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 to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
The French Revolution Pamphlets Digital Initiative, based at the Newberry Library in Chicago, is a large-scale digitization initiative that makes digital copies of over 38,000 documents, mostly pamphlets, accessible online. The documents, which primarily consist of material published between 1780 and 1810, encompass 850,000 pages of text, and the dataset produced by the project, containing OCR and metadata files, is roughly 11 gigabytes. This collection of French Revolutionary materials is among the most comprehensive in the world, and enriches the study not only of French and European history, but casts light on broader concepts of revolution and social transformation relevant to a global audience. The materials are of interest to numerous fields of study, including legal, social, and cultural history and the history of printing and publication.
The homepage for the project, built in Scalar.
The
collection gathers materials from a number of the Newberry’s collections,
including the French Revolution Collection, the Louis XVI Trial and Execution
Collection, and several smaller groups of French Revolution era material. The
materials chronicle the political, social and religious dimensions of the
Revolution’s history, and include works by a diverse set of authors, including
Robespierre, Marat, and Louis XIV. The texts include arguments both in support
of and opposing the monarchy between 1789 and 1799, and serve as a firsthand
chronicle of the First Republic. The collection includes complete runs of
well-known journals, many rare and unknown publications, and about 3,000 French
political pamphlets published between 1560 to 1653 that document a period of
religious wars and the establishment of the absolute monarchy.
The
main interface for the project was built in Scalar, a free and open source web authoring platform from the The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC. The Scalar site links to the
digital copies of the pamphlets, hosted on archive.org, as well as translations of select
pamphlets. The sites also includes a number of other valuable resources,
including data downloads, digital pedagogy materials, and pages designed for
librarians interested in working with the digital collection.
The digitized pamphlets on archive.org.
To
help support scholarship using the collection, the Newberry has funded an open
data grant to support researchers working with the project’s large data set.
The recipients of the
first grant,
Joseph Harder and Mimi Zhou, are conducting a sentiment analysis of the French
Revolution materials, assigning numerical values to word-use in order to code
for positive and negative tone across the data. By applying sentiment analysis
to both the popular press and propaganda, Harder and Zhou hope to find trends
in public opinion throughout the French Revolution, and to see how those trends
shaped the revolution’s political outcomes.
The project’s data on GitHub.
The project serves as
an important contribution to digital scholarship in European Studies. The sheer
volume of the project’s digitized materials alone is impressive, but the
variety of the resources it encompasses makes it particularly distinctive. Its
venture into funding research using an open data grant—and the fact that its
data set is openly available to anyone who wants to download it—is especially
exciting, and I look forward to seeing the scholarship that results from making
these materials freely accessible online. For those interested in exploring
French Revolutionary materials in the UT Austin Libraries, I recommend looking
through our extensive
holdings on the subject, including our collection
of pamphlets, both in
print and on microfilm.
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 to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
The
Istanbul Urban Database project, headed by Nil
Tuzcu (MIT), Sibel Bozdoğan (İstanbul Bilgi), and Gül
Neşe Doğusan Alexander (Harvard), seeks
to preserve collective memory and the urban cultural heritage of Istanbul by
becoming the most comprehensive online archive of Istanbul’s urban history. The
project is based on a digital corpus of maps of Istanbul, aerial imagery,
photographs, and geographical features. The project combines this wide range of
historical data on a sustainable platform that can be integrated into other
projects. The project does not stand alone; there is, in fact, an API in
development for serving and exporting the various layers of the information it
contains.
With the Istanbul Urban Database, users can
select a variety of maps, photos, and other imagery to superimpose over one
another, or compare. You can examine one historical map at a time, superimpose
them with adjustable transparency, and overlay georeferenced features on the
maps. The side-by-side tool allows users to compare maps from two different
time periods (currently limited to the 19th and 20th
centuries). Uniquely, the project draws on Ottoman and French maps, primarily
from the Harvard Map Collection. This allows the user to get a sense of both
the internal and external views of Istanbul in the early 20th
century.
The map comparison tool.
In terms of infrastructure, the Istanbul Urban
Database’s transportation layer hosts information drawn from a 1922 map on
ferry, train, and tramway lines. The project organizers decided to present
major roads separately because of their impact on city growth. The ferry,
train, and tramway lines, and the roads, were drawn by Harvard Mellon Urban
Initiative researchers––a quite labor intensive process from which
users benefit immensely.
Users also will enjoy having access to Henri Prost’s master plan archives,
which have had significant effect on the development of the city of Istanbul.
