0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 6/14)

Published a decade ago, these comments are still relevant to some of the most crucial challenges facing digital scholarship: untangling the rights to freely use and publish public domain texts (and images of them) in digital databases.

While many important projects already mentioned have begun this process, there is still much for literary scholars to do, especially in terms of re-imagining what an “edition” is or ought to do in a digital environment. A scholarly edition need no longer be imagined as a single text; it might be something closer to an archive or a system of archives. Assuming that the texts truly are released into the public domain, a potentially useful source for page images is Google Books; however, while out-of-copyright books are available to freely search, link to, or download, the image quality is low and editorial/curatorial selection and bibliographical data have not been priorities: there are no filters, for example, that limit search results to items catalogued in the ESTC. Furthering the general uglification of e-books, subsequent use or distribution requires that the Google watermark remain on every page. The tremendous good that is the result of Google Books for early modern works is that it has released these images of public domain texts for the public to freely use. The Google Books project, like the work of Wikimedia in asserting public domain rights, will benefit all scholars and readers, insofar as their unrestricted availability on the Internet establishes a precedent for public access. ^{One such example is Wikimedia’s response to legal action taken by the National Portrait Gallery, London, against Derrick Coetzee, who participates in the Wikipedia community under the user name “dcoetzee.” Coetzee downloaded over 3,000 high resolution images of public domain paintings from the NPG, which claims a copyright violation. Coetzee, however, lives in the United States where photographs of public domain paintings are not copyrightable, and where database rights are not recognized. The test case for Internet copyright here amounts, regrettably, to a blatant disregard for UK law on the part of Coetzee, but the willingness to assert public domain rights is also a very important contribution to the public good. See (External Link) , (External Link) , and (External Link) .} However, as Robert Darnton has argued, we are facing with Google Books “a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company.” ^{Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,” The New York Review of Books 56.2 (February 12, 2009) (External Link) .}

One key to sustainability for non-commercialized digital projects might have to be a willingness by textual scholars (including those who do not consider themselves “digital humanists”) to negotiate the rights to study and analyze, to quote from, and to re-distribute digital documents—whether as faithful replications of works now out of copyright or as quotations from recent digital texts, recordings and movies. Projects such as the Internet Archive could to a great extent alleviate some of the problems with access to images of historical documents, though opaque organization of early modern materials, limited finding aids, dirty OCR, and lack of editorial apparatus or commentary presently make it difficult to find, read, and use the archived works. ^{The project headed by Gregory Crane, “Mining a Million Scanned Books: Linguistic and Structure Analysis, Fast Expanded Search, and Improved OCR,” is using as a testbed the corpus of over one million open-access books from the Internet Archive. This project, to investigate “large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collections,” is very promising. (External Link) .} In any case, partnerships with or links to open access projects such as the Internet Archive or Wikipedia in addition to ECCO, EEBO, and other proprietary databases seem to me crucial for establishing the longevity and accessibility of large digital projects. For these reasons, the Grub Street Project aims to explore some of the new possibilities inherent in creating and publishing a scholarly digital edition/collection that is, in short, as usable as possible for as many readers as possible.