Reading the changing platforms of Eighteenth Century
Collections Online.
In Old
Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth Century Collections Online,
I analysed the various interfaces to Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections
Online (ECCO), including Jisc’s Historical Texts as well as Gale’s various
platforms. However, since the book was published both Gale and Jisc have
modified these interfaces, so I wanted to reflect on some of the arguments I
originally made about these platforms.[1]
Detail from the ESTC record of Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (1789)
A key strand of my argument was that the digital
representation of bibliographic meta-data, such as format, variations in
printing, if and how it was illustrated, errors, pagination (essentially, data
ingested from the English Short
Title Catalogue, see for example, above), was a significant factor in
how we apprehended each book’s material presence. Because each different
interface represented that record of their materiality differently, our
perception of that presence, the ‘bookishness’
of these books, depended on which interface we were using. I argued that these
differences reflected some wider changes. First, the direction of publishers such
as Gale and ProQuest has been towards packaging their digital products to
enable cross-collection access and searching; however, given different collections
were built on different standards of metadata, it became very difficult to
represent metadata language in a consistent way.
Second, the influence of computational analysis or
text-mining was reflected in Gale’s new platforms for ECCO from around 2014. As
I argued: ‘the increased focus on the text of the books in ECCO risks bypassing
the bookishness of books, those eccentricities introduced by the handmade
processes of book production and transmission’ (92). Originally, such lack of
material evidence was particularly felt in the beta release of the Gale Digital
Scholar Lab platform where the results lists and the book viewer included no
bibliographic information at all. However, between December 2021 and March 2022
Gale updated that interface. The book-viewer interface is now based on the same
architecture as the Gale Primary Sources interface and bibliographic metadata
is now available in the same way as the standard GPS interface.
Figure 1 Gale Digital Scholar Lab, ‘Explore’ view, detail (31.03.2022)Figure 2 Gale Digital Scholar Lab, ‘Full Citation’ view, detail (31.03.2022)
As you can see, bibliographic metadata is still rather awkwardly
presented across two different viewing options (‘Explore’ and ‘Full Citation’).
I won’t rehearse the arguments between bibliography and text-mining here, but
it does seem a shame to make certain ways of reading less accessible on Gale’s
now standardised platform.
By comparison, Historical Texts, Jisc’s platform for accessing
ECCO (above), presents bibliographic data in a slightly more user-friendly way
in one whole pane. However, that metadata is not consistent across all collections
accessed via the platform, and as I discussed in the book, the data was still rather
attenuated. However as of July, 2021, Jisc ingested more bibliographic data
from the ESTC, naming the source library and listing holding libraries for
items in ECCO.[2]
Setting aside my point about the bookishness of books, one
of the other central points in Old Books and Digital Publishing was that
digital archives are far from static entities. For the moment, the collection
itself remains stable, but how we interface with those old books – how we
apprehend their material presence – is
subject to change. At the end of my book, I said that ‘ECCO is still changing’
(104). So, indeed, it turns out. But the rapidity with which commercial interfaces
are updated underline how essential it is that we learn how to read these
platforms and trace their histories.
Stephen H. Gregg is a senior lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University, UK. His research and teaching cover eighteenth-century literature, the history of the book, and digital humanities. He has published on eighteenth-century literature and issues such as masculinity, and empire and colonialism, as well as on the work of Daniel Defoe. ...
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