The Function, Structure and Future of Catalogues

This is the text of a keynote lecture to the conference at Leicester University on 11 January 2013 marking the launch of Manuscripts Online: www.manuscriptsonline.org.

THE FUNCTION, STRUCTURE AND FUTURE OF CATALOGUES

The story of the British Library is full of remarkable personalities.  One of the most striking of these was Donald Urquhart, who established in 1961 the National Lending Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in Yorkshire, which afterwards became the northern outpost of the British Library. Urquhart was described by his successor Maurice Line as ‘one of the greatest innovators, practitioners, thinkers and personalities the library profession has ever had’. Urquhart was a scientist whose wartime experience made him aware of the inability of staid literary libraries such as the British Museum to satisfy the increasing need of scientific researchers for prompt, easy and cheap access to the burgeoning range of publications reporting the latest technical and scientific research.  At Boston Spa, Urquhart designed and built a remarkable mail order facility for information which would ensure that scientists could receive the articles they needed in their laboratory within twenty four hours. In creating this facility, Urquhart questioned, and frequently rejected, many of the accepted principles of librarianship. His best known innovation was to jettison the idea of a catalogue. When he asked a librarian what the purpose of a catalogue was, he was unimpressed by the reply he received: ‘for completeness’. Urquhart argued that, if books were arranged on the shelf by author and title order, a catalogue was unnecessary. If the book was there, the lending request could be met straight away off the shelf; if the book was not there, then it would be necessary in any case to contact other institutions to see if they have a copy.

Urquhart’s questioning of the principle of a library catalogue may seem to be gaining a new relevance as we see Google and other search engines becoming the primary means by which researchers seek out information. Recent studies, for example, show that students, in seeking electronic resources, do not turn to the catalogues of e-resources laboriously compiled by libraries, but simply Google the resource. Library catalogues have been criticized as dowdy and lacking in interaction by comparison with (for example) Amazon.  The highly structured and meticulously prepared information in a catalogue looks redundant by comparison with the speed and simplicity of Google.  The catalogue is starting to look in many ways to be exactly what Urquhart suggested – a comfort blanket for librarians and curators. It seems that some librarians themselves are also coming to such a view.  Deanna Markum of the Library of Congress commented in 2006 that: ‘the detailed attention that we have been paying to descriptive cataloging may no longer be justified ... retooled catalogers could give more time to authority control, subject analysis, [and] resource identification and evaluation’.  Likewise, Karen Calhoun, in a report commissioned by the Library of Congress expressed a concern that ‘The existing local catalog's market position has eroded to the point where there is real concern for its ability to weather the competition for information seekers' attention’.

Yet the humble catalogue also underpins many aspects of the new digital services by which it seems threatened. Two of the major library digitization projects of recent years, Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, stem directly from the largest modern cataloguing project of recent times, the English Short Title Catalogue, and the primacy of EEBO and ECCO as digitisation projects reflects the visionary insistence of those who established the English Short Title Catalogue in the 1970s that it should be in machine readable form. While Amazon may have given a lead in promoting a more interactive approach to identifying and using books, the comprehensiveness of Amazon database is due to the fact that it incorporates the historic catalogues of major libraries such as the Library of Congress and the British Library.  Anyone who feels that Google can do the job performed by library catalogues should attempt to locate specific volumes of periodicals in Google Book. It is an extraordinarily time consuming task, and sometimes downright impossible, which explains why digital libraries such as Hathi and Open Library offer conventional online catalogue access to digital libraries.

Library, archive and museum catalogues offer some of the largest and most highly structured datasets which humanities researchers are likely to encounter. These bibliographical datasets are increasingly being made available as open data. The British Museum’s collection database is now available in this form and the British Library has also made the British National Bibliography available as linked open data. The highly structured data in library catalogues has great potential to support innovative visualisations showing aspects of bibliographic and intellectual history, as can be seen from this project at St Andrews, the Bohemian Bookshelf.  While these possibilities have lead to an increased interest in the potential of using catalogue data in new ways, this renaissance of interest in the catalogue comes at a time when the catalogue itself is fundamentally changing because the services it has traditionally supported are also being transformed. As Lorcan Dempsey has commented, ‘the catalog is being reconfigured in ways which may result in its disappearance as an individually identifiable component of library service. It is being subsumed within larger library discovery environments and catalog data is flowing into other systems and services’.

The catalogue is one of the oldest and most important means by which humans have sought to control information. The library of clay tablets collected by King Ashurbanipal of Assyria in the 7^th century BC had an author and title catalogue and probably a class catalogue as well. We will all be familiar with the corpus of British Medieval Library catalogues which has been in the process of publication by the British Academy under the general editorship of Richard Sharpe and which lists thousands of texts in circulation in medieval Britain. The production of library catalogues was one of the first fields in which automation was used to expedite the management of information. One of the earliest applications of automated duplicating devices was in the production of the British Museum’s library catalogue. The card index may nowadays seen like a very humdrum instrument of information technology, but it was revolutionary in the way in which the use of standardized cards allowed the sharing of information. The Library of Congress in the early part of the twentieth century operated a bibliographic service which offered pre-printed catalogue cards for books to local libraries. The automation of these card indexes was one of the first computing technologies to impact on humanities research.

