The EEBO database consists of thousands of early
titles originally published between 1475 and 1700 (the periods covered
in the short-title catalogs of Pollard & Redgrave and Wing), which
were formatted onto microfilm in the 1930s by the University of Michigan
and have since been digitized. After a centuries-long journey through
manuscript, print, microfilm, and digital media, the text images are
sometimes poor in quality and therefore hard to read. Below is an
example of the kind of “show-through” you can find in an EEBO document
(this is taken from the 1644 edition of John Milton’s
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce:
Despite these occasional exigencies, EEBO is ultimately an invaluable
resource, and it continues to grow. Beginning in 1999, a collaborative
effort between ProQuest LLC, the University of Michigan, and Oxford
University known as the TCP (Text Creation Partnership)
began to key the full texts of first-editions in order to make them
searchable by keyword. Now in its second phase, the TCP seeks to bring
its total to 70,000 titles and includes the collaboration of over 150
libraries. I’ve had the pleasure to hear Martin Mueller speak recently
on EEBO, and I share his enthusiasm for a project that certainly has its
“noise,” but that probably promises more good than ill. In fact, it
opens up a new generation of scholars to the textual and editorial
practice that has been mostly taken for granted in the academy for
decades. It
does matter what editions we read.
And yet. We must temper our enthusiasm, for although
EEBO is an invaluable resource, it does not and will not replace
archival research. At least, not yet. There are physical aspects of rare
books that cannot be fully conveyed through these digitized microfilm
copies, such as watermarks, physical dimensions, and bindings, each of
which offer important clues about the production, consumption, and
circulation of a given book. Additionally, EEBO images (often from
copies in the British Library and the Huntington Library) represent a
very small sample of the surviving copies of a given publication. Far
from being identical, copies of early books often have very subtle
differences in terms of press variants and error corrections.
Fortunately, scholars and librarians are becoming increasingly aware of
the value of retaining “duplicate” copies of early books in the effort
to digitize them. Claire Stewart recently pointed me toward this HathiTrust duplicates report,
which acknowledges the value of “duplicates” for scholars in certain
fields (see p. 6). It’s my belief that the effort to digitize our
cultural heritage will lead us back toward the material, the physical,
and the artifact, and I’m thinking more about this after reading Bethany Nowviskie’s MLA 2013 paper, published just yesterday.
EEBO is not alone in its home-delivery of rare books
to readers and researchers. Other projects including GoogleBooks,
HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive contain millions of printed books
from earlier eras, and in some cases allow readers to download the whole
artifact. I want to use the rest of my time here to show some of the
potential and limitations of the Internet Archive, however, mainly in
order to call attention to some of its unusual features. Here is what
you find when you search for John Milton’s
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce:
a copy of the 1645 pirated edition held by the Boston Public Library. I
came across this in November while researching Milton’s pamphlets:
The Internet Archive allows you to do with this book some of the same
things you can do in EEBO. For instance, you can page through the
artifact in its entirety; you can download it to your computer; you can
peruse the ASCII text (although EEBO’s TCP project currently only has
available first-edition keyed texts, so this one would not be there).
However, this online archive allows you to do some different things as
well that come slightly closer to the archival visit. For instance, the
images of the artifact appear in color, as opposed to black-and-white
(although you have the choice to download the PDF here in color or in
black-and-white). The resolution of the images is not excellent. There
is, however, a two-page layout and a page-turning animation effect that
you can opt for, which I have found found for modern texts in iBooks,
but less commonly among early modern digital archives. You can also
“play” the book as a slideshow and watch the pages turn rhythmically,
one after another. It’s a bit mesmerizing. I admit I’m not sure how
useful it is to be able to “play” and “pause” a book like this, though.
Below is an image of the “page-turn,” although you have to see it in action to really get the full effect.
The final aspect of this interface I’ll consider here is perhaps among
the most promising, but the least successful. If you press the sound
button in the top-right corner, you can hear a simulated, female voice
read the text. This could be a useful feature, but the OCR delivery of
the text is confused by the typography of this early modern book, and
systematically garbles the “long s” into an “f” sound. There are other
problems with it as well. Olin Bjork and John Rumrich have recently
collaborated on a
Paradise Lost audiotext,
and their work suggests that the visual and the aural can indeed work
together productively in a hypertextual archive site. The Internet
Archive’s current “iffues” suggest that we still have many years and
hard work ahead of us, but we should not sacrifice the effort on account
of the “noise” we will inevitably encounter.
