On behalf of the BSA, the Bibliographical Society of America, welcome
Thank you to the hosts of this webinar on the Archeology of Reading
Those are Earle Havens, Matthew Symonds ,Neil Weijer,
Jaap Geararts--and am I forgetting anyone?
No, I'm not, good.
So
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Follow along in the chat and just let me know if you have any other any issues, but without any further ado
I will introduce Earle Havens
Thank you Earle.
Welcome.
Thank you, Erin. Can everybody hear me, can you hear me Erin?
I can hear you.
Okay, great.
Well, welcome everybody to the Archaeology of Reading.
I am sharing with you just to start a view of our website for this
five-year digital project between
Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London,
and Princeton University Library
Earle
Yeah.
One second. I think you've stopped sharing your screen.
Ah, I don't know how that happened.
Thanks for catching that, I'm trying to figure out what happened
Okay.
Sorry for that,
the inevitable technical difficulties.
So, I'm going to just give a kind of a general overview of this project
with an eye towards
addressing some of our immediate thoughts and needs and concerns as
scholars as teachers as librarians
rare book
curators and so forth
about how to access
Material of great research but also teaching value within the online environment
Through what was originally generated as a kind of a research
tool but which we had already begun to adapt as a team
Also for teaching and pedagogical purposes.
What began as a kind of a research enterprise
became something more like a digital research experience through the creation of the Archeology of Reading viewer
But first in order to understand any of this one really needs to understand
What the project is about in terms of its content.
What we've really generated is a viewer. This is a still image of a page from
Castiglione's Il Cortegiano in the English translation of Hoby.
What we did was we took this as an exemplary page in this two-page
poster which can be downloaded from the website and
and offered a kind of little
arrows pointing out to various and sundry
aspects of the idiosyncratic methods of annotation, animadversion, and
interpretation--in a sense, evidence of reading practice--
of Gabriel Harvey
One of the two main figures that comprise the the corpus of material along with John Dee.
On the right you'll see what is a
real core of project as we'll see when we open up the AOR viewer is an annotation panel, which
transcribes all of the marginalia on each page and
keeps that data integral to the digital surrogate of the image in all instances as you pass through the viewer.
If you toggle to the search, you'll then find a search panel, which was also a
creation of this project which allows you to conduct a multi-faceted
search through our
data set, of the underlying data set, for the Archeology of Reading. What we undertook to do is to select
36
rare books
from the scattered libraries of these two serial annotators of the 16th century.
We chose Gabriel Harvey and John Dee
primarily because they, in addition to having two of the largest libraries in
16th century England, and in addition to always having an inkpot and a penknife and a quill pen in hand
when they read, and also evidence within their annotations that they read not just one book at a time
but that they read through many books in their library at the same time, in addition to all that
they also fulfilled the absolute requirement that they have excellent handwriting, excellent penmanship,
which makes
The Archeology of Reading particularly useful across all sorts of user groups precisely because one can read the marginalia.
So we essentially digitized 36 books scattered across the dozen libraries.
You cannot do this kind of research outside of a digital environment
because you cannot literally put many of these books in the same room again and compare them one to the other.
We were interested to get beyond the sort of
one-off tradition of studying marginalia as
how X read his or her Y as a kind of case study and allow for a much more in-depth kind of
exploration of reading as an activity within a library within a collection and across space and time.
We chose Gabriel Harvey who was a Cambridge Don, a would-be English courtier whose
marginalia very much
fills in that kind of mode of a kind of early modern self-fashioning
reader and
Polymath. And then John Dee a rather different figure though
also undertaking this great enterprise of marginalia.
The proverbial magus of the Elizabethan Court, the mathematician, astrologer astronomer,
alchemist, and
all-around reader of the book of nature as it were.
We chose books
for our canon, for the Harvey, that we thought were particularly rich in their marginalia.
We have for example Frontinus' s Stratagemes of Warre, at the Houghton Library, which is
spectacularly
annotated. Both the Italian Cortegiano, as well as the English translation I mentioned earlier
Works of contemporary political theory, books about jokes,
Machiavelli's the Art of War,
Olaus Magnus's history of the northern lands of Europe and so on and so forth
We then moved to add the corpus of John Dee, which is a very different corpus
but again is quite representative of his library and also
Should be useful to a much wider range of people, including great works of mathematics, medieval history,
astronomy, classics,
Some wonderful books from the New York Society Library that Erin Schreiner actually helped us with in her former position there.