The scholarly literature on cataloguing is considerable, and the changes in the position of the catalogue mean that discussion as to its purpose, value and future remains vigorous.  This extensive scholarly and professional debate has helped encourage the establishment and continued development of new cataloguing standards. Not surprisingly, the discussion of cataloging is most sophisticated for such conventional,library materials as the printed book and the periodical publication. As early as the seventeenth century, Thomas Bodley debated with his librarian Richard James how the books he purchased should be described. The Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, Anthony Panizzi, established the first modern set of rules for cataloguing books in 1841. The ninety one rules promulgated by the British Museum reflected the collective wisdom of Panizzi and his assistants, their debates about points of cataloguing practice often extending far into the night. The British Museum’s example encouraged American librarians to produce their own rules, culminating in Charles Ammi Cutter’s Rules for a Dictionary Catalog of 1876.  The formation of professional Library Associations in Britain and America encouraged further collaboration, resulting in the compilation of an Anglo-American Code in 1908 and finally the issue of the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) in 1967, which were further revised in 1978. The experience of the Library of Congress in producing catalogue cards for use by other libraries encouraged early experiments with distributing library catalogue records in machine readable forms. The Library of Congress developed a service to produce and distribute on tape Machine Readable Catalogue entries as early as 1966. This international co-operation of course extends beyond the English speaking world. The International Federation of Library Associations has been very important here, for example, in enunciating the International Principles for Bibliographic Description in 1961. This framework has provided a strong basis for addressing new challenges. The new version of the Principles for Bibliographic Description, which you can see here, attempts to reconceptualise the role of bibliographic description in new information environments, and reflect the sort of thinking which has underpinned the development of the new Resource Discovery and Access (RDA) which has been implemented by the Library of Congress and is in the process of being adopted by the British Library. Since one of the advantages of RDA is that it is meant to provide a more flexible framework than AACR2 for dealing with archives, manuscripts and other non-book materials, RDA is likely to loom more considerably in the field of manuscript scholars than AACR2 has done.

While the use of ICT in printed book cataloguing has a long history, for archives the development has been much more recent, but very dramatic. Archive processing differs fundamentally from printed book processing because of its concern to preserve and represent the hierarchies and administrative inter-relationships of individual documents. An archival callmark such as this example (National Archives, KB 145/3/5/1) tells me everything I need to know about the document. At the fonds or collection level, it forms part of the records of the law court known as the King’s Bench. At the series level, the number 145 tells me I is part of the series of King’s Bench Recorda files. The sub-series number, 3, indicates that this from the reign of Richard II. The item number, 5, indicates that this file is from the 5^th regnal year of Richard II and the file number 1 shows that it is the first of two parts surviving for that year. The concern of archival descriptions is chiefly to preserve and document these hierarchies, as the record entry for this file in the National Archives catalogue illustrates. The kind of codicological and palaeographical information such as the number of membranes or the number of scribes which might be discussed in a literary or liturgical manuscript of the same period is not analysed or recorded here. As you can see, the physical information provided for description of a twelfth-century archival document such as this pipe roll is minimal. The international standard which governs archival processing and description is ISAD(G): the General International Standard Archival Description. By contrast to MARC and printed books, the fonds structures of ISAD(G) cannot easily be represented in a relational database. The hyperlinks of the World Wide Web closely map archival structures, so that very quickly after the web appeared, an XML schema known as EAD (Encoded Archival Description) was produced which enabled archive descriptions to be readily made available for web access. The vast catalogues of the National Archives in London, which had remained until the 1990s in typewritten form and were only made available remotely through the energetic photocopying programme of the List and Index  Society, were rapidly made available online. This was rapidly followed by the Access to Archives programme which converted and put on the web catalogue records from many local and specialist repositories.

There isn’t time here today to go into the interesting development of online cataloguing and inventory methods in museums, but the need for museum documentation to embrace such a wide range of materials led to the emergence of a more semantically-based standard of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, which is I suspect likely to have a very major impact on the way in which we document and analyse cultural heritage materials over the next few years. But what is striking here is the way in which the sort of material in which we are interested – the type of medieval literary, liturgical, legal and other library manuscripts which are the glory of collections such as the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the libraries of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges – has been ignored by developments in cataloguing. The needs of these manuscripts – or indeed of early modern and modern manuscripts which do not fall easily into the fonds structures of ISAD(G) - have barely figured in discussions of the nature and future of the catalogue in new information environments. This is surprising, since the cataloguing of manuscript libraries was one of the earliest forms of library cataloguing. Among the earliest published library catalogues in England were Thomas Smith’s 1696 catalogue of the Cotton Library and David Casley’s 1734 catalogue of the old Royal collection of manuscripts, while Humfrey Wanley set a formidable standard for specialized catalogues with his catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts published by Hickes in 1705. Edward Bernard’s 1697 Catalogue of manuscript books in England and Ireland was one of the first attempts at a union catalogue. These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pioneers established a tradition which has without doubt been one of the glories of English medieval scholarship. The catalogues of manuscript collections compiled by scholars such as M. R. James, Neil Ker, Malcolm Parkes, Tilly de la Mare, and Andrew Watson are remarkable achievements and this tradition continues today, and some of its most distinguished practitioners are with us today. Moreover, the various in-house catalogues of manuscript collections compiled by institutions such as the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the John Rylands Library in Manchester incorporate some of the finest work of such manuscript scholars as Edward Maunde Thompson, Sir George Warner, Francis Wormald, Julian Brown, Falconer Madan, Richard Hunt and (in Manchester) Frank Taylor.

