Enfilade

In yesterday’s NY Times, Patricia Cohen addresses the rise of digital research tools, including Mapping the Republic of Letters:

Patricia Cohen, “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” The New York Times (16 November 2010)

A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have. . . .

Last year the National Endowment for the Humanities spent $2 million on digital projects. One of the endowment’s grantees is Dan Edelstein, an associate professor of French and Italian at Stanford University who is charting the flow of ideas during the Enlightenment. The era’s great thinkers — Locke, Newton, Voltaire — exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire alone wrote more than 18,000. . . .

The full article is available here»

The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive, from 1665 to 2010 inclusive, will be free to view until 30 November 2010. Notes and Records of the Royal Society and the eighteenth-century volumes of The Philosophical Transactions may be useful for some Enfilade readers. Both are available through JStor, but such periods of free, fully open access are useful for a much larger audience.

The Benefits of Traditional Indexing versus Free-Text Searches

The Burlington Magazine has produced its own index with content up to December 1997. The editor of the Index, Barbara Pezzini, outlines some of the advantages it holds over JStor (from a recent discussion at ARLIS-L). To use the index, register at http://index.burlington.org.uk/ and a password will be emailed to you.

Illustrations
1) In the Burlington Index you can search for illustrations, which have been indexed and are vocabulary controlled. In JStor you can free-text search for captions, but in many captions the name of the artist is not included (especially in issues up to the 1970s), and when the artist is included, names are often cited with various and inconsistent spellings: i.e. Roger de La Pasture for Rogier Van Der Weyden, John Van Eyck for Jan Van Eyck, Baciccio for Gaulli, etc.
2) Illustrations in the Burlington Index can be browsed according to media and artists, and artist searches can be refined for works attributed to artists, formerly attributed, and a list of 10 other roles. For instance, one can search for prints after Raphael, for paintings formerly attributed to Giotto, Drawings from the circle of Michelangelo etc. This is simply not possible to do in JStor. This makes the Burlington digital photographic index, where users can search for images that appeared linked to exhibitions or in the art market, which then can be used to establish provenance and attribution history of works.
Content
1) In the Burlington Index there is the opportunity to browse a complete census of all the contributors who wrote for the Burlington Magazine. Especially in the first fifty years of publications, many contributors signed articles with their initials only. In the Index it has been taken great care to associate those initials with authors, whereas on JStor the initials RF and Roger Fry are quoted as two different authors. This is particularly important when establishing bibliographies or reconstructing the critical personality of an author.
2) As for the illustrations, the contents indexed are vocabulary  controlled. As above, many artists’ names have inconsistent spelling and variations; in the Burlington Index they are cited consistently and linked to the Getty Ulan thesaurus to facilitate searching.
3) The keywords are vocabulary controlled as opposed to a free text search. For instance, there could be articles of Chinese Aesthetics where the word ‘Aesthetics’  is never used and so it would be missed, whereas in the Burlington, articles on Chinese aesthetics have been clearly indexed as such. The Burlington really surpasses JStor in this more ‘general keywords’ search. For instance, if you try to search for ‘museums architecture’ in JStor (Burlington Magazine 1903/03-1977/12), you obtain 1045 results, of which the first two are already false hits. In the Burlington Index, you will have 22 results of which only one is a false hit. Even more blatant the results for ‘National Gallery architecture’: over 1,500 hits in Jstor (of which 99.9% are false) and 4 true hits in the Burlington Index.
4) In the Burlington Index, searches can be highly refined. For instance, you can specify if you want to see results only pertaining to Vasari as an artist (opposed to a source) or Henry VII as patron (opposed to a simple subject) or Empoli as the artist Empoli as opposed to the town in Italy.
5) In the Burlington Index you can browse critical lists of museums, private galleries, artists, collectors, and patrons. This allows the user to gauge the depth of the indexing and makes the structure of the system more transparent.

These are all examples of differences between indexing and free-text searching. Then there are some limitations pertinent to JStor; the most annoying for me is that all the articles in one page have the same code, so that, say you are searching for Picasso, you have a list of all the articles present in one page, even if only one of them has got the reference Picasso in them.
Lastly, there is one thing that Jstor does better than the Burlington because it is a free-text search. If you are studying a minor personality, say the painter Nina Hamnett, JStor will give you all mentions (and some more, see point above) whereas in the Burlington, you’ll have only the most important critical citations.

From Mark Curran at the University of Leeds:

As we are now less than a year away from the public release of our database, we would like to draw your attention to the existence of the AHRC-funded French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794 project. Our team would be especially grateful if you could take the time to look at our project website and post feedback on our blog at c18booktrade.wordpress.com.

Our project uses the archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) to trace the passage of over 400,000 copies of around 4,000 books across eighteenth-century Europe, from London to Lisbon, Moscow to Rome. It reconstructs, where possible, the STN’s entire trade with its vast network of clients. We hope that it will be a major research and teaching tool of interest to all eighteenth-century and book-history scholars, especially those interested in the dissemination of works and ideas, the comparative history of the book and cross-cultural transfer.

Moreover, we have extensive plans to expand our platform to a broader c18 book history resource that would be extensively collaborative. Between now and the public release of the database in the summer of 2011, we are especially keen to forge links with specialists in the field with competences in online c18 databases (especially those looking to develop c18 book history platforms) and GIS in the historical context, as well as scholars working on the late-eighteenth century book trade, and particularly the Société typographique de Neuchâtel or their many clients. Because of the scale and richness of this project, we are keen to assist research already in progress, and have already been able to give extensive assistance to other scholars. So if you are interested in any of aspect of our project or plans, please get in touch,

Thanks in advance,
Mark Curran, m.d.curran@leeds.ac.uk
Research Fellow, University of Leeds