The Gerhard Dorn and
Paracelsus alchemical texts and so forth and so on; don't really have too much time to talk about that other than to say that
we've covered a wide range of material.
Now, if you go to the Archeology of Reading website and my colleagues who I'll introduce shortly will be talking much more about the
content here, I just want to draw your attention to one thing in particular
in this site, which is our books and readers page
which actually you open up and then it takes you to individual essays for all of the books for Dee and Harvey's corpora
with biographies of each of these
fascinating figures and also histories of their libraries
Along with allied content about the locations of books from their libraries. And then if we enter into one of these spaces here, for example
Harvey's books, you'll see a nice gallery of each of the books in the collection
with
Bibliographical essays
That give you kind of contextual information about each with bibliographical data.
But the key and core of the project is the Archeology of Reading viewer.
This is essentially what we built in our project utilizing Mirador 2
Open source
API to present our digital surrogates and all of this data in one place. And so, you can scroll down
within the viewer which is where all the action is happening as it were and you can choose.
On the left side of the screen you'll see books that were annotated by Harvey books that were by Dee by those images
and I'm just going to take you through a very simple sequence of
What you see, so here you have a gallery below
There are all kinds of different options for viewing this material in different ways. You can simply move
With arrows, but you can also move across
items along the bottom of the page and so forth
So here we have, you can go fullscreen and you can see we have in before as Thomas Tusser's
Five hundred points of good husbandry
A literary work of the Elizabethan period that was incredibly popular.
It's a typical text. You see above a kind of motto:
"Gratum opus agricolis"
Which here is reflected in the annotation panel
along with an English translation. Everything that appears in a marginal form we've
transcribed
encoded into XML to make them searchable and then of course
Translated them so that these can be really valuable to students
even those without advanced language skills in Latin, Italian, French, Greek, even a bit of Hebrew
these are all languages at work in this resource.
Below you'll see Gabriel Harvey having dated, having the date either of acquisition or of reading
You also see dynamic elements of our viewer
at work here and there are image
adjustments, you can
grayscale and other things that I don't have time to show you, but, say we look at the bottom of annotation here: Heywood's proverbs
Here you see a reference to Heywood's proverbs. If we toggle over to search
there's a basic and an advanced search and the option to search within this book
So, if I just type in the word Heywood,
this is the proverbial poet in epigrammatist of the sixteenth century
Two references come up in this book of Tusser:
the first one is the one you see, the second is this
so then it takes us to the end of the book and there at the bottom of the page is a reference to Tusser
and Heywood poets of common life, these are poets interested in the pastoral themes
So you can then, if you wish, search in a more complex way.
We could for example search across all the books in the Archeology of Reading corpus for Heywood
in the basic search function and then open up
14 references to what Harvey thought was useful for
invoking on the identity of Heywood.
If we click on to the first of these you'll see a rather vertiginous looking annotated page from a joke book,
Domenichi and Guicciardini. If you rotate--this is why we did this--and you read you'll see: "he shall never be
good at an extemporall descant, that hath not all Heywood." And so here is the reference to Heywood in
conjunction with the Apothemata of Laertius and Plutarch and Marshall and so forth.
So we also created sort of hotspots for people, places, and books so you could go to this
transcription and translation which also gives clues to where on the page the marginally are.
You click on this
I'm going to exit the full screen
you click on
Heywood and you get to search in the book or search in the collection. If we search within this
One book for more Heywood we get a dozen hits.
So now if I want to do an advanced search I can add a term. Let's choose. For example
one of the symbols that Gabriel Harvey used.
He actually had his own personal symbolic system of annotation and here we've created filters for all of these.
I'm going to choose the Sun which is a symbol very often of kingship and conduct a search.
Here I come up with page 438 in the same joke book, and if I advanced to that and
rotate the page and move in, I'll see another note here this time in Latin
And it is "Sensi Aschami Germanicum," etcetera,
"I heard the Germanic discourse of Ascham with Heywood's proverbs." And you can see you can just sort of
go down the rabbit hole as it were as our colleague Anthony Grafton
often likes to call it, this experience,
as did Lisa Jardine, our co-principal investigators along with myself and Matt Symonds.
When you're done going through all of these steps, you can actually click export current research and you get this handy dandy list
Which you can then export in HTML and save
onto your machine and you open that up and you've got a sequence of all the unique
durable links for everything that you've just gone through. You could produce this, reproduce this, generate this, for not only for teaching
activities but also for directed research.