The catalogues of British manuscript collections represent a formidable scholarly achievement, but, unlike printed books or archives, this remarkable body of work has failed to generate any reflective or theoretical literature. Manuscript cataloguers have been too deeply steeped in the uncial to consider how the catalogues they produce fit into the wider range of library and archive catalogue provision or to consider how their catalogues can be better suited to their function and purpose.  The contrast has been drawn between France, where Leopold Delisle’s influence was responsible for the early development of a very integrated and consistent approach to manuscript cataloguing. It has been  suggested that the failure of English manuscript libraries and scholars to develop a similar approach was due to a more pragmatic tradition in England – that English scholars were more concerned  with studying the manuscripts than with the way in which the catalogues were structured. I fear this is a rather self-serving piece of justification. I suspect that the failure to develop any theory of manuscript cataloguing in Britain has more to do with the way in which the study of manuscripts has been some intimately connecting with connoisseurship and collecting. Falconer Madan’s discussion of the cataloguing of manuscripts in his 1899 volume Books in Manuscript – amazingly, still one of the best introductions to the subject when I started work in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library in 1979, but now of course supplanted by more up-to-date treatments by scholars such as Michelle Brown and Christopher de Hamel – makes this concern with the creation of informed connoisseurs clear when he explains that his discussion of cataloguing is aimed at the ‘private collector [who] has purchased a manuscript at a sale, that it has just reached him, and that he is inexperienced in the treatment of such volumes’. 

This tradition rooted in collecting and connoisseurship goes back deep into the history of manuscript scholarship in Britain – one thinks of Wanley’s work on the Harley collection. I suggest that it had a profound effect on the intellectual programme of scholars such as James or Ker. Richard Pfaff has suggested that the aim of M. R. James in compiling his catalogues was to create in his mind a kind of imaginary library which would assist him in dating and placing texts, and a similar sense is also evident in the approach of Neil Ker. This means that for these scholars, the catalogue was a method which gave them a structure for the systematic exploration of manuscript libraries and also became a means of recording and delivering a scholarly judgment on the dating and localization of a particular manuscript. But frequently the relationship of these scholarly catalogues to the libraries they described was not necessarily clear – as is apparent from the problems created by James using his own systems for the numbering of manuscripts. While the documentary scholars at the Public Record Office codified their professional practice to create a new archive profession, with training offered at new schools in centres like University College London and Liverpool, there was no comparable move to create a similar professional basis for manuscript librarianship. Indeed, in creating the archives profession in Britain, Sir Hilary Jenkinson explicitly excluded Departments of Manuscripts like that at the British Museum, arguing that they used museum procedures which caused damage to the fonds. Rather than seeking to create a parallel professional structure to that being established by the archivists, manuscript scholars such as Edward Maunde Thompson, Francis Wormald and Julian Brown concentrated instead on formalizing and developing the academic study of paleography and codicology. While scholars from the Department of Manuscripts such as Thompson and Frederick Kenyon served as Directors of the British Museum and played a major part in museum administration, they had little impact on the development of the new archives profession – something which perhaps confirmed Jenkinson’s argument that the approach of manuscript libraries was too often based on the selective connoisseurship of the museum.

The result of this is that, while the emergence of cataloguing standards for books and archives, was underpinned in Britain by a substantial scholarly literature discussing the function and structure of archives, there is no comparable literature on the theory and practice of manuscript cataloguing. Our essential handbooks, such as the works of Michelle Brown and Christopher de Hamel that I have already mentioned, discuss palaeography, codicology and terminology. They do not discuss the cataloguing requirements of manuscripts. The British literature on this subject is embarrassingly meagre.  The best historical overview is A. J. Piper’s article on ‘Cataloguing British Collections of Medieval Western Manuscripts’ in Lynda Dennison’s collection of the legacy of M. R. James. An important but largely forgotten contribution is an article by the remarkable palaeographer Dorothy Coveney, who produced a groundbreaking catalogue of the manuscripts at University College London in 1935. Coveney’s article on ‘The Cataloguing of Literary Manuscripts’ – literary manuscripts here being adopted as a technical term to distinguish library manuscripts from archives – published in The Journal of Documentation in 1950 argued for much fuller and more systematic palaeographical treatment of manuscripts, making trenchant criticisms of the mannered descriptions of hands in James’s catalogues. Of course, there are descriptions of the methods adopted in the prefaces of catalogues by scholars such as James and Ker and in some library catalogues, such as that of the Bodleian Library which sought to introduce some of Delisle’s principles, but otherwise that is all we have.  While the Public Record Office in London was at the heart of generating a new literature on the processing and documentation of archives, the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library produced nothing beyond two short handbooks itemizing the various manuscript catalogues, a Guide to Manuscript Indexing by J. P. Hudson, which is a impenetrable description of the typographical house rules used in the indexes of the Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts, and a short guide to the methods used initially to automate the catalogues of manuscripts.

