Now I knew from previous visits that the collection contained ms correspondence, Hurd’s commonplace books, printed books he has annotated himself, works annotated by previous owners, as well as various material and written interventions by Richard Hurd Jr. (Hurd’s nephew, secretary, and erstwhile librarian). What I wanted to do is to try to get a sense of how such books and their annotations might relate to each other and how they relate to Hurd’s published output. Now the library has over 3,000 titles, of which quite a number are annotated, so I wanted to track such interactions with a case study of the relations between Hurd’s publication, Moral and Political Dialogues (1759), and the various works by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon held in various editions in his library. But tracking – mapping – the complex relations between these books, their owners, and the annotations became almost impossible in traditional prose description; particularly as the annotations and the interactions were also time-sensitive. What I needed was a visual aid.

At about the same I came across the project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (an inspired title for a project!) The striking way in which the project visually presented data to track a network of literary relationships was an inspiration. I didn’t have such resources at hand, so I opted for a quick and dirty option and tried out some free mind-mapping software. What I produced – for a paper for the Writers and their libraries conference – rendered rather nicely a set of relations between objects and annotations.

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Subsequently, I’ve started experimenting with a piece of software not out of beta yet but which looks fantastic and, more to the point, very easy to use. This is Scapple, designed by the producers of Scrivenor. Details at the literatureandlatte forum.

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What striking is that because Scapple is designed to mimic the rather looser way people actually doodle ideas, it doesn’t require a single starting-point. For a project like mine where I needed to map interactions between objects that have more complex and non-hierarchical relationships, this was ideal. Although I haven’t yet played around with the aesthetic appearance, the tentative reconstruction I’ve begun already looks very different without a centre. At the moment I don’t know if this will ever get beyond a personal tool, but even if that’s all it does, it should enable me to better conceive and represent the idea I began with: a kind of dialogue or virtual conversation between authors and their annotations within a library.

The roundtable panel ‘Compiling the Canon: what can poetic miscellanies tell us? New findings from the Digital Miscellanies Index’ comprised Jennifer Batt, Rosamund Powell, Adam Bridgen and Mark Burden. Jenny Batt – the project’s coordinator – announced the startling fact that the DMI has indexed approximately 1,400 miscellanies from the period. Her own piece exemplified how one would use the DMI by focusing upon Mary Leapor’s poems in various miscellanies; mapping their chronological spread, the source of the poems, and their destination. For example, the biggest number of her poems in the miscellanies were from her first volume of poetry, Poem on Various Occasions (1748). However, her poems also appeared anonymously in some miscellanies, so the DMI also challenges the traditional authorship-centric notions of poetic dissemination, or what Jenny called ‘authorial branding’. Ros Powell’s piece on the mentions of Horace’s Art of Poetry in miscellanies revealed the flexibility of the DMI: she was able to separate mere mentions of or quotations from Horace, translations of Horace, and imitations – whether attributed or unattributed. She was also able to break these varying uses of Horace down into percentages (some nice pie charts too, which I never thought I’d find myself saying in a literary context!). Adam Bridgen fascinatingly concentrated on a surprising and little-studied genre of poem to be found in the miscellanies – the last will and testament. Adam pointed that that the well-known literary genre of the ‘mock testament’ afforded much satiric potential, especially when wielded by Pope and Swift, but what he found in the miscellanies were frequently real wills and testaments rendered in poetic form. The disjunction between form and function in such poems did not necessarily undermine their moral or functional role. However, Adam could not help pointing out that this could go awry and create unintended comic consequences. The final piece by Mark Burden concerned the reconstruction of the reading of dissenting academies and looked to the DMI to be able to aid such research by asking what poetry was being read in the academies. Since I’m a big Defoe fan, I’m going to watch that for what might be revealed in Defoe’s old academy, run by Charles Morton.

The subsequent discussion really brought home the possibilities of the DMI when it is launched, since from these papers it looks like it can enable both close readings and identify larger literary-cultural patterns. Moreover, the DMI has a striking potential for shifting our notions of what was popular, how authors disseminated their work, and even how we conceive reading practices in the period. With that in mind, I was looking forward to the opportunity to play with the early test version of the DMI search interface. All I can say is that – even in this early and not fully integrated version – it was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the final version when it is launched.

The DMI blog can be followed here.

This review can now also be found on the BSECS online reviews page.

