There is a great slate of writers among the University Lectures guests at SU this year. I think I’m most excited about Jonathan Franzen’s talk with George Saunders (3/6), but David Sedaris (10/11), Zadie Smith (3/20), and Katrina vanden Heuvel (10/4). All these lectures are free, people.
The New York Times has a story on annotation and Association copies this morning. I love the following quote:
“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”
Indeed!
The latest NYT article on digital humanities was published over the weekend. (Here’s the first.) I like how the graphic for the frequency of “Christian” looks like a skyline filled with churches.
The full project is available online at victorianbooks.org, where the researchers have kindly made their data available open access.
Scans of the manuscripts were recently made available by a project of the Oxford, Kings College, & the British Library:
Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts are the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation. The manuscripts were held in a single collection until 1845, when at her sister Cassandra’s death they were dispersed among family members, with a second major dispersal, to public institutions and private collections, in the 1920s.1 Digitization enables their virtual reunification and will provides scholars with the first opportunity to make simultaneous ocular comparison of their different physical and conceptual states; it will facilitate intimate and systematic study of Austen’s working practices across her career, a remarkably neglected area of scholarship within the huge, world-wide Austen critical industry.
via Eightface
Videos of the MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium are now available online.
Not that anyone needs ANOTHER reason to visit Austin, but the HRC opens the DFW archive for researchers today, with a webcast of the festivities.
A great online exhibit of Women in the book arts from Princeton University Library:
Unseen Hands: Women Printers, Binders and Book Designers.
Some wonderful stuff!
Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.
They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.
This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.
Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.
If it’s Amazon: what a business model! Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.
The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.
Clicking a book links you to WorldCat, at which point you can request the title from ILL-- a nice touch from the non-lending library.
If you can’t get down to Marfa, TX (which, at some point in your life, you should), Donald Judd‘s library is now browseable online. Housed at the Chinati Foundation (hundreds of miles from Anywhere, TX) on some very Juddly shelves, the collection was meticulously recreated online for all to see.
Read an interview with the developers of this resource on ARTINFO.
I have a couple announcements from Library IT regarding the library website and the SUMMIT catalog.
First, you may have noticed that the link to “Classic Catalog” under “Quick Links” on the homepage has disappeared. Let me assure you, SUMMIT hasn’t gone away—it has been incorporated into the main homepage “Search” box located just below the Quick Links. This is intended to allow quicker access to SUMMIT results.
This box now includes a drop-down menu that allows for basic field selection (author, title, call number, etc.).If you select any field other than “Keyword” for your search, the search will automatically be conducted in the classic SUMMIT catalog. Alternately, you can simply click on “Advanced Search” in that area to directly access the SUMMIT start page for its more advanced features. Searches performed with the default “Keyword” setting will be conducted using Discover tool.
Frequent users of SUMMIT, if they have not already, may prefer to bookmark the SUMMIT start page and bypass the homepage altogether. The address for that page is: http://summit.syr.edu
Second, a notification of some upgrades to SUMMIT. On Friday afternoon (the 21st) for a few moments between 3 and 5pm, SUMMIT will be offline briefly for maintenance. Over the following few days Library IT will be testing different aspects of the upgrade—during this time some features of SUMMIT may be unavailable. If you have problems using SUMMIT during this time, please call the Research Assistance Desk at (315) 443-4083.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Recent Books at Bird