Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

One of my favorite digitization projects is the SF Nexus from Temple University Libraries’ Duckworth Scholars Studio. It’s a digital corpus of 403 Science Fiction (SF) works, mostly novels, anthologies, and single-author short story collections published between 1945 and 1990 in the United States. It was created from scans of physical books in Temple’s Paskow Science Fiction Collection. It’s a notable project because SF has long been sidelined in literary studies, even though research on the genre can bring to light topics well worthy of study – race, gender, politics, futurism, climate change, and technology. This genre bias has carried over to digital humanities (DH), even though computational DH methods can accelerate this research beyond traditional methods like close reading one text at a time.

The project’s first step was to digitize the print books from the Paskow Collection. The team at Temple made the bold decision to physically disassemble the books. Most were cheaply-made paperbacks already in various states of decay and would sustain irreparable damage from digitization. They intentionally chose books that were not already part of the HathiTrust Digital Library, and after the digitization process, HathiTrust ingested these works, preserving them far longer than the physical items might have survived while also making them available to a much wider audience of researchers.

After scanning, the team created the Omeka exhibit Digitizing the New Wave, which highlights mid-twentieth century SF book covers. (Omeka is a commonly-used platform for scholarly online exhibits.) I thoroughly enjoy browsing Digitizing the New Wave, mostly for the entertaining cover art. But it’s also a great work of scholarship in its own right. It sheds light on lesser-known SF novels and writers from the New Wave Era, roughly from 1960-1990. I appreciate how the team structured the exhibit – it’s organized by sub-genre. Visitors can browse early “cli-fi” books (SF discussing climate catastrophe) and find examples of the subversive sub-genre Cyberpunk beyond well-known authors like Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson. 

A screenshot of the Cyberpunk section from the Digitizing the New Wave Omeka exhibit.

Digitizing the New Wave is a great entry point for anyone interested in DH covering SF (and cover art). But in terms of research potential, the current iteration of the project – the aforementioned SF Nexus – offers a great deal more for computational DH, such as text mining and topic modeling visualizations. To facilitate such projects, the SF Nexus offers several datasets, including one organized by book chapters and discrete sections of books (what they call “chunks”) and CSV files with metadata associated with the corpus, including one of “named entities” (proper names associated with real-world objects, such as place names or author names). These datasets are available through a HuggingFace repository linked from the SF Nexus website.

One aspect of the SF Nexus that I find most interesting is the approach to copyright. All of the works in the corpus were published after 1928, the current cutoff date for materials to enter the public domain, and so are still in copyright. The SF Nexus is pretty small as far as digitized corpora go, with only 403 works. This was an intentional choice, partly due to copyright concerns. Many of the books are orphan works (works in which the rightsholder is difficult or impossible to identify or contact), and the subsequent datasets are designed for non-consumptive use. “Non-consumptive” means the digitized versions of the text are not meant to be read as ebooks, but rather studied at an aggregate level in a quantitative way. Additionally, the website includes a copyright Take Down Notice with contact information for a potential rightsholder to request removal.

A screenshot of the SF Nexus’ Take Down Notice, at the bottom of their Data webpage

Currently, the team at Temple is looking to expand the corpus and find partner institutions with substantial SF print collections to contribute. Temple has also been the home institution for most of the current research generated from the project, so the team is also spreading the word to researchers elsewhere with hopes of seeing more research and publications.

And if all this discussion of digitizing old Science Fiction novels has you curious to actually read some, head over to the PCL! UT Libraries has a collection strength in late twentieth century SF that we continue to build on by collecting new SF novels, short story collections, and anthologies! Learn more about our SF collection on our Science Fiction LibGuide!

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Financially supported by the Indian Ministry of Culture, the Virtual Museum of Images and Sound is an online platform drawing upon and digitally presenting the amazingly rich resources held in the American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) collections.  While the open access museum highlights a vast range of artistic expression that I encourage everyone to explore, this brief post highlights the audio recordings from the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). 

Grab your headphones, settle into your comfortable chair, and join in to listen and learn!