All of this requires teamwork and
if we go to your blog you'll see that some of our members of our team
Matt and Jaap who you'll hear from,
also our late colleague Lisa Jardine, a mastermind behind this, and one of many
graduate student research fellows who helped to transcribe and
transform this information to searchable forms.
We have over 31 members of the Archaeological team as we call ourselves listed on the site.
So without further ado, we'll then proceed to the next presentations. The first is by Jaap Geararts here to the right
who will walk us through the AOR viewer with a more particular sense about the structured data model that underlies this resource
and also talk about data export. We'll then move to Neil Weijer who was also a
postdoctoral fellow on the project now a curator at the University of Florida of rare books.
He will talk to us about his preparation of pedagogical training material for the site
and also make some suggestions for teaching. And then finally my co-principal investigator Matt Symonds
will talk about digital research
Contextualizing AOR in the context of other research allied resources online
What we call, in technical jargon, external objects from the viewer that can be brought to bear to turn
AOR into a bit of a diving board for directed research. And so without further ado, I'm now going to pass it on to Jaap.
Yes, thanks Earle for that. I'm now sharing my screen just give me a sec.
Right, so as Earle mentioned
I'll explain a bit more about the search and especially how the search relies to the underlying data
as we captured it in the project.
So, preliminary remark
which would be useful is to say tha it can be sometimes daunting for either students who are not
Used to
the historiographical field of the history of reading
or working with these resources like AOR
Because the kind of data we present and kind of data sets we present can be quite daunting because of the
detailed information that we've captured and this is really the result of
a decision we took quite early in the project mainly to take a maximalist approach.
Which means we didn't just focus on the marginal notes
that were made by Harvey and Dee in their books
But we really decided to capture all reader interventions as we call it made by
these readers so that mentions as you can see on this page of Frontinus's Stratagemes
that we captured the
marginal annotations. We captured the Mars symbol which you can see here in the middle of the page
And we also captured all the underscored words in the print text
As well as the marks which you can see here in the left margin, the plus signs and the quotation signs.
If you look at the transcription or annotation panel on your right
You will see that not all this information is actually
displayed
so because there's only limited space in this annotation panel we decided only to
display the symbols as you can see here the Mars symbol
and marginal notes their translation and
The other information contained within these marginal notes that we've singled out such as the cross reference here
The people mentioned and so forth.
There are various ways to access this information and that's what I want to talk about now just to offer some
strategies ways of combining the simple search and the advanced search and also offering some
Shortcuts as it were to particular--a particular kind of information that we've captured.
So, Earle already showed the simple search, how it works and
There's one thing we should realize if we do a simple search, which is a string based search
it searches for
the original text of the marginal notes made by these two readers,
the text of the translation, it searches within the
underscored words in the print text, but it also
searches for all the text
Associated to all the reader interventions. So for instance, if a transcriber was looking at this page and thought
a clear link could be established between say a plus sign in the left margin and
part of the printed text, he or she would capture that in the XML files in which are made our transcriptions and
this information is searched as well.
So it can happen that if you do a basic search for a particular words that you that the search result will
yield pages we don't have marginal annotations, but you would but which will have say for instance
underscored words in the printed text
which yield to results, so don't be put off if you
come across those pages.
This means that the
simple search is a very wide and broad search which can make it fairly useful for
students when they access
this resources and want to find information on a particularly broad topic. Xo for instance if we
search for the words war in the AOR corpus both Dee and an especially Harvey were
interested in war and military strategies and
we click on search and you can see that we have 160 search results and
this is
very nice and you know, you can take your time to go through this list
but one might want to, on the basis of this sort results, might want to narrow down the search a bit further.
In order to do so as Earle also already showed we can use the advanced search.
Which allows us to search for particular words or particular marks or symbols
and create a more complex, query-based search.
So for instance we search here for war in the text of a marginal note
But we're not satisfied with that. We want to narrow the search down a bit more.
We want to couple that to
the search for a particular
historical person in this case
namely Caesar, and
in order to, as I said, narrow the search down a bit further. So what we'll be asking from search here is now:
"Return us pages in the whole AOR corpus
Which have a marginalia which contains war and the marginal notes, which mentions the person Caesar."
