Measuring Impact of Digital Repositories

Simon Tanner will offer a sneak peek at the Balanced Value Impact Model 2.0 (BVI Model). Tanner will introduce the Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and link this to his open and collaborative research practices to tell the story of the intellectual development of the BVI Model. He will detail the BVI Model 2.0 to highlight what’s new and how it works. Tanner will relate these changes to his collaboration with Europeana to develop their Impact Playbook and look to the future of that tool.

The session will include time for questions and discussion.

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Simon Tanner is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is a Digital Humanities scholar with a wide-ranging interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches that reflect a fascination with interactions between memory organization collections (libraries, museum, archives, media and publishing) and the digital domain.

As an information professional, consultant, digitization expert and academic he works with major cultural institutions across the world to assist them in transforming their impact, collections and online presence. He has consulted for or managed over 500 digital projects, including digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and has built strategy with a wide range of organizations. These include the US National Gallery of Art and many other museums and national libraries in Europe, Africa, America and the Middle East. Tanner has had work commissioned by UNESCO, the Danish government, the Arcadia Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  He founded the Digital Futures Academy that has run in the UK, Australia, South Africa and Ghana with participants from over 40 countries.

Research into image use and sales in American art museums by Simon Tanner has had a significant effect on opening up collections access and OpenGLAM in the museum sector. Tanner is a strong advocate for Open Access, open research and the digital humanities. Tanner was chair of the Web Archiving sub-committee as an independent member of the UK Government-appointed Legal Deposit Advisory Panel. He is a member of the Europeana Impact Taskforce which developed the Impact Playbook based upon his Balanced Value Impact Model. He is part of the AHRC funded Academic Book of the Future research team.

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Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the encoding data model for a song, with TEI including MEI data. The song shown is When on the Altar of my hand. Facsimile from Early English Books Online.

The scholarship surrounding Lawes’s book and Early Modern song is at the nexus of literature and music and pays careful attention to both the literary and musical aspects of the songs. To reflect this duality in the data model of a digital edition, we use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format for the verse and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format for the notated music. You can find our encoded files on GitHub. Combining the two formats is becoming a fairly established practice (see for example the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum), but is not without challenges as existing tools and workflows are usually focused on either TEI or MEI. The hierarchical nature of these formats also requires one of the two to contain the other or, in other words, take a primary position. We have decide to prioritize TEI, partly because it has a well established metadata header in which we store bibliographical information. The MEI representing the music notation is then embedded within the TEI (see Fig. 1). We have decided to reproduce the underlying lyrics as a TEI-encoded stanza in order to provide our interpretation of how it may appear if formatted as subsequent stanzas often printed after the music.

For some songs, we are also dealing with multiple versions from other sources with or without music. In these cases, we produce a variorum edition, or a presentation of the text that showcases differences across the sources without privileging one over the other. Both TEI and MEI are well equipped formats for modeling textual variance, but both assume that one text will be the main reading text and only variant text will be encoded from other sources. To overcome this apparent limitation, we create a separate TEI/MEI document that only represents a collation; in other words, a document that lists where the differences between the sources of one song are to be located. This allows us to encode each source separately and to the degree of detail that we deem appropriate without worrying about tessellating multiple sources in one place (see Fig. 2). This approach has proven quite effective and I have had the opportunity to apply it to other projects at MITH and beyond, such as Digital Mishnah and the Frankenstein Variorum edition where, together with colleagues at Pittsburgh University and CMU, particularly Prof. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, we have begun to further develop, contextualize, and generalize this approach.

Fig. 2 Diagram of the data model of an hypothetical song with variants, showing three sources (A, B, and C) and a collation containing two variants that identify and connect diverging parts of the sources.

One goal of the Early Modern Songscapes project is to capture song as a multidimensional form, so we are complementing the edition with recorded performances of the songs, including variant version, under the direction of Prof. Katherine Larson (UoT). The musicians are Rebecca Claborn (mezzo-soprano), Lawrence Wiliford (tenor), and Lucas Harris (lute).

The UoT Scarborough Digital Scholarship Unit, under the direction of Marcus Barnes, has provided the backbone for the project through a robust implementation of Fedora for storing the Songscapes data and Islandora for the project website. My focus has been on providing a lightweight viewer for displaying the TEI, MEI, and adding interactivity for exploring variant readings and sources. The viewer is written in React/Redux and uses CETEIcean for rendering the TEI and Verovio for rendering MEI. Both of these tools offer a solution for rendering these data directly in a user’s browser, thus reducing the need for server-side infrastructure for TEI and MEI publications. They also provide isomorphic (that is one-to-one) renderings of the data, which allows to manipulate the rendering as if it were the actual underlying data. This, for example, makes it somewhat simple to write code to follow references from collation documents to the sources according to the variorum edition model described above. You can read more on CETEIcean in Cayless & Viglianti 2018 and on Verovio in Pugin 2106 (pages 617-631).

The first phase of Early Modern Songscapes has culminated with a conference at the University of Toronto, February 8-9 2019. As we plan the next phase, we are gathering user feedback on the site: we invite you to visit songscapes.org and fill in our survey!

Fig. 3 A screenshot of the current prototype showing a variant for the song Venus, redress a wrong that’s done (A Complaint Against Cupid).

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Photo by brewbooks.

The fact is that nearly all printed books now begin—and for many practical purposes end—their lifecycles as digital files that are produced and managed by designers, editors, publishers, packagers, and printers. The printed book that we hold in our hands is just one of the outputs that can be derived from these digital assets, which are also used to produce ebooks and Web-ready texts. In particular, the role of Adobe InDesign and other software tools is not well understood outside of the industry. And yet, this is where the book stops being a manuscript and starts becoming a book, by way of its transformation into a prescribed set of digital assets which in addition to the text may include stylesheets, fonts, metadata, images, and other design elements.

