.

Apart from the obvious theme of digitisation, papers focus on literary subjects and to a lesser extent art and art history. Projects address documents from the thirteenth century, a bibliographic database to support research into the Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, to nineteenth and twentieth century writers Gadós, Flaubert, Mann and Joyce. There is a single paper on broadcast television and radio contributed by the reviewer with colleagues from Bournemouth University.

It is perhaps inevitable that literary texts dominate the proceedings. Digitisation lends itself easily to reproducing copies of documents and to relieving the tedium of analysing text by applying the power of the computer to the task. Disappointing is that digitisation techniques are not applied more often to other forms of historical records such as film, television and radio. Funding bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) have proved willing to fund projects in broadcasting; perhaps it requires the respective academic communities to extend the boundaries of digitisation in the humanities by creating new projects.

Some trends recur across the many projects reported. Most significant are high overhead costs forcing hard choices on projects that set out to digitise whole collections. The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern Tracts for example rationalised their choice from 11,000 to 120 representative texts. Sampling at this level means that the serious scholar may still have to visit physical collections to view the complete record. It raises questions about the role of these projects in relation to collections. In one sense it is an expensive form of marketing, drawing attention to under‐used and under‐supported national collections, or alternatively by putting highly requested items online reducing the burden of physical use of popular collections. Important also is the time scale of digitisation projects. Projects may extend over many years; however, funding sources generally only fund short term. Overwhelming demand for funding will inevitably impose its own limitations. It seems likely that new business models will be needed to pay for the digitisation. Mark Sandler describes one such model, the Early English Books Online (EEBO) project. Established as a partnership between academia (Oxford University and the University of Michigan) and business (Bell and Howell), EEBO invites members of the Association of Research Libraries and others to subscribe to the project over five years receiving texts, with enhanced local rights, as they are digitised.

Digitisation is having its impact on the conduct of scholarship. Dirk Van Hulle uses hypertext as an analogy to understand the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. In literature a new area of genetic study is emerging, described by Alian Goulet. Genetic study focuses on the process of creating published works rather than the final published versions themselves. Genetic editions layer digital copies of early drafts and notes on top of each other finishing with the published version. Papers looking at the use of digital resources in the teaching and research were less convincing, but clearly this is an aspect that will evolve as the canon of digital material expands.

Conferences of this kind are often a vehicle to fulfil commitments to publicise projects to funding bodies. DRH has avoided this trap, balancing scholarship with straightforward reporting of case studies. This is important work. Without it there will be no published record from which to synthesise lessons learned and therefore inform future projects. DRH looks to be an annual event and it is hoped that some of this synthesis will be reflected in future proceedings. Anyone involved in or preparing digitisation projects of either text or images would do well to read these two volumes.