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CERES Harvest IV.iii
28.2.2000

Of Autumns fruits a basket on his arm,
His golden God in's purse, which was his charm.
And last of all to act upon this stage
Leaning upon his staff came up Old Age,
Under his arm a sheaf of wheat he bore,
An harvest of the best, what needs he more?


INTRODUCTION
This is the first CERES Harvest since August, and it is high time to inform you of the latest phase in the perpetual reformation that we enjoy here at CERES Towers. From this issue onwards, there will be a few changes. First of all, Harvests will no longer attempt to keep up with conference announcements and calls for papers: the CFP mailing list and website (link there from our links page) do the job very well, and we don't. Related to this is the decision to remove the Bulletin Board from the CERES website.

This will allow us to concentrate on the things we think we do well, and which we want to do better. Harvest will become a quarterly review of Internet sites which will aim to review rather than to list. In particular, we will concentrate more on special features such as the one in this issue. The COPIA section of our website (CERES Online Publications Interactive) will remain a top priority, with additions to the existing projects (Sidneiana and Aeneas and Isabella) and exciting new projects to be announced soon.

We remain keen to feature your work, whether surveys and reviews of Internet resources, or electronic publishing projects which would fit under the COPIA banner. Please contact us via the addresses below.

Despite the transitional phase currently being managed by the CERES Secretariat, this issue of Harvest has one of our most important articles yet, Andrew Zurcher's survey of Online Editing projects. This comes first: but don't forget to read on to a few more gems nestling below.


FEATURE

Online Editing

by Andrew Zurcher

As more and more 'regular' people become interested in the possibilities of publishing edited and original texts online, problems once reserved for the trade publisher or the computer programmer become the more common concerns of the ordinary net-surfer: issues of, for example, encoding, archiving, and addressing, and of intellectual property, fair use, and proper citation. For those of you who have considered the possibility of publishing Renaissance texts or criticism on the internet, these issues (and probably many others) will have surfaced, and nagged, and nagged. In an attempt to force a little order on the internet, I offer here a preliminary bibliography of online materials relating to electronic and particularly online publishing, some of which may prove useful or provocative. I am aware that there are very likely some glaring gaps in this collection of materials; as this bibliography is an ongoing project of mine, I would be grateful for any suggestions or other feedback (to aez20@cus.cam.ac.uk). As the bibliography develops, I will post and maintain an updated version on the internet.

The following materials have been very quickly rated on a * - ***** scale. This scale does not reflect a given site's overall quality, but rather gauges my own sense of that site's combination of quality, relevance to online publishing, scope, and currency. As I say, these were quick ratings, meant to aid in efficient sifting.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND COPYRIGHT
Special Issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing: 'Who Owns What? Intellectual Property, Copyright, and the Next Millennium' ***
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-03/
Includes a number of provocative, and recent (March 1999), articles on key problems in electronic publishing, including pieces on intellectual property and fair use and on cyberspace citations.

English Server at Carnegie Mellon: Articles on Copyright and Intellectual Property *
http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/internet/copyright.html
If this list were corrected and updated, it would prove very useful; at the moment, only three of twelve links seem to work.

Stanford University Fair Use Site *****
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ Stanford University's very responsible and clearly presented take on fair use, copyright, and intellectual property. See especially their bibliography of articles, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/articles/

ELECTRONIC EDITING
Renear et al., 'Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies' **
http://www.stg.brown.edu/resources/stg/monographs/ohco.html

McGann, Jerome:

  • 'The Rationale of HyperText' ****
    http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html
  • 'Imagining what you don't know: the theoretical goals of the Rosetti Archive' ***
    http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jjm2f/chum.html
    The first is a dated (1995) but thoughtful article on the emergence of electronic texts and editions in electronic (particularly CD-ROM) formats, including treatment of several examples. The second is a sort of follow-up to the first, discussing the limitations of text-based encoding for future electronic publishing.

    Brown Women Writers Project Online Bibliography of Electronic Editing and Text Encoding ****
    http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/bibliography.html
    Slightly dated but otherwise comprehensive bibliography of printed and online sources, with special attention to mechanics of markup and to the publicating of women's writing.

