Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Presentation Handout on Open-Access Websites


19th Century British Pamphlets:
Simple and down to the point.
Space of the homepage. (open-access website/no ads)
Why digitizing? Why this website?
From physical to digital.
Collections: out of date/limited access.
Guidelines for teachers.

At the Circulating Library:
Another simple down to the point.
Paper-like homepage.
No commercials.
Started in 2007 (as a grant). Constant updates.
Biographical and bibliographical data.
Modeling, physical/digital.

Dickens Journals Online:
Long homepage. (forces the reader to browse the contents of the main tags)
Emphasis on “free.”
Offers a personal account.
Why digitizing? Why this website? (Promotional video and audio)
Interaction features. (The Tale of Two Cities Project/Facebook and Twitter)
Wider audiences. (text-to-speech)
Access.
Community projects. (Correction/Moderation)

Internet Library of Early Journals:
Space in the homepage. (the latest news box, which shows the website is being updated often, or is it?)
A finished project.
Scanned images. (OCR, Optical Character Recognition)

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition:
Another simple down to the point homepage.
Facsimiles, searchable and downloadable.
Beta.
Editorial commentary.
Metadata and TEI. (Musslle)
History of the project.

Old Bailey Online:
Open-access website with ads.
Rich collection with frequent updates.
Tutorial videos.
API. (application programming interface)
Guidelines for students and teachers.
Corrections.

Victorian Women Writers Project:
Another simple down to the point homepage.
Turned digital.
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) language.
Up to date.
Access. (Text Mode, Image Mode, Entire Document, PDF, XML)

Discussion Questions: (but not limited to)

1)  In the websites for tonight, we have seen restricted access and limited and/or unlimited access to the contents of those websites, in terms of viewing, searching, downloading etc. Based on your own experience in reading/browsing those websites, how do you define an open-access website?

2)  Numbers of the websites seem to spend a great deal thinking about the type of visitors (audience) who visit them. Do you see that those websites target specific audiences or larger audiences, bearing in mind that some of them address researchers, teachers and students? Do you think the targeted type of audiences determine how and/or why this particular website is an open-access website?

3)  With ncse, Mussell explains, “we proposed leaving the transcripts uncorrected in the index, but providing an elaborate set of metadata that could compensate for the way this transcript represented the article” (136). On the other hand, Fyfe questions “the fate or future of copyediting” and the “tasks of verification and correction,” and justifies, “[m]y argument is not that we are ignoring error but rather that we have not sufficiently considered error correction as a structural feature and theoretical premise within the transition to digital publishing” (206). On both ends of the two arguments, how do you see them manifest in the websites we looked at, especially with data viewing/encoding? 

4)  Tonight, we have seen metadata, beta, statistics, OCR, TEI, API, XML and even a “finished” website. Let’s simply talk about them.

Websites:
19th Century British Pamphlets
http://www.britishpamphlets.org.uk/  
At the Circulating Library
http://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/ 
Dickens Journals Online
http://www.djo.org.uk/ 
Internet Library of Early Journals
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ 
Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition
http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html 
Old Bailey Online
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ 
Victorian Women Writers Project
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/welcome.do 

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