Right
we get a number of search results here which is nice and then one of the advantages
of the AOR viewer is that we can
load this search result within this particular workspace as it's called, but we also have the possibility
To open that search results in another workspace
like I did here and
This is especially useful if you have a very big screen, which I don't have as you can see
but it allows one to open multiple search results up to 25, I think,
and really start comparing pages of different books and comparing marginal notes.
Okay. I'm going to close this done now and I want to
show something else which is something similar. We again want to search for marginalia, "war,"
but then for a symbol both
Harvey and Dee used
a set of symbols. They used them in different ways, but often they used symbols to mark up passages in the printed text
So we can now search, for instance, for Mars
find it--here this--and
again searching for marginalia on war and for the Mars symbol
in order to find, possibly find, marginalia, which are clearly linked to the printed text
the reader was interested in,
and then for instance
we can immediately go to a page in Livy's history of Rom, still the crown jewel of the AOR corpus.
Interestingly on this page what we see is that
Harvey and Dee, they made what we call internal references, so
They refer to other books or they refer to
pages within
Within a particular book they were reading
This is really interesting because it shows us which books were so to speak
in conversation with one another but it also allows us to follow the pathways early modern readers took to their books
and what we did is to
make these internal references these links operational so you can click on them and then you have to the option to open
the page to which is linked in the same workspace, or as I showed before,
open it in another workspace.
Now, in order to
single out if you're interested in these kinds of internal references what you can do they say, okay, we go to search again
and
we won't still focus on the topic of war but we want you to hunt down some of these internal references.
Both Harvey and Dee often use the Latin supra or infra, see above or see below, so then
Searching for
supra or infra will quickly
Provide you with a list of a number of these internal references.
What also happens is that
These readers providers very detailed a references to a particular book or to a particular chapter
within a book or a book within the book and sometimes was done in early modern imprints. So what you then can quickly do
as a shortcut to get to this information
simply search for the word book, which will also look for the word book in the
translations of marginal notes
and what you then see for instance, which is interesting in Fontinus's Stratagemes of warre, references to
the book of Jacopo di Porcia, an Italian soldier, The precepts of warre, which was
often referred to by Gabriel Harvey
So these are again some simple strategies to to make use of the search,
combine a simple search with a more advanced search and also make use of
the particular ways in which we decided to classify the data and also capture the data in the XML files and
then as Earle already showed
there is the possibility to export this as a list of HTML links
which is especially useful if you want to continue your research another day and
Want to see, go back in time and see which pages you've looked at,
but also which kinds of searches you have already done.
So that's another great benefit of having is this export function.
So having said that I think I have talked for long enough already
so I will hereby hand over to Neil who will more sort of reflect on the
Pedagogical aspects of the resource that we have created. Thank you.
Thanks, Jaap. I'm just gonna share my screen quickly
put that up. Hello everybody. Thank you for coming.
Picking up off of what Jaap was saying
In the second phase of our project, when we were working with John Dee's books, and we were developing more things in the viewer
we started to have conversations about
uses for the project and user groups for the project that kind of went beyond the
core constituency of people who already knew what the history of reading was
And probably already had a sense of what these books were about.
So as Jaap mentioned the Livy is the crown jewel in the AOR corpus for the first part of it
because there was a specific article written about the way that Gabriel Harvey read it and so
moving from a project that was built to kind of illustrate one readers path through their books
to incorporating multiple readers and multiple pieces of information
Really kind of had us think about well, how do we get somebody else to use this for a different purpose? and so teaching
was really one of the more
I wouldn't say easy but one of the more readily apparent uses.
So as we go through some of the resources for teaching with AOR first of all
I want to say you do not have to be an expert to do it. That's kind of the point
You do have to be an expert, but you do not necessarily need to know everything about all of these books
We realized there were two key strengths to the project.
First of all, as we were saying, for students who may never have seen an annotated book before
the project is interactive so we can show you a very
high-resolution image of a particular book; you can manipulate it in ways that you
wouldn't necessarily be able to do readily with a physical book.
But we've also layered information on top of it so
We had thought about ways of getting this material into a seminar room having people talk about something on a page
Without necessarily having that be talking in the abstract. So if we were using AOR in a class
We can all discuss this
We can try and decipher some of the annotations, first of all,  just see what people think about how to read it
And then pop out
additional information
that kind of gives you help in navigating the book
so this layered information means that like I said the
Project, this page of the book, is more interactive than it would be if it was just a flat digitized image.
