Kindle and Reading

I've got a Kindle, but use it mostly when I'm travelling so that I can have access to reading material without having to haul around lots of books in my suitcase.  I hate running out of books. During more than one foreign vacation, I have been forced to track down bookstores that stock English-language titles and then pay exorbitant prices for them.  With the Kindle, this problem goes away.  Most of what I read on my Kindle is fiction, which is why I was interested to learn that researchers have found that readers using the Kindle were "'significantly' worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story."  This conclusion comes from a recent study of fifty readers who read the same short story (half on a Kindle and half on print) that was reported in The Guardian.  The readers were tested on "aspects of the story including objects, characters and setting," and the "'Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure.'"  The researchers can't explain their findings, but speculate that it has something to do with the tactile quality of paper and the physical unfolding of the book as the reader progresses through the story.  "Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."  The study doesn't address the issue of reading nonfiction works on a Kindle, but the results might carry over--the same researcher has found that "'students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the text digitally.'"  More research is being conducted to determine which devices (print, iPad, Kindle) are suitable for which types of content, and this research should help educators deal with the impact of digitization on learning.         

Change Comes to the Bodleian Library

The famed Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford is undergoing a transformation.  A high-tech, off-site storage facility that can house millions of volumes has recently opened, which has made possible the provide more and better space for users.  There is an interesting look at the Bodleian in this video (Building a 21st-century Bodleian), in which one of the librarians describes the storage facility as resembling a DHL warehouse.  Although hundreds of items are retrieved from the facility every day and sent by van to the Bodleian, many items never leave the storage facility and are scanned on site for delivery to the requesting patron's computer.  The video ends on a very update note, declaring that the library and print are far from dead, and that librarians are more relevant now than ever.  Hat tip to Alice Pidgeon, Head of Technical Services at Pace Law Library, for pointing out the video to me.   

A Treasure Trove from the British Library

The British Library has launched a major new digitization project, the British Newspaper Archive, which currently offers around 4,000,000 searchable pages from over 200 different newspapers. The papers were published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and date mainly from the nineteenth century, although some newspapers' runs extend back to the mid-eighteenth century. Searching the Archive is free, but viewing the content, either through the pay-per-view option or by subscription, is fee based unless you access the Archive in person at one of three British Library Reading Rooms. The project is a collaboration between the British Library and brightsolid, a British digital publishing firm. Digitization continues at the rate of 8,000 new pages a day, with the goals of scanning 40,000,000 newspaper pages over the next ten years.

Newspapers have been called the "raw material of history" by no less an expert than historian Henry Steele Commager. In the British Newspaper Archive, researchers will discover

Exhaustive coverage of crime and punishment ... Eyewitness accounts of social transformation ... Illustrations and advertisements ... first-hand accounts of [newsworthy] events ... and countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died.

At the moment, only newspapers that are out of coyright are included in the project, but the collaborators have secured "permission from one publisher to digitise newspaper runs up to the mid 20th century."

Bentham Project Revisited

In a blog post last December, I discussed the University College London's Transcribe Bentham Project, an experiment in crowdsourcing whose goal was transcription of the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. All the work was going to be done by volunteers, with their submissions being vetted by paid research associates. Now it looks as if the future of the project is in doubt. According to a post in the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, lack of funding is going to cause "scholars to scale back [the] groundbreaking project ..." The government grant that paid for computer programmers, photography, and research associates is coming to an end, and private money needs to be found to keep the project going. The research associates were a vital link between the project and the volunteers, and once they are gone, the links will begin to break down. The director of the project, Philip Schofield, acknowledged that relying on volunteers was risky; some were put off by the difficulty of the undertaking, and bailed out after transcribing one or two documents. Mr. Schofield thinks that "one way to overcome that problem might be to use the crowdsourcing model in an entity like a museum ... which would already have an established community interested in its work."

"Many Hands Make Light Work"

I'll never forget the first time I visited University College London and saw Jeremy Bentham's mummified remains on display in a large glass box in the main corridor. The head is not the original, but everything else is what's left of the great Enlightenment philosopher who died in 1832. Frankly, the sight unnerved me a bit. My husband assured me that Bentham had ordered that his body be dissected, embalmed, and displayed, and that his remains were brought out for departmental meetings and other events. The illustration for this post is a photograph of Bentham as he is displayed at UCL.

The philosopher was extremely prolific, and UCL began to publish his writings over fifty years ago; so far, only twenty-seven volumes have been published, "less than half of the 70 or so ultimately expected," according to an article in The New York Times. The publication project is under the aegis of the Bentham Project, which has hit upon a novel approach to transcribing Bentham's papers, which are already scanned and available online. There are approximately "40,000 unpublished manuscripts from University College's collection," and the organizers of the Project have turned to the public to help them transcribe the documents. This approach, familiar from Wikipedia, is known as crowd-sourcing, and draws on volunteers--"350 registered users have produced 435 transcripts" so far. No specialized credentials are required of the volunteers, and their work is vetted by editors before becoming part of the print edition of Bentham's collected works. Advocates of this approach point out that it has the "potential to cut years, even decades, from the transcription process while making available to the public and ... scholars miles of documents that are now off limits, difficult to read or unsearchable."

As with any new approach, there are those who are not enthusiastic. There is "tension between experts and amateurs." The experts tend to want to make the work perfect before it is published. They also point to the many mistakes made by volunteer transcribers. According to Daniel Stowell, who directs the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, "nonacademic transcribers ... produced so many errors and gaps in the papers that 'we were spending more time and money correcting them as creating them from scratch.'"

Reading this article, I thought of the quotation attributed to Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." The original French is: "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," and it comes from the 1764 Dictionnaire philosophique. There are many different interpretations of the saying, and if you're interested, click here to read some. To me, what Voltaire meant is that trying to reach perfection, which may well be unattainable, can get in the way of achieving something very good that would benefit many people. Isn't it better to produce a very good transcription now instead of waiting decades for a transcription that may be only marginally better? There are a number of transcription projects that are taking years to complete that might be candidates for the crowd-sourcing approach if scholars running the projects could overcome their concerns about the quality of the transcriptions produced by volunteers. The Times article mentions the papers of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, both of which are years behind schedule, and also a collection of 55,000 unpublished eighteenth-century documents from the War Department, which will be transcribed starting in January 2011 with the aid of volunteers.