Lastly, users can peruse photographs of everyday life at different points in
Istanbul’s history. Examples include beaches, casinos, movie theaters, and
patisseries; snapshots of lives well-lived so long ago, in some cases in places
that no longer exist.
Looking at spaces of everyday life, including beaches and the spaces of Beyoğlu.
The Istanbul Urban Database project is significant for its
combination of resources on an accessible platform with potential for
applications in other projects. Istanbul is a difficult city to navigate, let
alone understand, today, and so attempting to imagine its past lives might seem
rather intimidating for researchers. The Istanbul Urban Database project
streamlines access to crucial 20th and late-19th century
resources to facilitate research on the growth, structure, and development of
the city of Istanbul.
Using the comparison tool between 19th century maps.
I encourage readers to explore all of the tools available,
especially the comparison tool that allows you slide two maps right and left to
compare time periods. I also suggest looking through the photographs of
everyday life that are exhibited through this project, and examine whether or
not these places still exist today by zooming into the base satellite map.
Readers who are interested in maps of Istanbul and Turkey more broadly would
benefit from visiting the UT Maps Collection. The maps of Turkey and specificallyIstanbul are extensive and of interest for those piqued by the Istanbul
Urban Database.
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.
This Is Not an Atlas is a continuation of a book of the same name, subtitled “A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies.” Critical geography proposes that maps are never neutral, but rather reflect views of the map maker, often those in power. Counter-mapping, or creating counter-cartographies, refers to the use of maps to reframe the world in such a way as to challenge dominant power structures and to articulate alternative, progressive and even radical interests (Kitchin, et al., 2011).
In the spring of 2015, kollektiv
orangotango, a self-described network of critical geographers,
friends, and activists who deal with questions regarding space, power, and
resistance, sent out a call for maps in English, German and Spanish.
Overwhelmed by the response and realizing that many of the maps submitted are
dynamic, they decided to create a website to, not only highlight projects from
the print edition, but also to “continue to share maps, struggles, projects,
texts, and inspirations online.” Here I highlight a counter-mapping project
that successfully deals with the politics of in/visibility, as described
in Emancipatory Mapmaking: Lessons
from Kibera.
Map Kibera was initiated after a group of
geographers attending a mapping conference in Nairobi, Kenya noticed that
Kibera, one of Africa’s largest informal settlements, was not mapped. In fact,
they discovered that authorities had labeled and designated the Kibera Slum as
a forest. How could a community with an estimated population of 250,000 people
be omitted from official maps of Nairobi? Two geographers who were also
interested in open source mapping decided they wanted to change this. In
October 2009, Mikel Maron and Erica Hagen started the Map Kibera project to
address “the glaring omission of roughly a quarter-million of Nairobi’s
inhabitants from mass communications and city representation and policy
decisions” (Hagen, 2011).
Current (09/09/2019) image of Kibera in Google Maps. Detail view of Kibera in Google Maps yields little detail about the community.
Kibera is too densely populated to rely on satellite data
for mapping. Maron and Hagan knew they would need to map it from the ground.
They recruited a dozen young residents to be “mappers,” gave them GPS devices,
and sent them to collect data by creating “traces,” a GPS-enabled process that
tracks and records your physical location. The mappers interviewed residents
and collected observational data, such as the names of clinics, schools, and
businesses, locations of water pumps, public baths, and other “points of
interest” along their routes as well. The team then added the data to OpenStreetMap (OSM),
a crowdsourced world map that relies on user-generated content to create
geographic data that is relevant and available to everyone. And within three
weeks they had created an incredibly dense map of Kibera for the world to see. But
more importantly, a map of Kibera that was extremely useful to residents.
Kibera in OpenStreetMap (09/09/2019)
The project did not stop there; they immediately created,
printed, and distributed maps of clinics and schools within the community. And
a security map of Kibera warning of areas to avoid and illustrating places to
get help. And have since formed the Map Kibera Trust,
created the Voice of Kibera, a platform for citizen
reporting, and replicated their model in other marginalized communities in
Nairobi.
The book is as beautiful as the website;
visit the UT Libraries to see it in person. If you’re interested in learning
more about critical geography and counter-mapping, I highly recommend Rethinking the Power of Maps and the Map Reader. Map Kibera initiators, Erica Hagen,
and Mikel Maron later founded the Ground Truth Initiative.
Visit their project page to
find out about other counter-mapping projects they are working with, such
as Grassroots Jerusalem.
Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.
Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor droned and thrashed in somewhat obscurity for exactly one decade (2002-2012), but left behind an impressive slab of noise pop albums in the vein of early Hüsker Dü, or a more song-oriented Lightning Bolt. Stay Afraid pushes the faders all the way up with its scorched earth feedback and fuzz, its electronica squeal and hyper-manic drumming, but those sugar-sweet vocal hooks are still up there in the mix (somehow!) front and center.
Selvidge, the late great Mississippi Renaissance Man (songwriter/anthropologist/radio producer/record label owner), graciously bequeaths us this collection of Americana classics, with a couple of topnotch originals to boot. His protean vocals moan and yodel on country standards such as Long Black Veil and Swannanoa Tunnel, then growl and screech on old-time rocker Real Thing. Recorded in his adopted hometown of Memphis with gorgeous and understated production by the legendary Jim Dickinson, the songs drip with Delta sincerity, simultaneously breaking the heart while nurturing the lovesick soul.
Avant pop singer-songwriter Shara Nova (previously Worden) simply sparkles and shines as My Brightest Diamond. Utilizing her classical voice training from the University of North Texas, Nova served as guest/backup vocalist for the likes of Sufjan Steven, The Decemberists, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne. But on her debut studio album, Bring Me The Workhorse, she combines these masterful vocals with a slightly skewed, shadowy songcraft that presents something uniquely her own. The etherealness of Kate Bush; the edginess of PJ Harvey. A Goth pop instant classic.
NYC pianist and McCoy Tyner acolyte Cary leads his Focus Trio (bassist David Ewell, drummer/percussionist Sameer Gupta) into jazz hinterlands on this mesmerizing concert recording. A droning intonation of Monk’s classic ‘Round Midnight starts things off, then the trio lets things unravel artfully with intense originals. Cary’s piano beseeches us to hear those notes between the notes while his rhythm section hard bops like a most welcome punch in the gut. Gupta’s classical Indian tabla is highlighted on KC Bismillah Khan, and audio of Malcolm X and Dr. King speeches weave their way in to the mix (Runnin’ Out of Time, and Slow Blues for MLK), adding a historical gravitas to what is already a truly heavy experience. Metaphysical, moving, and masterful.
The Soledad Brothers were White Stripes garage rock fellow travelers back in the day (guitarist Johnny Walker taught Jack White how to play slide, while White produced their debut album). Having said that, the Ohio natives became more Sticky Fingers than Seven Nation Army. Their third album, Voice of Treason, finds them not only stomping and hollering tried and true swaggering blues, but also mellowing out on tracks such as the sweet and soulful Muscle Shoals-inspired Only Flower In My Bed, or the acoustic Delta-tinged Sons of Dogs. Dig that warm analog tape sound captured by UK producer Liam Watson.
[Harold Whit Williams is a Content Management Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources. He writes poetry, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and releases lo-fi guitar-heavy indie pop as DAILY WORKER.]
Despite his spare frame and quiet demeanor, Greg Lipscomb isn’t a wallflower, especially regarding his thoughts on the subject of libraries.
“The library is just in my veins,” he says. “I cannot imagine living in a society or a culture that doesn’t have a library.”
Lipscomb is the incoming chair of the UT Libraries’ Advisory Council and has just committed to a large planned gift for the Libraries, so I’m sitting with him to find out why.
Greg Lipscomb.
He begins by recounting the period during his study at UT in the early 1960s when a confluence of history and wanderlust compelled him in a direction that would ultimately lead him on a fifty-year journey away from Austin, on an odyssey of professional work and travel that would brush against events of notable historical significance.
“It was at the end of 1961 – the end of my sophomore year – I was over in one of the massive reading rooms in the Tower with the beams above and the wide tables and so forth, and at the end of finals, I stood up and I went out and took on the world as best I could see it in my own interpretation,” says Lipscomb, “and I was gone from that sort of setting for 50 years.”
Lipscomb expresses that he wasn’t walking away from his college career or academic endeavor forever – he went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from UT – but the draw of civic responsibility was too compelling to ignore. This was the time of John Kennedy’s clarion call to public service, and the cacophony of protest was growing audibly across the campus.
“You have to realize that in the 60s, you could literally be in class — many times we had the windows open because there wasn’t air conditioning — and you could hear civil rights demonstrations out on Guadalupe,” he says. “And there was this pull. John Kennedy was in office and he was making politics elegant again for the first time since Roosevelt. And the notion of public service was big.”