For those new to South Asian music traditions, the ARCE’s Music in Context section provides a great introductory overview as it organizes recordings thematically.  While one might expect a section on ragas, the ARCE site encourages one to listen to songs associated with life cycle events, with work, or with ritual traditions.  If curated thematic journeys aren’t your style, rest assured that the site also operationalizes a number of digital humanities methods to delve into the dizzying array of musical types.  For example, one can use the Mapping Music or the Music Timeline interfaces to discover recordings by geographical location or in their chronological context.  There are so many fascinating things to find here—for example, did you know that the American jazz artist Teddy Weatherford lived in Kolkata (the city then known as Calcutta) and was featured on India’s First Jazz Record in 1944?  Or that the 1978 “Jazz Yatra” brought the likes of saxophonist Sonny Rollins and sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan together?  One loses oneself in the midst of such resources.

Beyond the fun to be had on the site from wherever you are, it is important to remember ARCE’s compelling vision to support the study of ethnomusicology in India.  The original goals for the AIIS analog collection were to protect and preserve recordings made by foreign scholars in the course of their research which were subsequently deposited in archives around the world.  Troublingly, it was obvious that such recordings were rarely available in India itself.  Addressing this problem head on, ARCE declares that “repatriation of collections has remained a major aim of the ARCE, which houses collections… which were not [previously] available in India. Scholars and collectors from all over the world, as well as India, continue to deposit collections of their recordings regularly at ARCE.”  In addition, they see the collection and the wide array of associated programs and events anchored in the collection as a way to stimulate new ethnomusicological research worldwide.  Knowing this driving mission, it is no surprise that ARCE has made so many collections freely available online.  I commend them on this important work.

I further applaud ARCE on their partnerships to collaboratively digitize and make recordings openly available.  To cite one recent and impactful success, ARCE worked with grant funding from the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) to preserve, robustly describe, and offer access to the “Recordings of Hereditary Musicians of Western Rajasthan.”  A scholarly collection formerly only on audio cassettes, the new online open access through ARCE and MEAP allows listeners worldwide to celebrate and enjoy Rajasthani music, culture and history.   

Learn more with these databases (restricted to UT affiliates):

Saarey Music provides streaming access to over 60 years of South Asian classical music including genres like Dhurpad, Thumri, Kafi, Tarana, and Ghazal.

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions and includes material from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE).

Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings presents content from across the globe, including thousands of audio field recordings.

Music Online: Listening provides access to over 7 million streaming audio tracks, see in particular the “World Music” section. 

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

“Baalbek Reborn” is a groundbreaking virtual experience offering free access to users worldwide. Utilizing cutting-edge digital technologies and insights gleaned from decades of archaeological research, the project presents 3D reconstructions showcasing the appearance of Baalbek’s ruins during the 3rd century CE. These reconstructions notably feature prominent structures of the Baalbek temple complex.

Nestled in the Biqā’ valley in Lebanon, northeast of Beirut, Baalbak is an ancient city that flourished as an agricultural and religious center for thousands of years. It is best known for its Roman temple complex, which was called Heliopolis after the Greek for “City of the Sun.” The complex has three temples honoring the Triad of Heliopolis: Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus, and the city flourished repeatedly under different religious groups’ administration because of its temple architecture. Baalbek remained a significant outpost through Antiquity and the Islamic imperial period, sometimes dramatically changing hands over the course of only months. As Europeans became acquainted with the city in the early modern period, their focus was––and has continued to be––on the remarkable ancient architecture of the temple complex. While the ancient Roman architecture is certainly significant, it is worth remembering that modern archaeologists cleared the Islamic town––which would have featured historic architecture as well––that had been built on the site in order to access the temples. The inclusion of Baalbek as a UNESCO World Heritage Site underscores its significance.