But,
the second thing that is a real strength of the projects as both Earle and Jaap have mentioned are the
linked data in it, the ability to export findings, and the stable URLs
for every image. That was something that we developed in the second phase of the project and is what's really made this kind of
teaching exercise with
with AOR not just usable, but I think actually very advantageous
because since you can save
paths through the resource and searches
You have the ability to design things or use exercises that are very open-ended
in addition to just being walkthroughs and you don't have to be sitting over the shoulder of your students saying
"Now do this, now do this, now click this."
So if we go to
the main website, so we're on the AOR WordPress site right now, and we go to this tab here that is how to use AOR
as we scroll down
There's a lot of just general how to's and then there's the teaching pages here.
What this allows you to do is if you are looking, and I imagine as some of you are, just for material to
dive right into
there are nine separate topics at different levels
for seminars for secondary schools and then even just some quick puzzles that
These links will drop you into the viewer
And you can either have a discussion
In person or asynchronously or build assignments around the resource.
These have all been built from the
HTML export function
And I'll show you a little bit how to do that in a second
But the other thing is that we had really intended this to encourage collaboration around the resource
and so you have the ability like I said to
Take somebody by the hand and lead them or you have the ability to kind of
Create an option and open-ended sandbox for them, too
so if we go to this particular exercise
Which traces the way that John Dee read
the history of England
all of these links
Will launch the pages in the viewer
That pertain to
The task at hand, so if you look at this you can kind of see the ways that he is trying to
Reconcile the spelling of names
from this supposedly fantastic voyage of the Trojans across
The ocean to found the island of Britain
and we can see him kind of working with the material in a way that is very specific to him
But fortunately for those of us who can't really decipher this
Can start to kind of move into
the English
I will say that the export will give you a series of links
So you can actually do as I've done here
People will click these separately
You can kind of give them prompts in the text or you can drop them into the viewer
But they will kind of have to go back and forth through
the material. It won't preserve the the search history in the window.
So while as you're navigating the AOR resource in real time, if you're searching through it, you can use your browsers back and forward buttons
For material that you're pulling out of an HTML export you have to go to the list and link it
We actually see on this last page of the exercise
Dee recording different areas that he's found other books different people who have collections of material that are useful to
others and actually useful to him a family member who gave him a hint as to
His own pedigree and then a notice of his death down here. So there are topics to explore
In all of these books that have to do with the history of reading
That have to do with the history of these authors and then also that just have to do with the uses of books and topics.
So
This exercise here is sort of a similar walkthrough but it provides essentially a translation of a passage in
the book that's being read so that somebody can follow the annotations in AOR and
use the the English translation
side-by-side. One of the things that we didn't capture in the AOR resource
was book material that was printed in the book.
We don't have translations of the texts that are in Latin, for example, we have translations of what was annotated
so in some ways we've made the
Annotations in the book very visible and we've kind of hidden the rest of the text.
These exercises at least will kind of help bring that back out and help walk a student or a group through
A particular part of a book or a particular aspect. They're very good
like I said for either kind of doing an intro to
Annotated books or intro to reading or just giving out his assignments that people can follow step wise outside of class time
The ability to preserve searches
Has allowed us to kind of build more complex
modules, more complex topics,
around the history of reading.
So this one actually looks at the ways it has four case studies of how our annotators dealt with different
aspects of their books
And it really allows you to compare the ways they were working through it. I only want to open one of these because basically
this process here shows kind of how to refine
a multi-term search. So, in this search I've really only looked at
The annotations in a book that have
These little notes on top. This is "I.D." John Dee's signature and
Realizing that we had done this in some annotations but not others is kind of a way of asking
Why sign, why autograph annotations in a book that theoretically only you are going to read?
And we can see kind of through this search how John Dee adds
Knowledge or adds authority to his books.
So there are a number of exercises on the on the resource that look at you know the ways that
marginalia and the printed word interact
Some of these, the seminar level ones, have suggested readings
and they're sort of designed to be full seminar classes or
longer assignments.
Down here,
we have just some puzzles; some things that we had been unable to solve on our own.
For example, this one, where Dee is talking about
mathematical theory in this annotation
We can decode the annotation, but we may not be able to actually figure out what he's talking about because none of us are mathematicians
So these sort of
collaborative problems that we can engage with
Using the viewer in real time
I think our also another good use of the resource as a basis for discussion, as a jumping off point for
really investigating the lives that these books had.