The urge to be part of something larger than himself became too strong to dodge, and led him down a five-decade path which presented the opportunities that ultimately formed him as a person.
“I felt the need to play a concrete role in the changes that were happening, so I got involved in student politics,” he recounts. “I got involved in civil rights. I went off to the army because of Vietnam. I went around the world. I went to California and worked for Jerry Brown. Went to Washington and worked for the Democrats there. Went to Harvard for the Kennedy School,”
Lipscomb became an active leader in the student civil rights protests at UT, was elected student body president in 1964, and used his standing to make the final push to get the regents to integrate the dorms on campus. He and a carload of his journalism colleagues from The Daily Texan drove 800 miles to document the fateful march at Selma, Alabama. As a member of ROTC, Lipscomb landed in an intelligence unit at the Pentagon during the war in Vietnam. After hitchhiking around the world with his wife, he worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, which propelled him into California politics, including a position in Governor Jerry Brown’s administration. He later returned to D.C. as a speechwriter for the first African American chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Any pairing of these life events might be enough to mention; that they’re woven into a single period of a single life is remarkable.
Amid his extended interlude in the Beltway at the FCC, Lipscomb began to seek distraction through some of the intellectual rigor that he left behind in college. He surveyed his environs and eventually wound up bumping around the library at George Washington University (GWU). After being given broad access to resources there, he felt an obligation to do what he could to return the favor, and approached the library’s development office to make a donation. Library administrators thought that as someone with no significant ties to GWU, Lipscomb might provide a valuable perspective as chair of their advisory board. His acceptance of that role enjoined him to a cause in libraries.
“Several years later, I decided retirement was timely. I was burned out on Washington. It had changed in temperament.”
The experience at GWU also elicited a change in him. Lipscomb summoned the earlier version of himself, making a conscious attempt to return to the point in time when he walked out of the library back in 1961 to take on the world. He wanted to find a place to settle where he would have ready access to the knowledge resources of a library, and began to consider all the familiar places from his past.
“And then, in 2014, I came back to Austin and I sat down at the same place and picked right up where I left off. What I was reading, what I was writing,” he says. “It’s like T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – ‘in my beginning is my end,’” says Lipscomb.
Lipscomb personifies this internalized value as “The Eternal Sophomore.” “That’s the kind of mindset I say with affection. You’re on the precipice, but your mind is still fresh, your attitude is fresh. And I saw the library reading room as a sort of cathedral, a sacred space. That’s sort of where I came back and picked up.”
“Coming back was a huge decision, and I came back humbled – and a little appalled at my arrogance sometimes along the way. Also proud of certain things and people I worked with, and causes I worked on. But I was ready to keep learning as a sophomore.”
And some undergraduates on campus might recognize him as a fixture in their world, or, perhaps, as a fellow traveler. Lipscomb’s loyalty to self-improvement through learning means he spends a significant chunk of his time on campus, much of it on the upper floors of the Perry-Castañeda Library.
“Within the closures of this building – if I had food and medicine – I could be here indefinitely,” he says. “Right now I spend about 20 hours a week – it’s a part-time job. I got up to that writing some personal stuff and just catching up on all the reading I never got to, the great reading.”
Lipscomb continued to feel a responsibility to the Libraries when he returned to Austin, wanting to carry through on the advocacy role he’d taken on at George Washington. He expressed interest to administrators at the UT Libraries, and was invited to join the council in 2014 where he has been a consistent participant not only at regular meetings, but as a vocal proponent and supporter both on campus and beyond.
Still, Lipscomb’s primary drive is in discovery and personal growth. That lengthy period of working on behalf of others has earned him the opportunity to focus on his interests, and he’s taking full advantage of it.
“The library to me is a great conversation,” he says. “I think of it in terms of books – but these books, they talk back and forth. And you can tell the mentor and the mentee — like in a translation of The Iliad or something — one passes on to the other. It’s the DNA of ideas. You can start out with just a germ of a phrase and watch it blossom into something right there.”
But even the bibliophile in Lipscomb recognizes the value of a diverse array of resources. He’s spoken extensively with library professionals about the transition to digital resources and the advantage it gives to preservation, and he’s been in active attendance at all of the public discussions in the last year related to a task force on the future of UT Libraries, where the conversation about the value of books and the impact of technology has real currency.
