Introduction to Electronic Texts in the Humanities

What Are E-Texts?

Research Issues -- Teaching Issues -- Professional Issues

Glossary


What Are E-Texts?


Definition of Electronic Text:

Text available in machine-readable or computerized form. The text may be saved on magnetic media, such as diskettes or hard drives, or on optical media, such as CD-ROMs.


How are E-Texts Created?


How are E-Texts Delivered to Users?


Five Advantages of E-Texts:


E-Text Vocabulary:

ASCII text ~ Bit-mapped images ~ Corpus, Corpora ~ Electronic Text ~ HTML ~ OCR ~ SGML ~ TACT ~ Tags

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Research Issues


Extended Access to Primary Sources.

Primary sources are heavily used for research and teaching in the humanities.

Definition of a primary source from the Yale University Library Primary Sources Research Colloquium: "A primary source is firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation."

Original texts and manuscripts are collected by libraries and museums all over the world. To use these texts, scholars and researchers are required to travel, sometimes at great expense in time and money, to the sites where the materials they study are housed. When these resources are converted into electronic texts, they can be saved on magnetic or optical media and transmitted over a network, making them available remotely.

African-American pamphlets from the Library of Congress' American Memory Collections

Civil War letters: The Booker Collection at UVa

This collection is transcribed and marked up in SGML and converted to HTML on the fly. SGML is full-text searchable. Bitmapped images of the original are also provided.

Extended Access to Secondary Sources.

Free: Godey's Lady's Book

Limited issues of a nineteenth-century woman's magazine are available on the Internet from the University of Rochester. The articles are marked up for the Web in HTML and supplemented by bit-mapped images of the illustrations or plates.

Subscription: JSTOR

Complete runs of back issues of scholarly periodicals from the beginning of the title to within three to five years of the present are available on subscription from JSTOR. Complete title list.

Each page is a bit-mapped images underlain by the OCRed full text, making the full text of the articles searchable.

Easier Navigation of Large Works.

Patrologia Latina

Before the advent of searchable electronic texts, locating references to people, ideas, and uses of words and phrases in an author's works required the preparation of an extensive index or a lifetime of reading and familiarity. Now, a large corpus of writings in Latin, comprising 221 volumes in print form, can be searched in a few minutes. The Patrologia Latina is marked up in SGML and is available on five CD-ROMs from Chadwyck Healey.

New Methods of Analysis.

TACT Web workbook

Text analysis software is bringing quantitative methods to the humanities and to the study of primary sources. Word frequencies and proximities can be be rapidly determined and mapped. Authorial styles based on word-use patterns can be useful for identifying the author of disputed works.


Enhanced Preservation.

Saving electronic texts as bitmapped images or as ASCII or tagged ASCII files provides an alternative way of conserving and preserving valuable docments. Electronic representations of documents may be used over and over again without the damage to a fragile original that may result from repeated handling. Books printed on acidic paper can be scanned at very high resolutions and reprinted on acid-free paper by high quality electrostatic or laser printers, essentially recreating the book in a longer-lasting form.

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Teaching Issues


Using Primary Sources in Teaching.


Teaching the cultural context of primary texts:

Gregory Crane: The Perseus Project

A very complex and multi-faceted site about Ancient Greece: texts and text tools, translations, lexica, maps, images of architecture and art. Gregory's site supplies a lot of information about the context of Greek culture and how it influenced what was written and vice versa.

Analyzing and comparing primary texts:

Melissa Bernstein: The Sermon of the Wolf to the English

Example of a teaching site that brings together five variant texts of a short work along with a glossary and other supporting materials. This site gives students the tools to compare variations they find among the texts, enabling them to begin exploring the reasons behind textual differences.


John Marshall: The Five Gospels Parallels

A simpler site that allows side-by-side comparison of five books of the Bible.

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Professional Issues


New Ways for Scholars to Publish.

Dissertations. Electronic Theses and Dissertations in the Humanities ~ Example of a dissertation

Some universities, dissertation advisors, and graduate students are beginning to experiment with new formats or "containers' for PhD dissertations. This site links to a number of examples and includes discussions of the issue.


Peer-Reviewed Journals. PMC: Postmodern Culture

Early example of a peer-reviewed journal in the humanities fully available in electronic form and published solely online.


Self-Publishing by Faculty.

The Internet provides a new place for faculty to publish their work. Because it is usually not peer-reviewed, however, self-published works usually are not considered for promotion and tenure in most universities and colleges. Even peer-reviewed and widely praised electronic publications are usually suspect.


Is It Scholarly Work?

New ways of publishing challenge existing social arrangements for evaluating scholarly production for promotion and tenure. Does a peer-reviewed Web site with scholarly content count toward tenure? The faculty who review scholarly production have a wide range of views on what constitutes legitmate scholarly work in electronic media. Some do not think they have the necessary background to evaluate scholarship in new forms. Others may simply see the format itself as disqualifying, regardless of the content.

Institutional rules also play a part. Dissertation rules, for example, are very specific regarding proper formatting. The nature of some electronic text is so mutable that the current assumptions about estrangement from the finished text are in question. When is a text "finished" and ready for critical review? How can it be set aside or "editioned" so that the author's original work is not constantly in flux, and therefore unable to be fixed for criticism?

Graduate students and junior faculty must be careful where they invest their time and energy, lest they end up with a large investment in scholarship and expertise that will not be considered in the hiring, promotion, and tenure process.


Copyright.

A Crash Course in Copyright

You must obtain permission to use materials covered by copyright, except in cases of fair use. The "crash course" is an excellent guide to this difficult area of the law.

Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use Site

A detailed site with lots of legal information and background material on copyright. Many text digitizing and imaging projects focus on areas where out-of-copyright material is plentiful.


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Electronic Text Center at Cornell

Revised 30 November 2006
Michael Engle
URL: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/cet/etextnew.html


Olin and Uris Libraries, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853
Information and reference: 607-255-4144, okuref@cornell.edu
Circulation: (Olin) 607-255-4245, (Uris) 607-255-3537, okucirc@cornell.edu