So,
very quickly,
if I was in the reader, if I was in the viewer here
and
I exported my--
I exported my research,
I just added a couple of pages here so I have that one
I go through a few steps here
in the Cicero
I open up another page
and I click this you can see that we have the ability here
to also remove steps
and to write little descriptions.
So when you export this as an HTML file
You can give this material directly to your students
or you can use it as the basis for group explorations.
If you wanted to open up four different pages of the book and have your students look at either of them  to compare
Or at the end of some of these exercises as we've built them
To just kind of go off and explore the viewer to fall down that rabbit hole
You can build that in and kind of drop them into the resource with some guidance.
So these are all kind of different ways in to using the viewer for education. I want to say a couple of things very briefly
We are in the process of designing a subject guide
Earle mentioned the different books by topic or different books in the corpus
but this we will post on our site and it should give you an idea
of which of the books basically have
their own their own subject headings, and I'm not sure I think I realized that if you guys can see this
It is a quick guide to the ways that the subjects that are headed in the different books in the corpus
We also have
These visualizations of our data
as possibly ideas to start searching on your own.
So I'd say pick one of these exercises, pick a topic and just jump right in, pick a cluster of books
But also think about ways that you can get out.
We didn't intend the
We didn't attend the resource to be a one-stop shop.
We knew that this is a small example of the books that are in Harvey and Dee's library
and
It shouldn't just be used by itself. So I think Matt will take the last part of the presentation and talk about
The ways that we might pair AOR with different resources
Either for your students or for your own research
Thank you Neil. And yes that's precisely what I intend to do over the next few minutes I have.
Hello, everybody. Unlike the
photograph Earle so happily showed you earlier, you'll notice I have rather
less hair pretty much anywhere on my face or indeed on top of my head.
But I'm co-PI on the AOR project. And now as Earle said in his introduction the project was built with a specific
intellectual project at its heart one based around Jardine and Grafton's
"Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy"
However we knew from the first moment that any resource we created would have to be as open as possible
To other researchers, researchers who would inevitably have other research questions in mind.
throughout this webinar
we've been demonstrating how AOR can show links across and within
Our corpus, or our micro-corpus if you like, but one important aim was to build in the ability to link
outwards to other resources
or what Earle called external objects, so
photographs of the books
the links
internally between one book and another that you can see within the IIIF viewer
We've called those internal objects and it's quite natural to go from one to the other but we also have these
external objects that we can move to moving outside the viewer and off our
digital book wheel into other people's
researches. So this includes other digitization efforts
sometimes paywall and sometimes not, and apologies for those who are trying to follow along can't follow me beyond any
institutional paywalls
For whatever reason. But much of what I'll be showing over the next few moments
Will be free as in free beer
including other resources built with the same technology, the same IIIF technology.
And now as time when my MA students are
embarking on their 18 thousand word research dissertations
These are dissertations that in our program should demonstrate an intellectual engagement with archival or rare books collections
I'm aware of how important it is to be able to locate and move to other
digital
artifacts online, other digital collections.
Now there are two prime examples of how we have
Built in baked into the viewer
these external resources and I'm going to show one example relating to the people who
Harvey and Dee mention and one relating to the books that they mention.
Here on my screen is from the Detti et Fatti
It's one of my favorite books and it's one of my favorite of Harvey's many comparisons.
The Lord, it's in the center page here,
The Lord Cromwell, a ball of fortune, and then here the Lord Burghley a globe of fortune.
Here is a comparison of two secretaries of state both of whom command the vital place in both the information
gathering regimes of two Tudor reigns but also the
Historiographies of our period and it's easy to imagine
Our students building research dissertations upon one or the other
But how can we move outward away, from
Harvey's own
comparison
towards other people?
Let's use the example of Lord Burghley and click on his name here.
The third option here
After the other options, which would search within the same book or search within the collection for other mentions as Cecil Lord Burghley,
Takes us out of the viewer. That's what this little
arrow out of a box is telling us and this takes us
to
the ISNI entry for William Cecil
ISNI stands for International Standard Name Identifier, a global standard for identifying
unique
Individuals whether they are contemporary to us or whether they are
historical.
Anyone who has any experience of building a data set will know the importance and time it takes to disambiguate
Various different naming protocols whether it's William Cecil, Lord Burghley, whether it's in Latin, or whether it's in another
vernacular form.