He especially appreciates the benefits that technology brings to research, particularly in making discovery significantly more efficient: “You can do it digitally. That’s a different training that I’m having to come up to, but I respect it. It’s easy to say, ‘Everybody’s just channel-surfing through nothing more than a paragraph or two.’ It’s a mile wide and an inch deep. But, also, you can search, you can go backwards and forwards. Software is beginning to mimic the brain, or learning as we know it.”
Whatever the challenges that have arisen since he was an undergraduate at UT, Lipscomb feels his experience all pointed him back to this place.
“I didn’t realize back in 1961 how much had been passed on to us in terms of the resources and the staff, the wonderful reading rooms – I didn’t realize until later,” says Lipscomb. “That’s when it occurred to me that I owed something.”
“The library function, role, the sanctuary, the passing on from one culture to another – it’s an optimistic enterprise,” he continues. “It says, ‘We have here your past, which is valuable, and you have to carry it forward.’ That’s what we do in the libraries. You owe current and future generations the gratitude that you received.”
“There is almost a Buddhist sense of circularity…returning to where you started. You come back and pay respects to the master that formed you. The mentor, the habits, the patterns, the depth of thinking.”
“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.
Political pamphlets played an important role in Soviet propaganda and education efforts, as they provided an easy-to-print and low-cost method for disseminating information to Soviet citizens. These short publications ranged across many different subjects including educational pamphlets promoting literacy among peasants, biographical sketches of popular figures such as Lenin, and pamphlets such as these, which cover a variety of topics related to the Soviet revolutions and military. The subjects of the pamphlets range from literacy manuals for soldiers, to the experiences of a war correspondent, to a booklet addressing the question of whether the Tsar and his family were still alive (note: the Soviet government kept the fact that the Tsar’s family had been murdered a secret from the general populace until 1926, and even after admitting the murders continued to deny that Lenin’s government was responsible).
This exhibit aims to highlight this broad spectrum of pamphlets tied together by their military themes, illuminating the commonalities between them and how the Soviet government utilized print–often with striking graphics interspersed with the text–to further its agendas, whether they be educational and for the good of its citizens (as in the case of the pamphlets promoting literacy among soldiers) or aimed at bolstering military might, as in the case of the pamphlet encouraging youth to enroll in military schools. While the documents date from 1917 through to the early 1930s, the way in which they highlight the use of media to promote a state’s agenda is relevant to current events involving propaganda being used by states to promote their aims, both within their own countries and on a global stage.
The pamphlets presented here have been selected for this exhibit not only because of their thematic unity and relevance to contemporary issues of propaganda and statecraft, but because of their ability to paint a broad portrait of the early Soviet Union and how citizens were communicated with through print. Many of the pamphlets also feature very attractive graphics that will be of interest to researchers and the public regardless of their familiarity with Soviet history.
This collection will be of interest to anyone who would like to learn more about Soviet or Russian history and propaganda, and to anyone interested in the ways in which states have utilized propaganda–and continue to do so–to further their policies.
The print versions of these pamphlets are available at the Perry-Castañeda Library at UT Austin via the Library Storage Facility. Fully digitized copies of the pamphlets are available through the UT Austin Libraries’ institutional repository, Texas ScholarWorks.
Ian Goodale is the European Studies Librarian for UT Libraries.
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.
The China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information of approximately 427,000 individuals as of April 2019, primarily from the 7th through early 20th centuries. Users can query the system in terms of place, time, office, social associations and kinship, and export the results for further analysis with GIS, social networks, and statistical software.
The China Biographical Database (CBDB) originates with the work of Chinese social historian Robert Hartwell. Hartwell’s research employed data as evidence to form and support his arguments. He built a relational database in dBase for MS DOS format to capture biographical data as it relates to five elements: (1) people, (2) places, (3) a bureaucratic system, (4) kinship structures and (5) contemporary modes of social association. He created an advisory committee for the database and made copies of his datasets and applications available to the committee members. When Hartwell died in 1996, the project included a large number of multi-variant biographical and genealogical data for over 25,000 individuals. He bequeathed his database to the Harvard Yenching Institute. Later, the Harvard Yenching Institute transferred its rights to the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies 1 and changed its name to the China Biographical Database (CBDB).