    Electronic Labryinth **
    http://web.uvic.ca/~ckeep/elab.html
    Dated (1993-5) but interesting theory-based approach to the status of the text in an electronic environment.

    The Electric Scriptorium: Approaches to the Electronic Imaging, Transcription, Editing and Analysis of Medieval Manuscript Texts; A Physical & Virtual Conference (November, 1995). ***
    http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/
    Includes a number of presentations, including pieces on electronic versions of Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's works, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Though dated, there are some provocative ideas in this archive of essays.

    Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) Project Articles ***

  • 'The Politics of Copyright on the Internet' (Michael Best)
    http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/SAA1997.html
  • 'Scholarly Editions of Shakespeare for the Internet' (Michael Best)
    http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/ISA1996.html
  • 'From Book to Screen: A Window on Renaissance Electronic Texts' (Michael Best)
    http://unixg.ubc.ca:7001/0/e-sources/emls/01-2/bestbook.html
  • EMLS Special Issue on ISE Project
    http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/EMLS3.3MB.html

    The Canterbury Tales Project, from Peter Robinson **
    http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/
    For details of a forthcoming one-day conference on electronic publishing of medieval texts, see their announcement at http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/conference.html

    Flanders, Julia. 'Editorial Methodology and the Electronic Text', part of a conference session entitled Electronic Texts and Textuality, NASSR 1996. ***
    http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/research/NASSR/Argument.html
    A brief presentation of some issues in electronic publishing, from the Brown Women Writers Project.

    Thaler, Manfred, Dino Buzzetti, and Stefan Aumann, 'Digital Manuscripts: Editions v. Archives' (conference session). **
    Session site:
    http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/thaller1.html
    This session includes three papers:

  • Buzzetti, Dino. 'Digital Editions: Variant Readings and Interpretations'
    http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/buzzetti.html
  • Thaler, Manfred. 'Text as a Data Type'
    http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/thaller2.html
  • Aumann, Stefan. 'Digital Archives'
    http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/aumann.html

    JOURNALS
    Journal of Electronic Publishing ***
    http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/

    Intellectual Property Magazine ***
    http://www.ipmag.com/

    Harvard Journal of Law & Technology ****
    http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/

    The Copyright and New Media Law Newsletter (archived TOCs only) ***
    http://copyrightlaws.com/index2.html

    OTHER RESOURCES
    Text Encoding Initiative *****
    http://www.tei-c.org/, or http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/ for the TEI Oxford Home Page (includes TEI guidelines)
    ...setting the standards for how texts should and eventually will be encoded in various electronic formats. TEI dtd, SGML, and XML may sound very daunting, but these comprehensive pages explain text encoding issues very carefully. Scrupulously updated.

    Association for Computing Machinery ***
    http://www.acm.org/
    An educational and scientific computing society, interested (among other things) in issues of intellectual property and in computing applications in education and the humanities.

    National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) **
    http://www.ninch.org/ (especially http://www.ninch.org/ISSUES/COPYRIGHT.html)
    A US group; its usefulness occasionally obscured by its jargon (e.g. their mission: 'educating policymakers, the cultural community and the public about the critical importance of translating the vision of a connected, distributed and accessible collection of cultural knowledge into a working reality').

    SCETI: The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, University of Pennsylvania
    http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/collections/index.html
    This exemplary project provides high-quality reproductions of rare books and manuscripts in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania - an important emerging strategy for presenting early modern materials on the web, if still a little cumbersome. Of special interest to Renaissance scholars will be the Furness Shakespeare collection. Other collections include 'Women's Studies', (Early Modern) 'Science, the Occult, and Religion', and the 'Lawrence Schoenberg collection of Medieval and Renaissance MSS'.

    Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) *****
    http://www.w3.org
    Headed by founder of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, this organization sets the recommendations and standards for all internet authoring - guidelines that set the parameters not only for software companies, but for the everyday web architect. Details of the latest HTML specifications (4.01, at present) are the very least among the stars in this rich crown.


    ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

    SPENSER HOMEPAGE
    The Edmund Spenser Homepage has moved from the University of Oregon and its creator Richard Bear, and now resides virtually next door to CERES on the Cambridge English Faculty's server. Andrew Zurcher, his skills sharpened on CERES, takes the helm. The new address is http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser

    BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
    Drew Whitehead of the University of Queensland starts with the ambitious and very worthwhile project of producing electronic editions of the works in the B and F canon. Entitled 'Twilight Pictures', this site currently has draft texts of only a few plays, of which the most interesting is of The Woman's Prize. The 1647 Folio and Lambarde MS texts are available in various forms, including a useful parallel text, but only of the first 30 lines. One to watch: it could turn out to be as interesting, and nearly as funky, as the Enfolded Hamlet, for which zap to http://www.global-language.com/cgi/openbin/enhamp?type=EN

    The URL is http://www.uq.edu.au/drama/twilight/

    AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS
    A substantial project and a significant phenomenon in Internet publishing, this is an electronic version of James J. O'Donnell's 1992 edition and commentary on Augustine's Confessions, first published by OUP. The entire work is now available on the Internet free of charge to users, under the auspices of the Stoa consortium, at a catchy URL: http://www.stoa.org/hippo. A duplicate copy is available at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/conf. The work provides a complete Latin text of the Confessions, a detailed scholarly commentary on the text line-by-line, and a lengthy interpretive introduction.

    EMLS NEWS
    Early Modern Literary Studies (http://purl.oclc.org/emls/05-3/05-3toc.htm) has recently published a special issue on Renaissance Literary Studies and Humanities Computing, guest-edited by R.G. Siemens and David R. Shore. Here there are various articles, usually provocative and knowledgable, including surveys of important projects such as ITER, the Virtual Furness Shakespeare Library, and EMLS itself.

    EMLS also invites submissions for a special issue entitled 'Listening to the Early Modern', re: the early modern perception of sound e.g. in speech, oratory, ballads, music and literature, the acoustics of performance, Renaissance theories of sound, acoustic metaphors, synaesthesia. The closing date for submissions is 1 September 2000. Enquiries should be directed to Matthew Steggle, M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.

    MARGARET CAVENDISH SOCIETY
    MC's many devotees have always given her a big electronic profile (the MARCAV-L list has been around for years) and now there is this neat and substantial website. Bibliography, links, pictures, and society info at http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/mcs/

    ITINERANT HOBO
    Our new neighbour at: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/hobo. Run by Ian Gadd and Martin Moonie, this splendid site, formerly 'History of the Book @ Oxford' offers a dedicated webspace for all History of the Book events and resources throughout the UK. Updated weekly and frighteningly comprehensive.

    RENAISSANCE DRAMA ONLINE RESOURCES
    A useful set of links for students studying Renaissance drama, produced by Emma Smith, and proving that an interesting enough reading list can be made up of online materials. Some of the links go via services (Project Muse) which your ISP may not subscribe to, or which you may have to access less directly: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/smith.html

    THOMAS BROWNE
    A site devoted to the wise one, with an ample and growing selection of etexts and some other non-Browneish goodies. Edited by James Eason at Chicago: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/

    ELECTRONIC HYPNEROTOMACHIA
    The MIT Press, in collaboration with the Design Knowledge Systems Group at The Technical University of Delft, has made available a complete electronic facsimile of the original 1499 Aldine Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The editing of the electronic book is based on research published in Liane Lefaivre's Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by The MIT Press, and coincides with its release. Go wide-eyed to: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/

    The site includes helpful snippets of Lefaivre's 1997 book by way of guide and overview, and does not insist on agreement with her intriguing attribution of the work to Leon Battista Alberti. The electronic text of this architectural and erotic fantasy is a superb example of web facsimile. Easy to browse, well-reproduced, it makes available all 467 pages of Aldus's beautifully produced book - a joy to behold with its quite perfect Bembo font and stunning images. Click on images for enlargements, and then go back and forth through the images alone, or wander through the book page by page or chapter by chapter. One to browse with Joscelyn Godwin's new English translation of the complete text to hand.

    BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE CATALOGUES
    Finally a web catalogue (BN-OPALE PLUS) is available en ligne, combining the contents of OPALE (new stuff) and OPALINE (old stuff), previously available only via telnet: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/
    For a full list of catalogues go to: http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/catalog/index.htm

    TRITHEMIUS, DEE, BRUNO ONLINE
    http://www.avesta.org/esoteric.htm
    A site run by Joseph H. Peterson called The Twilit Grotto offers an awesome array of occult etexts. Some are in progress, and the following site map is incomplete: http://www.avesta.org/sitemap.html We are not adept to comment on the accuracy of the contents, though the texts look to have been carefully edited and the graphics very well handled. Among scores of pages are versions of STC volumes, manuscripts, and more recent editions, as well as various indexes and lists of symbols, angel's names, and the like. Some of the texts (Bruno's De gli eroici furori, Sacrobosco's Sphere) are more likely to cross literary paths; others will just scare you.

    THE GALILEO PROJECT
    Based at Rice University, the Galileo Project is a hypertext source of information on the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the science of his time. Started in 1995 and still under construction, much of the information is presented as a tour of the rooms of Galileo's villa (the library, the instrument closet...). Aimed at 'viewers of all ages and levels of expertise', the information is rich and well-presented: http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/

    PILLARBOX
    Pillarbox is a free email service which notifies subscribers of all announcements it receives for UK & European conferences, seminar series and publication opportunities in the field of literary and cultural studies. Pillarbox was inspired by Jack Lynch's CFP network at the University of Pennsylvania, which sends out mostly American calls for papers and publication opportunities. It is intended to be a slightly modified British version of CFP. We have subscribed and can confirm that whilst there is much overlap with CFP, if you are a conference junkie you will want to be on the Pillarbox list. Go to: http://come.to/Pillarbox. Or if that link dies, go via the onelist site, which hosts the service: http://www.onelist.com/group/Pillarbox

    CURL UNION CATALOGUE AND SCIPIO AT EUREKA
    New to Eureka, which you may or may not have access to, are the 13 million records of the CURL Union Catalogue. The Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) is a group of research libraries in the British Isles whose mission is 'to promote, maintain and improve library resources for research in universities'. The CURL Union Catalogue (CUC) represents the holdings of CURL members, including UK and Ireland legal deposit libraries.

    Now, may we for once replace our usual witless optimism with a certain frankness? The CURL records are also the basis for COPAC, which is free, and can be accessed direct via: http://copac.ac.uk/copac/. COPAC is easy to search and fast to use. CURL via Eureka, on the other hand... For one, there is no way of limiting author searches properly. So 'Buxton, John' gets swamped by records listing the works of that notable author of Peaks District murder mysteries, John Buxton Hilton. In other words, hypertext markup is rudimentary compared to other Eureka offerings like ESTC. 'Buxton, Tradition' gets 10 separate hits for the 10 libraries which COPAC also lists as holding the book. But COPAC manages to stick most of these records together to give two hits. Perhaps we're missing something, but we wonder what value is being added here.

    Better, when it has grown, will be SCIPIO: Art and Rare Book Sales Catalogs. This database describes art auction and rare book catalogs for sales from the late sixteenth century to scheduled auctions not yet held. Records include the dates and places of sales, the auction houses, sellers, institutional holdings, and titles of works. Updated daily, SCIPIO has more than 625,000 records, and will prove a must for the provenance hunters of the future. Other recent Eureka additions include the German National Union catalogue and the Research Libraries Group Archival Resources database (currently a bit of a hotch-potch, more likely to turn up the letters of a nineteenth-century bore with the middle name of your subject than anything you really need). The usual URLs: http://eureka.rlg.ac.uk/ and http://eureka.rlg.org/. Or go via your institution's link to bypass password requests.

    ETHEREAL ETEXTS
    A very rich source of Christian classics, and including such favourites as Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel, is the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://ccel.org/

    All a bit modernised for our taste, but if you don't mind scrolling past Billy Graham to get to Ignatius Loyola, worth a trip.

