Laura Mandell

Breaking the book : print humanities in the digital age

Acknowledgments vii Advertisement ix Part I Pre-Bound 1 1 Language by the Book 3 Part II Bound 69 2 Print Subjectivity, or the Case History 71 3 Distributed Reading, or the Critic Filter 103 Part III Unbound 147 Conclusion 149 Works Cited 187 Index 205

Producing Hate in “Private” Letters: Horace Walpole, Mary Hays

In 1810, Mary Berry published the correspondence of Madame du Deffand, including in her footnotes excerpts from notoriously aggressive letters written by Walpole to Deffand; in 1798, Mary Hays published versions of some of her own letters to William Godwin and his responses to them in her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Hays’s private letters to Godwin and Walpole’s semi‐private letters to Mme. du Deffand reveal them engaged in transference, but not exactly transference‐love—rather, hate. I argue that letter writing becomes a psychoanalytic practice with the publication of this private activity. Publishing an epistolary relationship restructures it, positioning its authors and readers in narcissistic but also sibling relationships as described by Juliet Mitchell, thereby enabling these authors to deploy hate to encounter reality. They produce hatred in a way productive for historical understanding, both theirs and ours.

The First Women (Psycho)analysts; or, The Friends of Feminist History

The woman is not yet fraternal enough, not friend enough; she does not yet know what “fraternity” means; above all, she does not know what it will and should mean, she does not understand—not yet—the fraternal promise. She knows the word well enough, but she does not possess the concept. . . . She reads it literally but does not yet have access to what it thinks in spirit—and so it is the sacred that she misses, and history and the future, no less: “She can spell the sacred word of the new age, Brotherhood, but cannot yet read it.” Not yet.—Derrida, Politics of Friendship, ventriloquizing and quoting Michelet

Mass Digitization of Early Modern Texts With Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition (OCR) engines work poorly on texts published with premodern printing technologies. Engaging the key technological contributors from the IMPACT project, an earlier project attempting to solve the OCR problem for early modern and modern texts, the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) of Texas A8M received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to improve OCR outputs for early modern texts from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) proprietary database products—or some 45 million pages. Added to print problems are the poor quality of the page images in these collections, which would be too time consuming and expensive to reimage. This article describes eMOPs attempts to OCR 307,000 documents digitized from microfilm to make our cultural heritage available for current and future researchers. We describe the reasoning behind our choices as we undertook the project based on other relevant studies; discoveries we made; the data and the system we developed for processing it; the software, algorithms, training procedures, and tools that we developed; and future directions that should be taken for further work in developing OCR engines for cultural heritage materials.

Navigating the storm : IMPACT, eMOP, and Agile Steering Standards

This article discusses two major initiatives tasked with developing tools to im- prove optical character recognition (OCR) or the mechanical keying of texts that are digitally available only as page images. The two initiatives are the IMProving ACcess to Text Project in Europe and the Early Modern OCR Project in the USA. Because of dealing with a multilayered problem like OCR technologies and having to collaborate with radically interdisciplinary and international team members, the two projects developed techniques that we call Agile Project Management, outlined in this essay with rationales for their use.

The Role of XSLT in Digital Libraries, Editions, and Cultural Exhibits

We offer a half day tutorial that will explore the role of XML and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, themselves XML documents) in digital library and digital humanities projects. Digital libraries ideally aim to provide both access and interaction. Digital libraries and digital humanities projects should foster edition building and curation. Therefore, this tutorial aims to teach librarians, scholars, and those involved in cultural heritage projects a scripting language that allows for easy manipulation of metadata, pictures, and text. The modules in this tutorial will help participants in planning for their own organizations digital efforts and scholarly communications as well as in facilitating their efforts at digitization and creating interoperability between document editions. In five instructional modules, including hands-on exercises, we will help participants gain experience and knowledge of the possibilities that XSLT offers in transforming documents from XML to HTML, from XML to text, and from one metadata schema to another.