Hartwell’s database has since gone through many redesigns to make it work with modern computer technology. The FoxPro application has been used to make easier searches and queries. An online application for public access querying and reporting has been added. Python is used to write procedures for names entity recognition for text-mining and text-modeling. Other facilities that have been built into CBDB includes an XML export ability, a save/load ability, and a handy list of pre-made regular expression examples. The long-term goal of CBDB is to systematically include all significant biographical material from China’s historical record and to make the contents available free of charge, without restriction, for academic use. Users can query CBDB through an online database in both a Chinese and an English interface. Users can also download the entire database, together with query forms and utilities for exporting data for network and spatial analysis, from the CBDB website and explore the database on any computer with Microsoft Access. 2
The data in CBDB is taken from multiple biographical reference sources, including modern syntheses of biographical data, traditional biographical records, evidence for social associations from literary collections, evidence for office holding from modern and traditional sources, and other biographical databases. 3 Data is regularly being added and updated and is categorized and coded for various aspects of the life histories of Chinese people. The CBDB project also accepts volunteered data as it is thought that the more biographical data the project accumulates, the greater the service to research and learning that explore the lives of individuals.
Research methodologies supported by CBDB:
Prosopography
An investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group by means of a collective study of their lives.
GIS: Mapping and Analyzing
Statistical and geographic information system (GIS) software can be used to work with CBDB data. For example, ArcGIS, MapInfo or even Google Earth can be used to combine freely available China Historical GIS (CHGIS) with CBDB output
Social NetworksSocial network analysts find that people need and seek emotional and economic support of different kinds. All social network queries in the stand-alone version of CBDB export data for visualization and some analysis to Pajek, freeware for social network analysis for Windows in UTF-8, GBK or pinyin romanization.
Peter Bol, who was the chair of Hartwell’s advisory committee and a professor of Chinese history at Harvard, is now the chair of the CBDB Project’s executive committee. There are many committees overseeing CBDB: a steering committee (composed of scholars of pre-modern Chinese studies and computer scientists), editorial committees from the participating research institutes, working groups on each of the four historical periods, and functional committees who work on text mining and web maintenance. All committees are composed of scholars from around the world and CBDB has been promoted widely, for example a recent special program at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies Conference on “Digital Technologies Expo.”
Sima Guang social associates (464 listed, of various types: Patron of, Friend of, Friend in the same graduating class, Impeached, Impeached by, Recommended, Recommended by, Opposed or attacked, Opposed by or attacked by, Praised or admired by, Coalition associate of, Supported by, Purged by, Prefaced book by, Preface of book by, Epitaph written by, Epitaph written for, etc. )
2.
Spatial extent of the marriage networks of the Northern Song statesman Sima Guang and the Southern Song statesman Shi Hao. Source: CBDB – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/gis-mapping-and-analyzing
3.
An example of network visualization. The tie can reflect the number of letter between individuals, centered on Neo-Confucians of Zhu Xi. Source: Source: CBDB – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/social-networks
Some examples of biographical indexes included in CBDB and held in the University of Texas Libraries.
Liaison Librarian for Physical and Mathematical Sciences Lydia Fletcher is currently co-chairing the STEM Librarians South conference, which brings together information professionals and academics from across the Southern U.S. and beyond to share their ideas, current research, best practices, and unique insights that help librarians advance the cause of STEM education and research.
When not organizing conferences, Lydia provides research, teaching and publishing support for all students, faculty and staff in the departments of Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, Statistics & Data Science, Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering.
She graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her work and experience for us.
Lydia Fletcher
Tex Libris: First love — librarianship or science?
Lydia Fletcher: Definitely science! Especially space science – I wanted to be an astronaut for a really long time, and I went to Space Camp when I was 10. Some of my favorite memories as a kid involved going to Johnson Space Center in Houston. I couldn’t get enough of the place! But at some point I got more interested in history and literature, and even though I was always excited by whatever NASA was doing, for a while I focused on other things.
Lydia Fletcher: Definitely science! Especially space science – I wanted to be an astronaut for a really long time, and I went to Space Camp when I was 10. Some of my favorite memories as a kid involved going to Johnson Space Center in Houston. I couldn’t get enough of the place! But at some point I got more interested in history and literature, and even though I was always excited by whatever NASA was doing, for a while I focused on other things.
Science Legos on a shelf in Lydia’s office.
Where did you study?
LF: I did my BA at the University of Texas at San Antonio and did a Master of Studies degree at the University of Oxford in the UK. Both of those were in English, and it wasn’t until I started working in libraries and got my MSIS here at UT that I realized that I could work with scientists as a librarian. And that I love it!
When did you join the UT Libraries, and what drew you to Texas?