As we have seen, the emergence of such standards as AACR2, MARC and now RDA with printed books or ISAD(G) and EAD for archives  were closely related to both theoretical discussions and the development of international associations such as IFLA and the International Congress on Archives. There has been no such process with manuscripts, so that the picture internationally remains fragmented. In America, there was an earlier recognition of the distinct needs of manuscripts and an enthusiasm for a closer connection with mainstream library developments and the promotion of a more integrated approach to manuscripts, such as the proposal of the controversial librarian of Princeton, Ernest Richardson, for the creation of a Union World Catalog of Manuscript Books. This willingness to accept that manuscripts were part of libraries perhaps accounts for the way in which American practice has been more willing to accept that manuscript books can be catalogued in much the same way as printed books. Gregory Pass’s Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts is a supplement to AACR2 which provides guidelines for cataloguing manuscripts according to ACCR2 principles. This approach is widely favoured in the United States, but its drawback is that it cannot cope with the collection hierarchies which are required as soon as one encounters archival materials, and this is one reason why manuscript librarians have been reluctant to go down the simple route of cataloging their manuscripts in AACR. However, while EAD and ISAD(G) preserve information about the collection hierarchies, they are very poor at representing the kind of bibliographical and codicological information. The Liber Horn, for example, is held by the London Metropolitan Archives which naturally uses ISAD(G) and EAD. This is the description for the Liber Horn in the London Metropolitan Archives, and you can see the problems: whether it is helpful to describe the Liber Horn as a file I am not sure, and the kind of structural information we would normally expect in a description of a medieval manuscript is simply not there.  ISAD(G) is geared to large quantities of corporate records, produced by institutions; a volume of uncertain official status produced by a chamberlain of the city is not easily accommodated by a standard designed to cope with the city’s financial records.

There is, then, simply no accepted standard for manuscript cataloguing. This would not matter very much if it wasn’t for automation. The creation of large aggregated catalogues such as OCLC’s WorldCat or the type of federated searching which is possible through services such as CatCymru, which searches the catalogue of every public library in Wales, are only made possible by the standardization grounded in the use of guidelines such as AACR2. Without such standardization, it is impossible to develop such services for manuscripts in the same way.  A brave attempt to initiate such a standard was the MASTER project, which sought to develop a TEI document type definition for use in manuscript cataloguing. An immense amount of work has gone into developing MASTER and it has been used in modified forms in cataloguing collections in Oxford, London, Copenhagen and elsewhere. TEI P5 now includes provision for manuscript description, but use of TEI P5 has tended to be restricted to academic researchers rather than curators, and it has suffered from lack of take up by major libraries. However, the Bodleian Library, which used EAD to prepare a summary catalogue of its manuscript holdings, will be using TEI P5 to provide more detailed descriptions of its medieval manuscripts. Nevertheless, the risks and problems of fragmentation remain, which can be seen by looking at the rather sorry tale of the British Library’s manuscript catalogue.

The British Library’s historic printed manuscript catalogues, such as the long run of Catalogues of Additions to the Manuscripts, were converted to machine readable form in the 1990s and made available online via an Access database, which reproduced the split between description and index in the printed catalogues and offered separate searches for description and index, as well as easy access to information by manuscript number.  The catalogues of some of the oldest collections in the Library were by this time very out of date and a separate project was initiated to identify by means of a shelf survey all the illuminated and pre-1200 manuscripts and then recatalogue them. This resulted in a separate digital catalogue of illuminated manuscripts, where the manuscript descriptions were also made available via an Access database. The manuscript catalogues were separate from the Library’s main catalogue systems, and it was clearly desirable that they should be incorporated in some way. In 1982, the India Office Records were transferred to the British Library. The India Office Records are very much archives and in many ways it would have been preferable to transfer them to the National Archives.  For any library manager, it would clearly make sense to try and provide integrated access to the manuscripts collection and a major archive like the India Office Records. This is where the problem with cataloguing standards kicks in. For the India Office material, ISAD(G) and EAD is the available and recommended standard. For medieval manuscripts, there is no recommended standard, so in creating an integrated British Library archive and manuscript catalogue an ill-advised attempt has ben made to shoehorn the western manuscript catalogue records into ISAD(G) and EAD in  a form that I fear that many manuscript scholars will simply find cumbersome at best and baffling at worst. But it is difficult to suggest an alternative approach if there isn’t a clear-cut manuscript standard available.

