Unlocking e-content and enhancing education and research opportunities – an academic perspective.
Matthew Steggle, Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University
Hope to bring the user perspectives from a bigger picture. Will offer five principles about what academics do and don’t like about digitisation projects. I’m primarily a teacher and researcher and only secondarily involved in digitisation.
Resource example number 1: The Electronic Manipulus Florum Project
Collection of around 3000 quotations in Latin from Church elders, arranged into thematic headings. The manuscript was hugely popular in 15th and 16th century France and widely copied, became tool of choice for writing sermons. Medieval information technology. Around 2000, a professor in Canada put together funding bids to put together a new edition of the book. Did a simple digitisation of the book – bought an early printed copy and types it in as non-formatted pdf files. Meanwhile, I’m working on Renaissance literature and Thomas Nash. Some quotations had evaded me so I typed them into Google and kept coming across the American site.
First lesson: access is everything – I only found the quotes because Google indexes the full text of this chap’s site.
Second lesson: you don’t need a fully marked-up text – simple can work too.
Example number 2
YouTube Shakespeare skit from 1960s with Beatles doing a performance of a scene from A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Important for what it tells us about cultural history. Fascinating to teach with. It’s workable and can talk about questions of actor and role, fantastically adaptive as a teaching resource (though copyright issues…), very simple controls, no need to log in, students know how to use it, can use it in seminar rooms. It’s accessible. Can no teach with it when couldn’t six years ago.
Lesson three: accessibility
But, cannot source it on a research paper. Copyright issues, no authority, no relating of them back to the analogue artefact. Do not have a clear statement of how they relate to the artefact they come from.
Lesson four: helpful to have a clear idea of how what you’re looking at relates to the original
Example number three: early English books online
It’s a database produced by Proquest and available acorss the university sector in the UK thanks to a deal done by JISC. Offers page images of every book published in England before 1700s (?CHK). Replaces microfiche collections, which required a certain level of skills. No can get it almost instantly and is not restricted to grads – first year undergrads can look at it. A fantastic teaching resource. Gives you back the book-lined study of olden days of university teaching.
In the 1990s was writing a paper on Aristophanes. Took three years, did a lot of hard reading. Found a handful of texts which mentioned him. Now can get around 200 in about 15 seconds.
Lesson 5: academics like complete collections
These are fantastically exciting times to be involved in learning and teaching with all these new resources coming along and making a seismic shift in the academic culture. But keep talking to us, we might be able to help give you a sense of the bigger picture…