LF: My three year anniversary with the UT Libraries will be on August 15! Some days it feels like I just got here, and other days it feels like I’ve been here forever. Texas is home for me – I’m from San Antonio – and UT is an exciting place to work. I love getting to interact with the researchers here, especially the folks at McDonald Observatory.
Library at the McDonald Observatory.
Speaking of, you undertook a reorganization project for observatory a few years back. What did that entail, and what was the experience like?
LF: The folks out at McDonald Observatory wanted to make some improvements in the Otto Struve 82” Telescope (the original 1939 telescope) building ahead of their 80th anniversary this summer. The library collection had spilled out of the library into the hallways and they wanted me to help them clear those hallways. I got to spend a week at McDonald Observatory – which was amazing! – and at the end we identified materials to be brought back to Austin. I also helped them get former director Harlan Smith’s collection displayed more prominently and created a display collection of works by and about McDonald Observatory. It was a great collaboration and I’m very proud of how the library looks now.
Library at the McDonald Observatory.
What are your responsibilities?
LF: As a liaison librarian, I support students, faculty, and staff with their research needs in the departments I liaise with: Astronomy, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics & Data Science. At the moment that looks like working with faculty to make sure they understand some new National Science Foundation Open Access mandates, but it also includes a range of reference and scholarly communications support.
What aspect of your job is the most fulfilling?
LF: Solving puzzles for people. Sometimes I get reference questions where someone has an incomplete or incorrect citation, and I really love figuring those out. Or looking for a translation – recently someone wanted a translation of an article written in the Soviet Union in the 40s. I tracked a translation of it down to a microfilm held by the British Library and was able to scan a copy for the researcher. That was fun!
Your studies were in the humanities, but you’re immersed in science now. What are the differences you see in the discipline-specific approaches to research and general library use by STEM and humanities folks, and do you recognize any differences in styles within the departments you liaise with?
LF: Scientists are so different from people who do research in the humanities. Scientists use different materials from those in the humanities – most scientists rely on journals instead of books, but they also need things like datasets and specialty software. So, most of the students from those areas look to the libraries for computers where they can access all those things. I love that the Libraries IT staff do such a great job making sure we provide software like Mathematica and LaTeX. Of course, there are outliers even among scientists – Math researchers tend to be different from other scientists, and actually more like humanities researchers in that they love books!
What do you think the prospects are for wider adoption of open access practices by STEM faculty and researchers?
LF: It’s a little funny for me to talk about Open Access adoption because the departments I work most closely with – Physics, Math and Astronomy – are already committed to not just Open Access publishing but Open Science principles like data sharing. It’s almost universal to see Physicists and Astronomers making versions of their articles available as preprints, and most Astronomical data is publicly available. But they’ve been doing it for a long time already – the Arxiv preprint server was developed by Physicists in the early 1990s. I definitely think other disciplines will adopt open practices, but it will take some time. It doesn’t happen overnight. We just have to keep working on sustainable models and promoting them.
What are you reading this summer?
LF: I just finished “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race,” since I’m so excited about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Lydia Fletcher.
Still want to travel to space? Mars mission perhaps? Or the Space Force?
LF: If anyone at NASA or SpaceX is reading this and looking for a librarian to go to Mars, they can definitely call me.
Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.
Haunted chamber pop-infused indie folk from Oakland’s Emily Jane White. Stark, autumnal, minor-key story songs stack up before the listener like sepia-toned family photos. White’s plucked guitar and sparse piano are formally backdropped by somber strings, cymbal swells, and pedal steel, but it’s in the bleak lyrics her eerie disembodied vocals deliver where each track’s true power lies.
On their self-titled debut, L.A.’s Eulogies mixes thematically heavy lyrics with reverb-drenched back alley indie pop. Coolly restrained with an economy of motion, not a single guitar lick, bass thump, or snare hit is wasted. The band beautifully broods with noir-inspired post-punk, allowing singer/songwriter Peter Walker’s world weary vocals plenty of room to stagger about in his serious moonlight.
NYC bassist/composer William Parker pushes the boundaries of free jazz and world music alike with this heady and cross-pollinated collection. Parker (solo artist, poet, painter, onetime sideman for Cecil Taylor) displays the deep cultural connections between West Africa and the New World by blending traditional instruments from both areas with gritty downtown avant-garde sax and upright bass. Ancient, modern, and astounding.