It’s perhaps worth lingering a moment to take a closer look at why the new British Library ‘Search our Catalogue Archives and Manuscripts’ is so problematic.  Here’s what happens if you search on Thomas Hoccleve. The first indication that there is a problem is actually in the left-hand side, where entities from the manuscript descriptions, such as the language of the manuscript or names of previous owners are displayed. You will notice that there is some uncertainty as to whether these records are at fonds, item or file level; my suggestion is that they should all be at item level, but the difficulty of thinking about ‘file’ in the case of these manuscripts shows the inappropriateness of the approach. However, more to the point is the display of information about the manuscript. Here is the description of Harley MS 116 in the Catalogue of illuminated Manuscripts, and in my view it is exemplary in the clarity of its distinction between the different aspects of the manuscript. EAD doesn’t allow for any of this, so this is what we get if we go to ‘Details’ for this manuscript in the new catalogue. The first point to notice is that this is a very different description from the one in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. Unfortunately, no information is given as to why this new more detailed description was compiled and by who. It is a very fine description but I think you can see how awkwardly it fits into the ISAD(G) template. Moreover, some elements of the information will be difficult to search – there is no reason why we couldn’t easily generate listings of manuscripts pricked in different ways, given the level of detail here, but the inappropriate use of the EAD schema makes that much more difficult.

An even bigger problem is apparent if we look at the description of Sloane MS 1825. In this case, a description of the manuscript compiled in the 1840s has simply been scanned in without further amendment. Physical information is given briefly in Latin, and the date is in the description but hasn’t been registered as the date of creation. Again, there is no indication of the status or origin of the description. All this provides is simply a keyword searchable version of a very old description – useful, since this wasn’t previously accessible, but otherwise not much value. It is very difficult within the new British Library to access descriptions by manuscript number. The manuscript number here is a reference code. This is what you get if you search for the reference code Nero D IV, the reference for the Lindisfarne Gospels. In this record, more care has been taken to try and make the discussion of the physical structure of the manuscript and the bibliography fit into an archival framework, but the way in which the component texts of the manuscript are treated (as if they were papers in a box set) is very disconcerting. Moreover, the listing promises details that we don’t get – its surprising for example that the colophon is listed as a separate textual component, but no details are given anywhere of what the colophon says.

There are many other problems with the new British Library manuscripts catalogue. The facility to add your own subject tags is potentially useful, and a similar facility has been included in the new Discover the National Archives catalogue, but the relevance of reviews for the Lindisfarne Gospels seems doubtful (would we put something like ‘a manuscript that offers a great deal but when you see it close fails to deliver?’). But the important point is that the problem is not the way in which the British Library catalogue has been implemented here, but rather the difficulty caused by the lack of any agreed standard for manuscript cataloguing, which is in itself a symptom of a deeper lack of intellectual consensus as to the most appropriate methods for processing and documenting manuscript collections which are not formal archives. The temptation of course is to leap in and propose what such a standard might look like. The need to develop a more standardized approach is apparent from the outcome of a conference of manuscript librarians from Oxford, New York, the British Library, Harvard, Yale and elsewhere held at the Bodleian Library in 2007, where it was suggested that a good first step might be to look at better handling of name authority. But I’m doubtful whether such tinkering around the edges is adequate. Archival standards are not simply cataloguing conventions but a statement of a whole philosophy as to how archival documents should be processed, stored and made available. Cataloguing standards such as RDA likewise reflect a holistic view of how categories of information are managed.  Likewise, we need to think about what manuscript libraries are and how they should be managed. In thinking about the future of manuscript catalogues, we need to rethink the nature and function of the manuscript catalogue, from first principles.

I think that the linking of data, and thus the tentative first proof of concept that we have been given in Manuscripts Online, has a role here, but we need to start at the beginning and think about what the manuscript collections in the British Library or the Bodleian Library are. The first, and most important point, is one that Otto Mazel stresses in his little handbook, The Keeper of Manuscripts, which is perhaps the nearest thing to a philosophy of manuscript librarianship that we have. While medievalists may naturally assume that the most important things in manuscript collections are the volumes in which they are interested, manuscript holdings are extremely diverse. The Additional Manuscripts in the British Library embrace not only the Luttrell Psalter or Sherborne Missal but also the Codex Sinaiticus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks, Charles Babbage’s correspondence, the archives of many British Prime Ministers, the notebooks of scientists and engineers like Fleming and Whittle and even a choreographic diagram by Nijinsky. Any processing and cataloguing method to deal with collections like these needs to be embrace all these varied types of material – this is one reason why the use of the TEI guidelines for manuscript description fail to address the problems of manuscript cataloguing. It isn’t satisfactory to contemplate classifying the manuscripts, since individual collections will themselves often be very diverse: Sir Robert Cotton’s library included not only illuminated manuscripts but also a large portion of the personal papers of Thomas Cromwell. Likewise, the manuscripts of the more modern collector Eric Millar included both medieval material and the diaries of the Edwardian writer F. Anstey. If we tried to split this material up into subject types, we would potentially destroy a lot of evidence about the activities of these collectors.