The first thing I’ll be shouting about is a screen-cast tool. It occurred to me that a good way to introduce users to the blog – how to navigate the blog, how specific features work, or how links might be used – would be to put a screen cast in there. I first tried using QuickTime player but ended up with a huge file and in a format that my basic free WordPress package couldn’t upload. Luckily a colleague mentioned Jing. This is a really easy to use tool that allows you to record screencasts with audio commentary: when you open it a sun-like icon sits in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen. The downside with Jing is that the maximum record time is 5 minutes (though there’s a handy countdown timer for you). In practice, however, this is a positive since it limits your screencast to the essential point and to a specific task: reactions to them have been good. But the really big advantage is that your site does not have to host the file. Jing uploads your recording to Screencast.com: the URL to your screencast can then be simply embedded in your site.

The problem with my blog coping (or not) with complex files came up again when I wanted to upload an audio recording of a lecture. Having recorded it on Garageband, the resultant file was – you guessed it – huge, and in a format once again that my WordPress package could not upload. The answer to the problem lay in another sharing-type tool. SoundCloud seems primarily intended for musicians to upload and share music, but (again thanks to a colleague for pointing this out) it was useful for sharing any audio files, including lectures. You can record direct to SoundCloud, but having already recorded my lecture I wasn’t about to do it over again, so SoundCloud also allowed me to upload my audio file.  The result was a URL to my audio file that I then embedded in my blog.

Of course, more sophisticated blog packages might be the way forward, but for the moment these cloud-based sharing services are easy-to-use and attractive options for hosting more complex media.

Here’s a view of Cripplegate, or ‘Creplegate Parish’ in Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of the cities of London and Westminster (1720, 2 vols), courtesy of The Grub Street Project (click to see a zoom-able image):

As Rogers argues, Defoe’s honorary membership of the Dunces club owes much to his beginning and ending his life within the purlieu of that home of the Dunces, Grub Street (Grub Street, 311-327). On Strype’s 1720 edition of Stow’s Survey (above), Grub street runs roughly North-South between and parallel to Moore Lane and White Cross Street. According to John R. Moore (Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World, 3) Defoe’s father ran a business from Fore Street: on the Strype map this began at St. Giles, ran into Moore Street which then became Posterne Street at its eastern end. The minister of St. Giles, Samuel Annesley, was praised in an elegy by Defoe in 1697. In the section of John Rocque’s A New and Accurate Survey of the cities of London and Westminster (1746), below, you can also see Grub Street running North off Fore Street (via Old Bailey Online, images courtesy of Motco Enterprises Limited Ref: http://www.motco.com):

In the last months of his life Defoe was hiding from creditors, and between August 1730 and April 1731 he took lodgings in Ropemaker’s Alley, in the decidedly mixed environs of Cripplegate. Ropemaker’s Alley was just a few streets East of White Cross Alley where his wife, Mary, had property and Max Novak suggested that this might have enabled Defoe to keep in touch with his family (Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, 702). Ropemaker’s Alley cannot be seen in Strype’s Map: it is just North of the City Walls in the area known as the ‘Freedoms’. If you look on the Strype map it would be just above and just outside the far North-West corner of Cripplegate ward. On the next section of Rocque’s 1746 map, below, you can see it fairly clearly as a thin street running North-West from Finsbury, bordering Moorfields (‘a moorish rotten Ground’, Strype, 1.70). South East off Finsbury and below Moorfields was Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam. The dotted line represents the boundary chains of the City.

Strype describes Ropemaker’s Alley, in ‘Cripplegate Ward without the Wall’, as ‘pretty broad, with several Garden Houses, which are well built and inhabited’, which sounds rather genteel. Nearby, however, alleys and streets were ‘meanly built and inhabited’ and ‘very mean’ (Strype, 1:92) and the proximity to Grub Street would have confirmed for many Defoe’s association with the profession of hacks. Defoe died on the 24th or the 25th April 1731 and was buried in Bunhill Fields, just North from Chiswell street, and which is now the location of the nineteenth-century memorial to Defoe.

Chris started with the example the data produced by astrophysical research: CERN, for example, produces hundreds of terabytes of data per second during its experiments (Terabyte = c.1000 Gb). This is ‘Big Data’ indeed and pushes at both the limits of computing and the funding of such research. As an answer to the processing and the funding of digging such large amounts of data, crowdsourcing produces a very rich dataset. Involving multiple readers of data, crowdsourcing enables a high level of crosschecking and has been generating original knowledge and insight.

