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.