But the really handy thing about building this identifier in
To the AOR viewer is that it gives us
some shortcuts as you can see here because the ISNI is very much baked in also to Wikipedia there it brings us all the
Wikipedia entries, it's all Burghley
now this of course may be slightly problematic for some of you but it also handily built it into wiki data the
structured data
aspect of all the various Wikipedias and
Wikimedia instances.
And if we click here we can see this will bring us towards
this sort of grounding site for all mentions
of William Cecil for all uses. We immediately have his images of him
We have all the structured data that we can pull out of his various entries
But also very importantly as we keep going down this list
Past his various biographical details, is it can also link us to other places where he is
I'm just going to show you a few of these resources so that you can imagine using
AOR
Using wiki data to build a reading list around our subjects. So here is his Library of Congress authority ID
We can open this in a new tab
Here we go for the Library of Congress linked data service, which not only
has similar details about him, but will bring up say
subject works about
Burghley, headed here by the
magisterial Stephen Alford biography and also a list of printed works
That concern Burghley or use him in some way
Another example going down this list
Is his entry here at EMLO, Early Modern Letters Online
So this is one way we can move from the AOR world of printed books
Into manuscript and to find places, locations of much of his correspondence again
So long as it is contained within EMLO.
We are always talking here about various resources that have more or less information in them depending on their own very nature
I think you can see that this is actually quite a helpful guide to move forwards
Two others I would like to just mention to you quickly
is of course
His entry in the National Portrait Gallery, which allows us to bring back images of Burghley
At various stages of his career
The ODNB entry and also his appearance in the wonderful six degrees of Francis Bacon
Which allows us to see inside
His social network as it were
That's taking far too long to load so I should stop.
So that's how we can go from a person being mentioned in AOR, from taking interest in that person, to finding out more about them
Or finding or pushing towards a wider research agenda. We can also do something similar with books
Here in this comment
From his, from Harvey's copy of Livy, he discusses
Machiavelli's
discourses on Livy and its place with a
In other reading, for instance here he advises people to go away and read Johannes Velcurio's
Commentaries on Livy before you get to Machiavelli
But this allows us to link to the discourses on Livy if we open up the link here again
we can search through the book or search through the collection for other mentions of the Discorsi
or this our third option here instead of opening the ISNI up, as we do in people, this also, this will open up the
USTC, the Universal Short Title Catalogue's,
entry
for
discourses
on Livy by Machiavelli in this case
John Wolfe
edition
Now why I like the USTC is not only does it bring back the bibliographical details of this, the USTC is
Extremely good at finding other digitized images of those books. So of course while this is a very famous book,
There are many projects of digitization going on around the world particularly in Germany and France, incredibly rich
Digitization efforts have gone on in those countries and the USTC generally has a link there to a digital edition.
Here the link is via ProQuest and by
EEBO which I'm sure everybody is familiar with
online. So we've managed to go from AOR to finding a
contemporary edition of a book in this case fortunately
Rather than any other reasons because of the nature of EEBO, it's a
commented
Annotated edition of it, but we've managed to move from stuff in AOR to stuff without
AOR
Just like to end this talk by talking about something that's completely outside AOR
Cambridge Digital Library.
Something it has done similarly with a IIIF instantiation.
Here is its research
project on Montaigne's library, so here's a similar
intellectual project to our own in some ways, but this is just rather easily putting things online again
though with traditional IIIF
Technologies, so this doesn't have all the interactive things
We've been showing to you all the transcriptions
But it is here in IIIF form and as I'm sure some people are aware you can put together IIIF collections
extremely well, as long as they have all been encoded in the correct manner.
Cambridge University Library have been extremely good at using IIIF as part of their digital library
and not only that
They've indeed got this in their collection
Recently bought at auction, here is another of Harvey's books
In this case a marvelous discourse upon the life deeds and behaviors of Catherine de Medici.
Signed out by Gabriel Harvey. So in this way we've moved across resources
From outside the AOR, but within the
institutional framework of IIIF to build a research
environment, a research
ecosystem
To allow us to carry on our research into the world of annotated books
during a time of
social isolation
Thank you very much
Thank you everyone, this is Erin again.
That concludes today's webinar
I will turn it over to Earle now to see if there's anything else he'd like to add before we close
Earle, are you still there?
Well in any case, I thank you all so much for joining us I also extend my thanks to the presenters
I've learned so much about using the AOR and
I welcome your questions. I have a few here in the chat, and I'm also
eager to receive any questions you have by email.
Just send them to bsa at bibsocamer dot org
Thanks very much and enjoy the rest of your day
Bye