 The Baalbek Reborn collaborative project enhances accessibility to the site’s cultural heritage by offering a dynamic virtual exploration of its past and present beauty. Available as a free app for computers, mobile devices, and virtual reality headsets, the “Baalbek Reborn” tour provides interactive, 360-degree views of 38 locations within the city. Users can engage with expert audio commentary in Arabic, English, French, or German, and access additional images and text for detailed information about specific spots. One unique feature is the ability to toggle between the present-day appearance of the buildings and their historical reconstruction from nearly 2,000 years ago. The high resolution of both the photographs and reconstructions allows users to zoom in without losing clarity, while informative text and audio clips provide detailed explanations based on research.

Upon starting the app, users are treated to a five-minute introduction to the site, along with basic instructions on how to navigate the virtual experience. For those seeking a more comprehensive understanding, a detailed tutorial is available for the app’s features. The app offers two main modes of exploration: a guided tour lasting 38 minutes, highlighting the key features of the Baalbek temples, or the option to explore points of interest directly from the map of the temple complex. It is the latter option that some users may find rather disjointed: it is not easy to move seamlessly between points of interest. However, those who wish to explore further are encouraged to view the ruins on Google Streetview for a virtual walk, albeit without the detailed commentary provided in the app.

The collaborative effort behind this endeavor involved three key partners: Flyover Zone Productions, a virtual tour company responsible for the platform’s development; members of the German Archaeological Institute, who contributed content and provided archaeological expertise; and Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture – Directorate General of Antiquities, which oversees the protection, promotion, and excavation activities related to the country’s national heritage sites. Together, these partners have combined their expertise to create a comprehensive and immersive experience that brings the ancient beauty of Baalbek to contemporary audiences.

For further reading in the UT Libraries’ collections, consider the following scholarship:

• On the history of Baalbek: Naṣr Allāh, Ḥasan. 1984. Tārīkh Baʻlabakk. Bayrūt, Lubnān: Muʼassasat al-Wafāʼ.
• Baalbek in the French mandate period: Zayn al-Dīn, ʻĪdā.  2005. al-Taṭawwur al-iqtiṣādī wa-al-ijtimāʻī wa-al-siyāsī li-madīnat Baʻlabakk fī ʻahd al-intidāb al-Faransī, 1920-1943. Bayrūt: Dār al-Fārābī.
• Ottoman archaeology of Baalbek: Bahrani, Zainab, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem. 2011. Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914. Istanbul: SALT.
• On a Muslim’s scholars experience of the ruins of Baalbek: Shafir, Nir. 2022. “Nābulusī Explores the Ruins of Baalbek: Antiquarianism in the Ottoman Empire during the Seventeenth Century.” Renaissance Quarterly 75 (1): 136–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2021.332.
• Baalbek in antiquity: Paturel, Simone. 2019. Baalbek-Heliopolis, the Bekaa, and Berytus from 100 BCE to 400 CE: A Landscape Transformed. Mnemosyne, Supplements; v.426. Leiden: Brill.

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The E-lijah Lab (text in Hebrew) is a digital humanities lab in the Department of Jewish History & Bible Studies at the University of Haifa in Northern Israel. Among many projects that map the history of Jewish culture, HaMapah (Hebrew for ‘The Map’), founded in 2018 by then PhD students Elli Fischer and Moshe Schorr (now a Rabbi and a software engineer respectively), “aims to bring modern tools of quantitative and geographic analysis to Rabbinic literature[1].” Mapping ‘rabbinic networks’ that are based on responsa (Jewish legal texts written in the framework of questions and answers), the project reveals new data that “shows spheres of influence through time and across space.”

Schorr explains that “a true responsum, the answer that a rabbi writes to a query posed by another rabbi, is the basic unit of rabbinic authority. It orders the two correspondents hierarchically; the one asking acknowledges the greater expertise of the one answering, thereby expanding the latter’s influence.” Moreover, “because the hierarchy is … emerging implicitly from the deference of the secondary and tertiary elite, it can tell us more about the dynamics of influence, reputation, and expertise than many other forms of legal authority.”

The metadata of responsa – when they were written, to whom, by whom, from where, and to where they were sent – can be digitally quantified and visualized in different ways. HaMapah examines the effects of national and cultural borders on the spread of rabbinic authority. Data visualization shows the ‘reach’ of Rabbis who lived near one another, either at the same time or in succession, demonstrating rabbis’ authority.

