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Of Autumns fruits a basket on his arm, |
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.
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.
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
English Server at Carnegie Mellon: Articles on Copyright and Intellectual
Property *
Stanford University Fair Use Site *****
ELECTRONIC EDITING
McGann, Jerome:
Brown Women Writers Project Online Bibliography of Electronic Editing and
Text Encoding ****
Electronic Labryinth **
The Electric Scriptorium: Approaches to the Electronic Imaging,
Transcription, Editing and Analysis of Medieval Manuscript Texts; A
Physical & Virtual Conference (November, 1995). ***
Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) Project Articles ***
The Canterbury Tales Project, from Peter Robinson **
Flanders, Julia. 'Editorial Methodology and the Electronic Text', part of a
conference session entitled Electronic Texts and Textuality, NASSR 1996.
***
Thaler, Manfred, Dino Buzzetti, and Stefan Aumann, 'Digital Manuscripts:
Editions v. Archives' (conference session). **
JOURNALS
Intellectual Property Magazine ***
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology ****
The Copyright and New Media Law Newsletter (archived TOCs only) ***
OTHER RESOURCES
Association for Computing Machinery ***
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) **
SCETI: The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, University of
Pennsylvania
Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) *****
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
The URL is http://www.uq.edu.au/drama/twilight/
AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS
EMLS NEWS
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
ITINERANT HOBO
RENAISSANCE DRAMA ONLINE RESOURCES
THOMAS BROWNE
ELECTRONIC HYPNEROTOMACHIA
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
TRITHEMIUS, DEE, BRUNO ONLINE
THE GALILEO PROJECT
PILLARBOX
CURL UNION CATALOGUE AND SCIPIO AT EUREKA
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
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
ECCLESIASTICAL CALENDAR CALCULATOR
GROVE DICTIONARIES ONLINE
TLS CENTENARY ARCHIVE
BRITANNICA ONLINE
EARLY ENGLISH BOOKS ONLINE
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
STARRY MESSENGER
Back to top.
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.
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.
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/
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
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/SAA1997.html
http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/ISA1996.html
http://unixg.ubc.ca:7001/0/e-sources/emls/01-2/bestbook.html
http://castle.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Articles/EMLS3.3MB.html
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
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.
Session site:
http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/thaller1.html
This session includes three papers:
http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/buzzetti.html
http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/thaller2.html
http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/aumann.html
Journal of Electronic Publishing ***
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/
http://www.ipmag.com/
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/
http://copyrightlaws.com/index2.html
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.
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.
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').
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'.
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
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
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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/
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/
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
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.
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 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
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.
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/
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
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
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.
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.
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/
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'
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.
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.
For further information on CERES, please write to Gavin Alexander or Raphael Lyne.
This page is maintained by Andrew Zurcher, and was last updated on
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