Chris then enumerated a number of examples of science-related projects that use communal collaboration to dig data; the first of which was Galaxy Zoo which analyses data from the Hubble space telescope. Galaxy Zoo makes it easy for non-academics to take part: as you can see on the page that asks for your help classifying types of galaxies, it is as easy as clicking a button. This is a very important feature of getting communal participation: make it too difficult at the first step and you’ve lost your potential researcher. Chris argued that the key to people’s participation in crowdsourcing research like this was motivation: after a motivation survey was conducted that asked what kind of involvement people preferred the largest proportion voted to ‘contribute’. It reflected, he suggested, a powerful desire for people to own their research. Indeed, that first step led on to people producing their own specialised communities (and their own online forums) within the larger Galaxy Zoo community. In most areas of new research there are typically a number of known unknowns, so it was also key to produce task-specific fields of enquiry, managing the kind of questions you want crowdsourced.

The extension of Galaxy Zoo to encompass a number of new areas of large-scale projects resulted in the umbrella project Zooniverse. Chris warned not to ignore the problems of scale and specifically not to underestimate the potential numbers of contributors: across its various projects Zooniverse currently has 666,074 people taking part (Galaxy Zoo on its own has had around 250,000 people involved so far). While the project is dominated by astrophysics (five  projects based on data supplied by space telescopes and satellites) it also includes humanities-orientated projects: transcribing papyrus documents in Ancient Lives, interpreting whale song Whalefm (‘Whalefm’), and analysing historical climate data Old Weather. Old Weather uses the meticulously recorded weather data contained in Royal Navy ships’ logs dating back to the eighteenth century. What’s particularly interesting in this project is that the ships’ logs also include a huge variety of the day-to-day details of shipboard life – anything, in fact, that particular duty officer chose to write down. This data is also included in the project’s database and is fully searchable, so the community is engaging with research well beyond the confines of climatology.

Chris then moved on to discuss a variety of other humanities-focused crowdsourced projects, including the Bodleian library’s project on musical scores What’s the Score. Commenting again on the issue of building motivation, Chris commented that the most successful crowdsourcing projects do not face users with tutorials but use mini-help boxes supplying context as they go long: ‘dump them into the deep end’ he suggested! Indeed, the New York Public library’s project to transcribe thousands of restaurant dishes on its huge collection of historical menus is a good example. Participation in the What’s on the Menu project starts with just the click on one button (they’re up to over a million of dishes). Crucial, then, it to ensure that results are immediately obvious and tangible and that engagement with the wider community is easy. The Ancient Lives project (under the Zooniverse umbrella) involves transcribing ancient papyrus and uses a basic on-screen interface like a transcribing keyboard. It also includes a feature called ‘Talk’ – one click from the interface to engage in immediate responses to a particular image one is working on.

This lead Chris to argue that perhaps ‘crowdsourcing’ may not be the right way of conceptualising the kind of work done by such communal research and suggested that gaming theory might be more applicable to certain projects: an alternative way to imagine the motivation and rewards of crowdsourcing. Examples here include Fold it: a game to research protein molecular structures, which is, it has to be said, complex and expensive. Similar, but much more user-friendly and addictive looking, is DigitalKoot. At first glance this involves two games, ‘Mole Bridge’ and ‘Mole Hunt’, but they are in fact programs designed by the National Library of Finland to transcribe 19^th Finnish-language newspapers: as you play you transcribe. Turning analysis into gaming is obviously attractive and involves a shift in motivation. Similarly, the communal engagement with the SETI project (the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) offers various badges depending on what you have found, from interesting signal to an actual alien. However, this exemplifies the potential problems in gaming and motivation: unsurprisingly no one has yet got the top badge in SETI. In short, Chris argued, don’t replace authentic experience and meaningful participation with goals. Instead, if we wanted to design projects around crowdsourcing, he reminded us that the people who want to get involved in such communal research are specialists in something: build on that.

If we want to create a parallel learning space (and I use the spatial metaphor advisedly) to the space of the lecture or seminar or tutorial – and I think we should – then I’ve come to conclusion that we should move away from, or provide something else other than, the VLE / CMS. I’m perfectly aware that the major providers have been adding a huge variety of platforms to mirror the direction of web 2.0, but mine and my colleagues’ attempts to use the in-built blogs or the wiki packs have not been successful. This is partly to do with the clunkiness of the interface: it’s not intuitive, so students get caught up in the mechanics at the expense of the purpose of the exercise. But it’s also to do with the institutional effect of the VLE. I recently asked my class on eighteenth-century fiction about what kind of digital / online forum they would prefer if they wanted a ‘space’ parallel to the seminar and they overwhelmingly voted for something outside the VLE (they actually voted for Facebook because it was something most were familiar with). Recently, Carrie Shanafelt posted an adroit series of observations on using wikis in the classroom and, in particular, the negative effects of compulsion which I think my own observation on the institutional effect of the VLE / CMS parallels.