Berliner Nadja Korinth and New Yorker Ryan Schaefer meet somewhere in the jet-lagged middle on this mash-up of proto-punk fuzz, darkwave ambience, and krautrock minimalism. Drawing upon such art rock touchstones as VU, JMC, and Neu!, Palms defiantly never settles into a coherent sequence, preferring to bounce back and forth between styles in such a no-wave bliss that it keeps the unsuspecting listener peeking around the next corner for what’s next.
Linzay Young & Joel Savoy / Linzay Young & Joel Savoy
Old time Acadian music from Eunice, Louisiana’s Linzay Young and Joel Savoy. Like an update on Alan Lomax’s field recordings, Young (Red Stick Ramblers) and Savoy (founder of Valcour Records) captured these pre-accordion Cajun standards in just one afternoon with no frills and with no overdubs. Their vocal/fiddle/guitar dynamic rings true with front porch authenticity, and the twin fiddle tunes are simply enchanting.
[Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He writes poetry, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and releases lo-fi guitar-heavy indie pop as DAILY WORKER.]
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.
“It is astonishing how common this illness is, how it afflicts and torments so many with such grave accidents, that when a man or a woman barely turns 20-years-old they start complaining of melancholy and heartache. Some go about full of fears and shocks, and it is fixated in their imagination that they are about to perish. Others say that a who-knows-what climbs up from their spleen and their belly to their heart, shredding it to pieces.”
Such are the symptoms of depression as described in the first Spanish-language medicine book ever printed in the Americas (Mexico City, 1592), written by Agustín de Farfán. Even though the ailment has not changed, the way we access Farfán’s book has come a long way, from the extremely rare copy of an early American imprint, available in a handful of specialized libraries around the world, to the digital images easily discoverable through Primeros Libros.
What started in 2010 as a joint endeavor by two Texas university libraries and three libraries in the Mexican state of Puebla, is now a collaborative project in which 25 institutions, from California to Massachusetts, from Chile to Spain, have joined forces to digitize the books produced during the first century of the printing press in the Americas, up to 1601.
Primeros Libros is now an outstanding example of international library collaboration.
The goal is to provide digital access to a corpus of 136 titles published in the Viceroyalty of the New Spain (Mexico), where the printing press was established in the year 1539, and 20 titles published in the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the first master printer arrived in 1580.
Users of Primeros Libros might renew their appetite for browsing leisurely in a digital library of very rare books. They could look for the word agua in various indigenous languages, or visit the last pages of the naval engineering book by Diego García de Palacio in search of zingladura (spoiler: it means a day’s travel by ship). Aristotelian logics might be too intricate, at least compared with the modest joy of finding an acrostic poem at the end of Alonso de la Vera Cruz’s Dialectica Resolutio cum Textu Aristotelis.
A page of Alonso de Molina’s Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary. Printed in 1555, this is the first work of lexicography published in the Americas. It contains marginal annotations in Otomí, another language common in Central Mexico. This copy is part of the Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection, held at the Benson Latin American Collection.
When two or more member libraries own the same title, all copies are digitized and shared on-line, so that researchers can trace ownership, find missing pages, study pen facsimiles, and compare marginal annotations.
Although many a curious thing awaits the casual visitor to Primeros Libros, serious scholarship can be undertaken through this site.
The cross and the sword—religious zeal and military subjugation—were the tools of colonization of the Spanish empire. Primeros Libros is an invaluable resource for understanding the dissemination of the Catholic faith during a period of tremendously violent cultural clashes. To convert the native population, friars became linguists who learned and codified the most widely spoken indigenous languages.
Many titles in Primeros Libros, alongside catechism books that offer the basics of Catholicism, are grammars and dictionaries intended to help missionaries learn the native tongues so that they could preach and pray in the language of the natives.
This formidable linguistic enterprise was undertaken by friars with the aid of natives, not only as speakers of their languages, but also as interpreters and teachers—among the indigenous nobility, some youth were taught Latin and Spanish, and later participated in the elaboration of grammars and dictionaries. Linguistics, anthropology, history of the book, religious studies, philosophy, and history of science—these are some of the disciplinary perspectives enhanced by the Primeros Libros project.
Primeros Libros is a work in progress in which some institutions, already on board with the partnership, are in the process of digitizing their copies. Therefore, not all of the known titles in this corpus are already accessible online. The site will be greatly enriched when the first books printed in Peru become available. Even though the site is not always user-friendly, the inconveniences are minimal compared to the potential for research and education contained in this digital library.
Page from Instrucción Náutica, by Diego García de Palacio, printed in the New Spain in 1587. This copy belongs to the Universidad of Salamanca, in Spain.
