Gale Promotional Brochures and Clip

The Nineteenth-Century Collections Online Brochure, I think, is the most attracting of all. I liked in the NCCO how Gale built upon previous success with the ECCO to introduce its new success. The NCCO Brochure includes maps, images, manuscripts, pamphlets, music sheets and even photos of the actual process of digitizing. With this last feature I think the brochure establishes authenticity and devotion to what it is selling. The 19th Century British Library Newspapers Brochure obviously is a more specialized one with images of the actual printing of the 19^th newspapers and a photo of a boy who distributed them. Perhaps as the title of the coolection suggests, this brochure invites certain audience, not as wide of course as the NCCO. What is interesting here I think is that The following remark of Dr. Hobbs, from the review of the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Collections, links back to Musslle’s argument that digitizing enables us to encounter the past differently: “The well chosen geographical range of provincial newspapers and the sophisticated search facility have put an end to the needle-in-a-haystack problems of using newspapers as historical sources.” With the 19th Century UK Periodicals Brochure, I liked how it suggested titles for women, children and other genre of interest.  The promotional element here is not only inviting people to this periodical, but it is also directing them on specific titles of those periodicals, which might be familiar to the researcher and; therefore, is more convincing to join. This brochure also advertises for what’s coming, so I though this feature is commercially interesting as well. The clip we viewed also emphasizes on preservation and eliminating distances. The folks in the clip showed a keen interest and fascination of what they do, which I think is commercially beneficial. The specific promotional features, such as words search across the collections and the less time spent in finding the materials gives more time to thinking about it, all make Gale Collections worth joining. The arguments of the advantages of digitizing, such as the less physical hand touching the documents, the more time preserving it for the future, is also commercially beneficial. At the end, I think the clip really makes sense to both Gale and the field of digital humanities, since in reality, the physical document can be only handled by one scholar at a time, but with digitizing, this obstacle is a history.

3rd Post, Week 5

My experience with NINES is an ongoing learning experience-every time something new comes out of. Before I address my learning experience, though, I’d like to retell my initial encounter with NINES, because it was somehow funny, but productive. As we were supposed to, I created an account first, before browsing anything else in the website. Then, I started exploring around. The first thing that caught my eyes was the search bar in the middle of the page. I always like the scholarly websites that place much emphasis on the search option and present it up front in the middle of the page, not as a minor option on the sides or corners. Placing the search option in the middle of the page has always fascinated me since I think it sends the message that we have the information for you, and all you have to do is research it. In addition, through this option, one can go everywhere in the website, depending upon the nature of the search. Other options featured in the home page are also search-based options, which in my opinion has contributed to the grand idea of research importance within scholarly websites . For example, the “Recent Tags,” the “Publications” and the “Community” options, all take you to places that take you to another places and so on.

After going through the featured options on the homepage in less than a minute, I went to “My9s” to see what in there. I really liked the sorting and the organizing of the page. The options on the right side, which includes “My Tags,” “My Discussions” and “My Groups,” provide what I like to call the right way of approaching information as well as archiving it. Yet, there are few things that I did not understand at first, such as “Collect,” “Exhibit,” and “My Objects,” so I kept browsing and exploring.

Before I reflect upon my browsing and exploring of NINES, I should talk about an important detail that I am leaving out, which is “What is NINES?” After I created an account and sat down to study this magnificent website, I decided to look first (as I usually do) at the “About Us” option or “Who We Are?” or in our case, “What is?” option. Simply, I couldn’t find it. I went back to the home page and other pages, such as “Publications” and “Community,” but still could not find it. I started wondering why a huge interesting website such as NINIES does not have such a page, which presumably would make it easier for the reader/user to navigate around with few info or hints in mind. I could not find an answer, so I discarded this question and kept browsing and exploring the main features of NINES, which took me a while, until I started looking at the “NEWS” option. Right there, under the main tag of the page, I saw the “What is NINES?” option. I was so thrilled to see it since it has all the info and the background on what on NINES and how to navigate it. This simply was a great discovery for me, but it came somehow late, because by then, I’ve already learned a lot about the website’s features and options. It was kind of trial and error experience for me with navigating around NINES before actually going over the “What is NINES?” page. So, I started wondering, again, about why in the world they did not place this option somewhere in the home page, or any other pages for that matter. Then I went back and viewed all the pages again, and to my amazement and puzzlement, every single page I’ve already browsed many times has the “What is NINES?” feature on the right top corner of the page!!!!