My thoughts have been also catalysed by an ongoing experiment to develop (with the help of Gavin Wilshen – thanks!) a blog-site for an MA programme. The potential opportunities for a properly interactive interface between students and tutor are underlined by the ability for tutors and students to post a continuous series of news and commentary and links to create an ongoing conversation around the topics of the course that is parallel to – and to an important extent – outside the space of the institutional face of the VLE.

I certainly thinking that some form of free blogging software is the way forward. So, right now I’m considering what particular platform might best enable a more intuitive way for my undergraduate students to interact with the materials and the topics of my modules in an online space outside or parallel to the classroom, but perhaps also outside the VLE. TBC …

I was especially intrigued, in the roundtable ‘Digital Humanities and the Archives’, by Randall Cream’s (West Chester) call for digital archives to try to mimic the joyful moment of “serendipitous discovery” in traditional archives: such “interpretive moments” produced through unexpected answers to “unthought” problems may be difficult to reproduce in digital archives which depend so much upon naming, cataloguing, and tagging. Michael Gavin addressed how one manages the digitization of plays, with the special nature of a play as text and as a theatrical performance. For Michael Gavin, this is not addressed in the current tagging models of TEI, and outlines how he modified the tagging to produce an archive whose searches can be sensitive to these two play-contexts. Clearly, all were agreed that the move towards semantic tagging would enable a more human and sustainable interaction with digital data (semantic tagging, using XML for example, has the ability to describe concepts and meanings; as opposed to HTML which describes the nature of the document and its relation to other documents. If anybody wants to, I’m perfectly willing to be corrected on this very rough definition). In the ‘Poetry and the Archive’ roundtable, questions of use and searchability were again implicit. Jennifer Batt’s (Oxford) description of how the Digital Miscellanies Index could be searched was a good example of a digital resource that, perhaps paradoxically, is a more open-ended research tool: since this is in index of first and last lines and not a digital archive of texts, researchers are perhaps left to their own intuition. It is, of course, arguable: both Andreas Mueller (Worcester, UK) and Kyle Roberts (Loyola, Chicago), in the panel ‘Digital Approaches to Library History’, outlined digital archives that were, in effect, archives with a thesis and so imagined ways of searching that would be directed towards research problems specific to their archives (in this case, library collections that are extant or are now dispersed). Roberts, on the Dissenting Academies Online project, aimed to create a “virtual library” system able to comprehend multiform library catalogues and records including author catalogues, short list catalogues, borrowing registers for 12,000 titles, 45,000 borrowings and over 600 borrowers. What was described was a process of tagging that enables the user to track borrowing by individual “borrower profiles” and the borrowing of individual books; profiling the development and use of a particular library collection over time; and to reveal shelving habits and systems. Mueller’s collaboration with the Hurd Library (the still-extant library of Bishop Richard Hurd (1720-1808)) also aimed at a “virtual” library, but by through digital visualization. Using shelving catalogues and the few surviving original shelf marks together with digital images of the shelves and a digital schematic loaded with data may enable users to research how this man of letters interacted, not only with the books in his collection, but also  with the space of his library. The data mapped into the visualization would be garnered from Hurd’s annotations, letters and entries in his commonplace books. While I have to declare an interest in the Hurd Library collaboration, it seems to me that these two projects have an important contribution to make in rethinking library history.

But design is only one half of the process, and while designing digital archives involves thinking carefully about the questions a user asks of the archive, two panellists on the ‘Digital Humanities and the Archives’ roundtable raised interesting questions about the ways and results of searching a digital archive for the user’s perspective (in both cases here, this was ECCO). Bill Blake (NYU) asked “what makes a good keyword search”, and produced a list of popular search terms (“slavery” coming top). He suggested that many users had an impulse to “retrieve” rather than “search” and that the poorest keyword search terms effectively reproduced what was in the archive (one of the most popular search terms “slavery” was a good example of this). He argued that the best searches operated on a conceptual level. Indeed, that is what I’ve been training my own students to do, many of whose first try at ECCO was using a broad topic-based search term: they discover that the results of such search terms are useless and relatively quickly begin to think about the processes involved in deciding on a better search term (a factor I thought Bill Blake’s paper rather underplayed). Sayre Greenfield (Pittsburgh) posed a rather different problem with search results: what about “interpreting lack of results”? He argued that one can only “confirm the validity of negative results” by comparison to positive results elsewhere. Using the example of a phrase search “Ay, there’s the rub” resulted in only two (!) hits in ECCO; searching the Burney Collection resulted in a much larger number of hits, evidence that in the eighteenth century this particular phrase of Shakespeare’s inhabited the “cultural micro-climate” of journalism and not literary discourse (ECCO doesn’t include journals and newspapers).

Managed serendipity anyone?