Led by principal investigator Matthew Kirschenbaum, this project represents the first organized attempt to put ambassadors from the scholarly communities traditionally invested in safeguarding and studying the material history of bookmaking into contact and conversation with thought leaders and influencers from the contemporary publishing world. The centerpiece of the project will be a convening to bring those figures together in New York City in early 2018;  Kirschenbaum’s efforts will also be supported by site visits to observe the bookmaking process as it unfolds across different settings, and interviews with industry experts. Findings for scholars, archivists, and publishers will be presented in a white paper made publicly available in late 2018.

“Digital technologies have forever altered publishing workflows,” commented BISG executive director Brian O’Leary. “We’re looking forward to working with Professor Kirschenbaum to explore current practice and its impact on our ability to preserve content for future generations.” “This project represents an exciting extension of MITH’s long-standing interest in preserving born-digital culture,” said Trevor Muñoz, MITH interim director. “We’re delighted to partner in this effort.” Karla Nielsen, curator at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, added, “For a long time publishers’ archives weren’t collected systematically, but now scholars are very grateful for the more complete records of earlier firms that we have, such as those of Cambridge University Press. Research libraries are just beginning to collect born-digital materials produced by publishers and this initiative will help us to understand how to do that so that there is a record of this moment of profound media change.”

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. The Book Industry Study Group is the leading book trade association for standardized best practices, research and information, and events. Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, a past Guggenheim Fellow, and author most recently of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP, 2016).

Inquiries about Books.Files may be sent to Matthew Kirschenbaum.

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COLLEGE PARK — The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) has received a major collection of electronic literature and vintage computer hardware from pioneering hypertext author Bill Bly. Bly’s generous donation includes a rich archive of materials from the early literary hypertext movement, and joins the existing Deena Larsen Collection also housed at MITH. Together, these two collections position MITH as a major center of study for anyone interested in primary source materials–both manuscript and born-digital–from this unique moment in literary and technological history.

“The materials are from the incunabulum period of electronic literature,” says Bly. “Not only are the texts significant—some of which will disappear—but it is difficult to get at what the author intended without the original hardware.” Bly’s collection includes numerous exemplars of hypertext fiction and poetry collected over the years, as well as his own notes and variations for We Descend, his ongoing hyper-fiction, the first volume of which was published by Eastgate Systems in 1997. The collection is particularly rich in materials related to the early Macintosh software HyperCard, used as the platform for dozens of works of early electronic literature.

Notably, the protagonist of We Descend is an archivist. Bly notes that now, “the archive [is] needing to be archived–anticipating it’s own demise and rescue. The archivist is retrieving past lives, constantly having to deal with the degeneration of media. Everyone is dealing with the transmission of the story. The archivist exists on a personal level as opposed to the institutional level, that is, the institutions that sponsor archives but also impose order on them.”

The hypertext experiment originated in the 1980s as a small, closely-knit group of literature enthusiasts, authors, critics, and software developers. Michael Joyce is credited with authoring the first literary hypertext, Afternoon, a story, published by Eastgate in 1990 (though written several years earlier). Bly became hooked on hypertexts after taking “Hypertext Poetry & Fiction” through The New School in New York City. “In one’s mind, text exists differently than the linear structure on the page,” says Bly. “Hypertext is the closest thing we have to a mental structure.”

Speaking fondly, Bly describes the social history of the early hypertext movement, and its tightly knit community. The original culture has changed since hypertexts started migrating to the Web during the early 1990s. Associate Director of MITH Matthew Kirschenbaum remarks, “Hypertext was originally about new forms of narrative story-telling; what is happening on the Web these days often tends to be more visual and cinematic.” Several of the original Eastgate hypertexts are now being reworked for release on the Apple iPad.

Bly is currently completing We Descend, Volume Two. He will be presenting a live demo of the work November 19-20 at Dangerous Readings in Watertown, MA.

“As with the Deena Larsen Collection,” Kirschenbaum says, “we at MITH see Bill’s gift as a living archive, to be accessed, explored, and enjoyed as openly as possible by students and researchers. We will be working to catalog and describe the materials, and we welcome anyone with an interest in exploring the history of hypertext to contact us about a visit.”

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That is why the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, has created Omeka. From the Swahili word meaning “to display” or “to lay out for discussion,” Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for academic work of all kinds, one that bridges the university, library, and museum worlds through–and by helping to advance–a set of commonly recognized web and metadata standards. Omeka is free and open source. It offers low installation and maintenance costs–appealing to individual scholars and smaller cultural heritage projects and institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. It is standards based, extensible, and interoperable–insuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and integration with existing digital collections systems to help digital humanists of all stripes design online exhibitions more efficiently. Omeka brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to digital humanities websites–fostering the kind of user interaction and participation that are central to the mission of digital humanities, and providing the contribution mechanisms, tagging facilities, and social networking tools that audiences are coming to expect.

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The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) allows users with limited technical knowledge to add metadata to text, image, video, and audio files. Users can collaboratively tag a text in TEI, associate XML with time stamps in video or audio files, and mark off regions of an image to be linked to external metadata. With an intuitive, web-based interface, AXE makes the process of preparing online digital editions and archives more efficient and accurate. AXE also facilitates collaboration in the digital humanities by permitting multiple scholars to work on the same document or archive at the same time from various locations, and will track all work so that variant versions can be collated and all versions can be archived. The Ajax XML encoder, with its intuitive Web-based interface, will come as a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been frustrated by text-centric tagging tools which require an expert knowledge of mark-up languages.

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