In my opinion, everything that is described on the “What is NINES?” page is magnificent. The explanation of the software tools that the website takes the credit for programming is really clear and I think it adds a great comfort to the scholarly research. Furthermore, the peer review feature, which NINES emphasizes on a great deal adds to the credibility of the website. However, in terms of the goals that the website sets for itself to achieve, I do not think it succeeded in doing that. The website has really interesting features and pages, especially with regard to “Community” and “Classroom,” but not a lot of people seem to visit those pages. For instance, under “Publication,” there are only three journals, two of which have less than 10 members, which in my opinion contradicts some of the goals that the website sets for itself. The homepage itself features the “Federated Websites,” which have nothing to do with NINES, and which also occupy almost half of the space of the page. I still cannot deny that some of the featured websites are really interesting too.

On the other hand, the “Classroom” feature offers really interesting options. Members of any given class can be virtually linked to one another at all times. Discussing and exchanging scholarly works that usually dominate classrooms will always be present and available for all. NINES in this context functions as a social network that brings scholars and students together with the addition of aggregation, of course. With this last remark I think NINES is remarkable somehow and I expect to see more of it in the future. 

2nd Post, Week 4

I really liked the readings of this week and I have to admit that they were the most enjoyable read so far. I mean, James Musslle’s argumentation was laid out very nicely and it seemed to me as the type of argument that sets a goal and goes on to actually achieve it. In addition, the websites we examined were by far the most interesting websites so far. Of course, not to undermine the library websites of last week, but Gale websites were different in terms of we were able to see the advertising brochures of those databases and we were able to observe what they were selling and how they were selling it as well as we dug a little bit behind the scenes, especially with the featured video. All in all, this week’s readings had a positive impact on my understanding of the course so far.

Musslle opens his introduction with an intriguing statement, which claims that the purpose of his book is to illustrate how the digitization of the past has “transform[ed]” our understanding of the past. Few lines later, he states: “'This book argues that the digitization of the press provides an opportunity to reimagine what we know about the nineteenth century” (1). As I kept reading, I had this claim present in my mind all the time and I simply looked for answers that would satisfy me, the reader/user. We obviously did not read the whole book, and so I was trying to be extra cautious with what we read. As a result, I found few places in what we read that perhaps can function as answers to Musslle’s initial claim.

It is no secret that the 19^th century Victorian readers were very aquatinted with journalism. In this regard, Musslle points out, as he does in many other places, to Bennett’s  notion of “journalizing society,” which emphasizes that the 19^th century Victorian society was a society that lived on journalism as a way of carrying words; therefore, "There was no panoptic position from which nineteen-century readers could survey varied products of the press as they appeared at different intervals from location around the country” (2). Simply put, it was inaccessible for the 19^th century Victorian reader to access all that was produced in the 19^th century Victorian society. Therefore, there seems an overall lack of context for the 19^th century readers, which can perhaps become constructed through digitalization. On the other hand, this idea of an overall lack of context is kind of slippery because it works both ways. This means that the present-day reader may also experience the same lack of context. On this issue, Musslle explains:

The nineteenth-century presses might now be silent, but what survives is incomplete. We not only lack the details of those who produced and contributed to the press, but also the shared cultural resources that come from being a contemporary. Without these, we struggle to realize the meanings and effects such texts had for their readers: the pleasure of reading, the surprise or shock of their appearance, the nuances of description, the familiarity or novelty of what was under discussion, or glancing references and allusions. (3)

However, this issue perhaps can be resolved through the fact that the digitizing process actually involves an editorializing process. The editorial attempts almost always involve choices and interpretations that is based upon modeling. Those choices construct a context of the past that is based on having everything available in hand, and that can be only done through digitization. Musslle relates this idea to The Research Society For Victorian Periodical and to the Victorian Research Database, which gathered all that has been published. In this context, the use of OCR (the optical character recognition) made it possible to reconstruct the context of the past through the inside search of all of the documentations and linking it to other works. This conclusion, I think, answers Musslle’s initial claim about how digitization “transform[s]” our perception of the past.