For example, while mapping Noda Bi-Yehuda, a two volume responsa work by Rabbi Yechezkel ben Yehuda HaLevi Landau (1713-1793) who was an influential authority in halakha (Jewish law), the researchers discovered significant differences between the two volumes, as they represent distinct parts of his career.

The responsa in volume 1, published in 1776, are scattered across a wider geographic area than those in volume 2 (published posthumously in 1810), even though it contains only about half the number of responsa and was composed earlier. Those in volume 2 are much more densely concentrated in Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary, whereas Volume 1 includes more responsa to Germany and Poland. It seems that the publisher, who was actually Landau’s son, wanted the contents of the book to shape and perhaps geographically expand his father’s reputation. The knowledge gained through visualization leads Fischer to assert that “the implication is that Rabbi Landau had a certain geographic consciousness. He was aware that a greater reach implied greater halakhic authority and had a mental map of his sphere of influence, or at least of the sphere of influence he wished to project to his readers.”[2]

The success of HaMapah has branched out to adjacent projects, including a Searchable Map of Hebrew Place Names, and the comprehensive database of Prenumeranten. Similar to today’s crowdfunding campaigns, the Prenumeranten were lists of readers who presubscribed to books before publication. Those lists were printed in around 1700 Hebrew books published during the 18^th-20^th centuries. They document almost 10,000 distinct places of Jewish residence, mainly in Europe, as well as the names of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Each subscription – noting a specific person, living in a specific place, buying a specific book in a specific year – is a data point in a vast network of cultural interactions. For example, Fischer used this vast data set to reconstruct the itineraries of three booksellers as they sold subscriptions throughout Europe in the mid-19^th century. He also researched the reception of specific authors and their works in various communities, such as that of Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (1720-1797), better known as the Vilna Gaon.

The HaMapah and Prenumeranten projects effectively combine historical documents and cutting-edge technologies to shed new light on the intersections of travel, book culture, and Jewish history.  While these projects are still in their infancy, I encourage readers to visit the website for conference papers on their early findings and to learn more about these important projects.

Additional reading:

Fischer, Elli and Schorr, Moshe. Analysis of Metadata in Responsa : Methods and Findings. Innovations in Digital Jewish Heritage Studies – the 1st International Haifa Conference. July 13, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9N1Zt15Uc (video).

Haas, Peter. Responsa : literary history of a rabbinic genre : Atlanta, Ga. : Scholars Press. 1996.

https://openlibrary-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/books/OL8151172M/Responsa

Freehof, Solomon Bennett. The responsa literature : Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955. https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/9e1640/alma991031462519706011

Flatto, Sharon. The kabbalistic culture of eighteenth-century Prague : Ezekiel Landau (the ‘Noda Biyehudah’) and his contemporaries : Oxford, UK ; Portland, Or. : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010. https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/9e1640/alma991035983629706011 

Fischer, Elli and Ganzel, Tova. A Glimpse of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann’s Methods as a Decisor of Halakhah (Hebrew). JSIJ – Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal.

https://jewish-faculty.biu.ac.il/sites/jewish-faculty/files/shared/JSIJ22/ganzel_fischer.pdf

Fischer, Elli. The Prenumeranten Project: Digitizing Pre-Subscriber Lists. Digital Forum Showcases, European Association of Jewish Studies. January 21, 2022. https://www.eurojewishstudies.org/digital-forum-showcase-reports/the-prenumeranten-project-digitizing-pre-subscriber-lists/

[1] Rabbinic literature, in its broadest sense, is the entire spectrum of rabbinic writings throughout Jewish history. However, the term often refers specifically to literature from the Talmudic era, as opposed to medieval and modern rabbinic writing. In academic research, Rabbinic literature includes the Mishnah, Halakha, Tosefta, Talmud, Midrash, and related writings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbinic_literature).

[2] https://blog.hamapah.org/mapping/super-rabbi/