The way in which most manuscript libraries address this problem of diversity is to use acquisition and accessioning as the means of organizing the collections.  This is one of the reasons why the manuscript number is the key that draws together all our thinking about manuscripts. The manuscript number provides our equivalent of title, author and much other bibliographic information for modern printed books, and needs to be at the heart of our thinking about manuscript cataloguing. It is this physicality of manuscripts and other rare materials that creates a distinction with the kind of discovery resources represented by, say, Explore the British Library. It could be argued that coping with such physicality is more critical to the future of the library catalogue than the discovery of wider ranges of resource. Karen Calhoun, in her report to the Library of Congress, argued that since libraries are unlikely to be able to compete with commercial search services, they should perhaps focus on giving greater attention to providing information about rare and unique materials in their collections. However, if libraries are to give greater priority to the catalogues as a means of accessing manuscripts and other special collections, they will need to accept that this requires a different philosophy to that which is evident in the Explore type approach.

Lorcan Dempsey declared that: ’The catalog emerged at a time when information resources were scarce and attention was abundant. Scarce because there were relatively few sources for particular documents or research materials: they were distributed in print, collected in libraries and were locally available. If you wanted to consult books or journal or research reports or maps or government documents you went to the library’. Dempsey points out that nowadays the situation is reversed: ‘information resources are abundant and attention is scarce. The network user has many information resources available to him or her on the network. Research and learning materials may be available through many services, and there is no need for physical proximity’. However, of course, the dynamics described by Dempsey do not apply to manuscripts. In the case of manuscripts, our problem is not so much that we have become less focused and are looking at the manuscript in a more distant fashion, but instead, we are looking at manuscripts under closer and closer microscopes, as we seek to extract every nugget of information that we can from them. The interest of manuscript scholars in the potential of new information technologies is completely the reverse of what Dempsey describes – we want to view the manuscript under finer and finer views and to garner as much information about it as we can.

Again, this means that the focus is on the physical volume, on the individual manuscript, rather than a multiplicity of resources. Linked data is definitely one of the topics of the day in humanities scholarship and elsewhere, but I think there is a tendency to think that if we link a random group of resources together, somehow the magic of linked data will give us instantly new perspectives and new understandings for a particular place or period. I fear that this rather naïve hope is evident in Manuscripts Online resource in its first version, particularly in the selection of resources that have been linked. Sadly, scholarship is much harder than this. Linking of data can be a very useful scholarly technique, but we need to be clear about why we are linking data, what sort of data we are linking, and our aim in doing so. In the case of manuscript catalogues, linking of data has the potential to deal with many of the processing issues which govern the structure of manuscript catalogues, if we approach the linking in the right way.

Dorothy Coveney, one of the few commentators to discuss the philosophy of manuscript cataloguing, said that the primary purpose of a manuscript catalogue is to ensure that the manuscript is securely stored and can be easily located. This security aspect of a catalogue is easily forgotten but in the case of medieval volumes worth millions of pounds remains of fundamental importance. The potential problem of a catalogue which ignores this requirement is illustrated by Samuel Ayscough’s catalogue of the Sloane Manuscripts. Ayscough’s catalogue was organized by author and it meant that the numeration of the manuscripts became rather confused, because Ayscough’s catalogue was not an accurate guide to what should be on the shelf. As a result, the Sloane manuscript containing William Harvey’s lectures on the circulation of the blood was accidentally discarded. When the Harvey volume was found, it was put in the place of a fifteenth-century astrological manuscript, which has now in turn disappeared. The confusion created by Ayscough was only sorted out when a shelflist recording all the numbers of the manuscripts on the shelf was compiled.

In most manuscript libraries, these shelf lists, containing the definitive listing of the manuscript numbers, provides the fundamental statement of what the library holds, and is the spinal column which links everything together. This is an example of the handlist for the some of the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library. This is really the fundamental catalogue for these manuscripts, since it is the only definitive statement of the holdings of this section of the library. Obviously, it would not be much use simply to provide readers with a list of numbers, so initially a listing is prepared which provides an initial view of the manuscript. But the important point is that this is only an initial view – what Edward Maunde Thompson says about a manuscript in the Catalogue of Additions is simply the starting point to a scholarly discussion which will then last centuries. To my mind, ideally a catalogue provides us with access to a complete view of that scholarly discussion in a structured way. Our vision of a catalogue has historically been of a single volume that will provide us with an authoritative statement on a particular manuscript. We expect a Ker or a Kathleen Scott or a Andrew Watson to provide us with an ex cathedra view of what we need to know about a manuscript. This is a view very much driven by the assumption that a catalogue will be a single printed volume. Yet information about manuscripts is scattered through dozens upon dozens of different sources, some in digital form, very many not. Ideally what we want is synoptic access to all those different sources of information. I heard a gripping account recently by Arnold Hunt of the British Library of how linked access to catalogue information can be used to show that a dinosaur tooth in the Natural History Museum came from Sir Hans Sloane’s collection. Not all the information we need to follow this linked chain of evidence is in digital form.