    A GUIDE TO MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE INSTRUMENTS
    http://www.s-hamilton.k12.ia.us/antiqua/instrumt.html
    Just that. Pretty pictures and sounds and just the place to find out about the hurdy gurdy and the psaltery. Also includes a good set of early music links: http://www.s-hamilton.k12.ia.us/antiqua/links.htm

    ECCLESIASTICAL CALENDAR CALCULATOR
    If you ever need to calculate a date in the Ecclesiastical Calendar, this is where you should go: http://www.smart.net/~mmontes/ec-cal.html

    GROVE DICTIONARIES ONLINE
    A subscription-only service, but what a service! Full texts of the Grove Dictionary of Art: http://www.groveart.com/. And of the Grove Dictionary of Opera: http://www.groveopera.com/ The Dictionary of Music (2nd edition, while we wait for the 3rd edition in print) is on its way in September.

    TLS CENTENARY ARCHIVE
    http://www.tls.psmedia.com/
    A useful (therefore not free) service offering the contents of the TLS up to fairly recent times (for more recent content, subscribers to the printed journal can go to the TLS site: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/). At present the archive has got stuck in the twenties (though this already includes such pleasures as the copious review journalism of Virginia Woolf), and is rather difficult to search. You must hit 'search' for each new search rather than using your browser's button to go back to the search page (in which case your original search is resubmitted regardless of what you type). There has been hot debate about the ethics of charging for access whilst not paying authors any further fees. All rather redolent of the British book trade before copyright.

    BRITANNICA ONLINE
    The Encyclopedia Britannica website is now free to all, costs being covered by adverts instead of the small charge originally made. A wonderful resource and first port of call: http://www.britannica.com/

    EARLY ENGLISH BOOKS ONLINE
    While the English Short Title Catalogue continues to grow and its proprietors begin work on digitisation of the books themselves (e18, at http://www.e18.psmedia.com/), UMI have rather stolen their thunder with the stunning Early English Books Online, or EEBO. This site will offer snapshots of every page in every book in STC and Wing, that is from 1475 to 1700, taken direct from UMI microfilms. You will need a decent computer and a fast connection, and may be steered towards some plugins on first arrival, but the result is images which are of such high resolution that when printed off they actually beat the quality of print-offs from microfilm. There is a charge, and you may find yourself barred from some areas of the site if your institution does not already subscribe. To see if you are one of the lucky ones, go to http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/ and click 'enter'

    Search by author, title, STC/Wing number, or keywords, under either the basic or advanced search options. The matches which come up are in short record format. Click the text icon for a decently full citation. Or click either the camera or pen nib icons for page images and illustrations (anything pictorial) respectively. If the image in question has never been requested before you get a gratifying message reporting on your pioneer status and asking you to wait while the image is transferred from a CD to the server. The excellent viewing plugins allow the page images to be manipulated and printed off.

    Like many of the best sites reviewed by CERES, this one will come into its own in a few years, when bandwidth increases allow access to be instantaneous. At present, waiting times can be a little frustrating and, depending on the strength of the adhesion of your backside to its computer chair and the distance of your office from the library, a trip to look at the microfilm may still be a better option. But already, for the simple focussed enquiry (say, for a printout of the title page of a particular edition of a particular book) EEBO is a considerable blessing. And, let's face it, this is the one resource that we at CERES have been waiting for, and preparing you for.

    LIBER LIBER
    It would be churlish to complain about the visual appearance of this project, found at http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/t/index.htm A pioneering and burgeoning resource, it includes electronic texts of Italian literature, and does so in abundance.

    STARRY MESSENGER
    http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starrymessenger.html
    The aim of this project is to make available electronically some aspects of the early history of astronomy for the use of students studying the History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Cambridge - but other interested parties can get there too! By drawing on the rich collection of instruments and books in the Whipple Collection, the University Library and the Wren Library, it seeks to produce a history of astronomy which focuses on the uses of astronomy and its instruments, as well as on the practitioners of astronomy.

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