Another possible answer to Musslle claim is perhaps found in the discussion of the physical book vs. the virtual (digital) book and the reader vs. the user. Musslle differentiates between the physical book and the digital book as a means to carry the text. He illustrates that the physical book is a stable physical binding of the text, which traps it to a limited space, whereas the digital book is a dynamic virtual binding of the text, which enables endless expansion of knowledge through embedded links and the ability “to encode and instantiate text” (7). Within the reader vs. the user discussion, Musslle argues that our encounter with the past through digitization makes us users, “We are already users, whether we admit it or not” (17). The reader, according to Musslle, is somehow passive, but the user is dynamic in the sense that the latter is able to have a better control over the text to reconstruct its context: "As digital information is processable these resources necessarily exert control over their contents, providing indices that can be searched and browsed" (22). At the end, Musslle goes back to reassert his initial claim: “The digitization of large tracts of the nineteenth-century press has transformed the terms upon which we discover material and attempt to recover its meaning….Whereas it was possible to continue to ignore the press while it was arranged in forbidding bound volumes in fragmented runs around the world, now it is searchable from any device with a decent Internet connection” (28-29).

1st Post, Week 3

All of the read of the previous week was somehow dense, but generally speaking, it offered a large scope (and history) of some of the crucial issues in the field of Digital Humanities. To pick a specific essay as a favorite is hard to say, but I like how G. Sayeed Choudhury and David Seaman in the introduction, after illustrating the power of the digital libraries and how gradually traditional libraries are becoming digitalized, point out to the lack of “transform[ing]” of many literary departments and disciplines with comparison to other disciplines, such as science and business. They, however, take this point of crisis and offer many alternatives in the chapter. They are not alternatives per se but more like solutions or illustrations of the power of the digital library or as the title of the chapter indicates, Virtual Library.

I believe the websites of the open digital libraries that we looked at are live examples of the solutions or illustrations that both Choudhury and Seaman were trying to establish in the chapter. Looking at the Internet Archive for instance, one can find many tools of research that are perhaps only found digitally. The website can search images, movies, music, audio and texts. It can also, through “waybackmachine,” takes the user back in time to interfaces and contents that are no longer part of the present time. Such contents have been replaced, but the website reserves them digitally. Therefore, the digital library functions more efficiently in bridging the past to the present more than the physical library. However, in the field of digital humanities, we are not concerned with the contents that the Internet Archive offers more than the accessibility to those contents. Along those lines, the Hathi Digital Library offers varieties of ways by which the user can access information. For example, one cannot only view a text in the classical view (by which the pages are scanned into images), he or she can also flip the pages (replicating the physical experience of reading a book) as well as viewing the text in the “plain text” mode, by which the reader can copy/paste the text and; therefore, gaining more access to the digital text. In this last point, I think The Hathi Library surpass Google Books in having more access to the texts. On the other hand, the Open Library digitally offers something else. It is a fact that this website does not offer the “plain text” function for many of its content, and resembles Google Books in this regard, but it has many usable functions. For instance, one can have the whole text read out loud only by clicking the “read this book aloud” button. In addition to reading the texts online, one can download the texts almost instantly. Other useful tools of this website include listing the whole editions of any giving texts, starting from the first published edition, and guiding the user to where he or she can borrow or buy the texts that are not found digitally.

Greetings

Hi, and welcome.

I am super exited about this course and I positive that it will add a lot to my experience, which eventually I will carry with me home.

The beginning of our class last week was somehow a challenging  start, but with challenges always come excitements. It is a kind of an early prediction, but I think this course will enable me to learn the required skills that will allow me to explore the realm of digital humanities. Of course, having the Victorians as our case study, I think I will be able, later on, to expand my own focus of study to different type/times of literature. All that I can do at the moment is perhaps only to stay positive.

Thumbs-up.