My vision of the future manuscript catalogue then is very much one which is of linked information which enables us to accrue more and more detail about a manuscript. This doesn’t mean of course that we are limited to one single direction in exploring the links, but I see the physical manuscript as remaining our inevitable and necessary starting point. There is an enormous task in assembling the information which would enable us to create such a catalogue, particularly since many of the key sources are not yet available in digital form. Take this example, Additional MS 18196, folio 1, a leaf of a Hymnal , containing part of the hymns to Agnes and Anthony, acquired by the British Museum when Sir Frederic Madden was Keeper of Manuscripts. Among the basic contemporary resources you would need to link from this manuscript number in order to get a good overview of the manuscript are the British Library’s shelflist database, the Catalogue of Additions, Madden’s acquisition reports, Madden’s three series of dairies which contain a great deal of information on manuscripts acquired by him, Madden’s binding records, the huge archives of various annotated sale catalogues held by the British Library, and the indexes of Sir Thomas Phillipps’ manuscripts and catalogues – and that’s all just for starters. Subsequent scholarship on the manuscript is recorded in a huge range of different resources, starting with the Manuscripts Classed Catalogue in the British Library and going right up to works by Paul Binski and Jonathan Alexander. One of the biggest problems faced by manuscript librarians is keeping track of the scholarly bibliography of their subjects. One of the most comprehensive schemes historically was the British Library which systematically collected and indexed offprints of articles relating to manuscripts in the library’s collections, but this pamphlet collection stopped being systematically maintained in the 1960s. We now of course have an excellent opportunity to revive it on a larger scale in the context of something like Manuscripts Online. A search of JSTOR quickly reveals nearly 100 references to the manuscript. The British Library’s own blog reports that this manuscript is indeed currently on loan to the Getty Museum, where one of the curators describes it as the most spectacular Florentine manuscript commission of the first half of the fourteenth century. Just for this single leaf, there is an enormous amount of information to link together.

My vision then of a future manuscript catalogue would be of something that links together a wide range of resources in this way, anchored by the record of the physical manuscript itself. This is why in particularly welcome the vision of Manuscripts Online, which represents a small and tentative step – almost a Fisher Price version – of what I hope the manuscript catalogue might ultimately become.   

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4Humanities

I was delighted to be among the speakers at an excellent day organised by Melissa Terras at UCL on 18 September 2012, calling 'Showing the Arts and Humanities Matter'. The redoubtable Ernesto Priego was assiduous in live tweeting the day and has storified it here:

http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/2012/09/4humanitiesatucl/

Copies of the slides from my presentation are available at:

http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/how-the-humanities-can-help-transform-science

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Made In Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities

This is the text of my keynote for the Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield, 6 September 2012.

Made in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities

It is a great honour to be asked to inaugurate this first Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield. My connections with digital humanities at Sheffield go back to 1995 when the remarkable portfolio of projects in the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield caught the attention of the British Library, and I was asked as one of the library’s curators to foster links with the pioneering work at Sheffield. Since that time, it has been both a pleasure and an education to watch how Sheffield has produced a stream of imaginative and forward-looking work in the digital humanities. I’m going to suggest that the ‘little mesters’ of the Humanities Research Institute form part of a tradition of innovation in Sheffield which reaches deep into the history of the town, but I’ll start a long way from Sheffield, with the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring.

An aspect of the Arab Spring which has caused particular comment in the West has been the use by protestors of social media. One protestor tweeted ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world!’ A prominent Egyptian blogger, Wael Ghonim, named his book on the Egyptian uprising Revolution 2.0, and declared that ‘Our revolution is like Wikipedia … Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don’t know the names of the people contributing the content’. Western media quickly labelled the risings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere the ‘Twitter Revolutions’. It was even claimed that an Egyptian couple named their baby ‘Facebook’. For some commentators, these events proved that new communication technologies were a force for democracy. Phillip Howard and Muzammil Hussain of the University of Washington have argued that whereas in the past protest movements in this region had been suppressed,

           

The Internet, mobile phones, and social media made the difference this time. Using these technologies, people interested in democracy could build extensive networks, create social capital, and organize political action with a speed and on a scale not seen before. Thanks to these technologies, virtual networks materialized in the streets. Digital media became the tool that allowed social movements to reach once-unachievable goals…

However, it seems that such a cyber-utopian reading of these events is misplaced. It has been pointed that there does not appear to be a correlation between internet penetration and the extent of Arab protests. Thus, there were widespread protests in the Yemen, where rate of internet penetration is low, but few protests in the Gulf States where there was greater access to the internet. An analysis of clicks on links in tweets relating to the protests indicates that much of the internet traffic generated by the risings came from outside the countries affected, suggesting that the chief role of social media was not to coordinate protests but rather to alert the outside world to what was happening. When the internet was switched off in Egypt, the protests actually grew in size, suggesting that social media was not essential to the co-ordination of protests. New media did not simply supplant traditional sources of news. Indeed, it seems that much of the impact of new media was a result of its use as a source of information by traditional news outlets. For example, it has been suggested that much of the mainstream media’s coverage of events in Tunisia was derived from Tunisian Facebook pages which had been repackaged for a blog maintained for Tunisian exiles and then passed onto journalists via Twitter (Cottle p. 652). There appears to have been a realignment in which old and new media remediated each other in a complex interplay.

Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh in an important recent study have used interviews with Egyptian activists to contextualize the role of new media in the Egyptian uprising. They describe how activists including representatives of youth movements, workers’ groups and the Muslim Brotherhood, met for weeks beforehand to plan the protests. Alexander and Aouragh emphasise that ‘the Egyptian activists we interviewed rightly reject simplistic claims that technology somehow caused the 2011 uprisings, and they say it undermines the agency of the millions of people who participated in the movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak’. But Alexander and Aouragh remind us that there is also a risk of falling into the opposite trap by assuming that, if social media did not cause the Arab Spring, then they were of no significance. A million and half tweets from Egypt at the time of the rising suggest this is wrong, and Alexander and Aouragh insist that we need to move away from false polarisations and place the internet activism of the Arab Spring in the context of wider developments in media and the public sphere. The Arab Spring saw a profound realignment of the relationship between new and old media, in which new media emerged as an important additional space for dissent and protest. In past revolutions, it has often been difficult to recapture the voices of the insurgents; social media now gives us unparalleled opportunities to explore these textualities of revolt.

However, what I am interested in here is the cyber-myth, the idea that Facebook and Twitter allowed the Arab protests to succeed when previously they had easily been suppressed. This is a myth that has gained a firm hold in the popular imagination, and it reflects a deeply held belief that the digital revolution will not simply alter our working life and give us new forms of leisure but will also lead to major political and social upheaval, on a par with such great historical movements of the past as the Reformation. This widespread belief in inexorable technological progress has been well expressed by Michael Brodie, the Chief Scientist of Network Technologies for Verizon, the American telecommunications company, who suggests that we are about to see a digital revolution which will make the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution seem low-key. Brodie declared that:

the Gutenberg Bible led to religious reformation while the Web appears to be leading towards social and economic reformation. But the Digital Industrial revolution, because of the issues and phenomena surrounding the Web and its interactions with society, is occurring at lightning speed with profound impacts on society, the economy, politics, and more.

There is a common assumption in the West that changes in digital technologies will inexorably generate major transformations in social, political and economic structures. The American business guru Clayton Christiansen introduced in 1995 the idea that business success was associated with the development and adoption of ‘disruptive technologies’. Christiansen subsequently adopted the wider term ‘disruptive innovations’ to reflect the idea that business models could also be disruptive. In coining the term Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly picked up on the disruptive zeitgeist and disruption has consistently been seen as a feature of Web 2.0. The strapline for one of the first Web 2.0 conferences in 2008 was ‘Design, Develop, Disrupt’.

New technologies of communication have been seen as particularly disruptive and likely to produce major social and political upheaval. Among the most influential media theorists have been the Toronto school of Harold Innes, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who suggested that major epochs in human history were marked by the appearance of new communication media. They proposed that the shift from an oral to a literate society was one such shift. The appearance of printing in the West is seen as another major transformation precipitating great upheaval. In this analysis, the impact of the printing press is a pointer towards the type of social and cultural disruptions which will be produced by the emergence of electronic and digital forms of communication. The idea that the printing press was a major agent of social, religious and political change has become widely accepted as a result of the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein. In a monumental study, Eisenstein suggested that the role of printing had not been given sufficient weight in accounts of the Renaissance, Reformation or Scientific Revolution and that printing was ‘the unacknowledged revolution’. Eisenstein argued that there were two major means by which printing acted as an agent of change. First, she suggested that print standardized texts which had been fluid during periods of oral and manuscript circulation. This enabled knowledge to become more settled and easily transmitted. Second, Eisenstein argued that, by making large numbers of texts available, their contradictions and mistakes became more evident, so that readers became more critical and sceptical of authority.

The circulation of digital information alters once again these two key characteristics of information. Texts have perhaps ceased to become fixed, so that it could be suggested we have reverted to the fluidity of oral and manuscript culture. In a recent presentation at MIT, the folklorist Tom Pettit proposed the Gutenberg thesis, ‘the idea that oral culture was in a way interrupted by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the roughly 500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by digital culture and the orality it embraces’.  If Eisenstein was right, then it seems reasonable to expect that we will shortly see new historical movements comparable to the Renaissance and Reformation, disruptions and transformations on a cataclysmic scale. Yet a growing number of historical bibliographers are expressing doubts about Eisenstein’s thesis. There were states which were to resist the printing press. The church and state ensured that the printing press was kept out of Russia and when a press was set up in Moscow in 1564 it was soon destroyed by a mob. The Ottoman Empire was likewise able to keep printing at bay, with the first Turkish press only being established in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the printing press did not kill off the manuscript. David McKitterick has described how a manuscript of a treatise by Walter Hilton was copied at Sheen in 1499, despite the fact that the owner of the manuscript had a copy of the printed version of the same treatise produced by Wynkyn de Worde five years previously. Although the production of printed gazettes flourished in seventeenth-century England, manuscript newsletters were equally important in the dissemination of news. Indeed, many regarded manuscript news as more reliable than the printed version and the Duke of Newcastle warned Charles II that the pen was actually far more dangerous than the press, since opponents might be bolder in a letter than in print. John Donne and Andrew Marvell were suspicious of print and believed that manuscripts might prove to be more durable.

The survival of a mixed media economy after Gutenberg is perhaps not surprising, but a more substantial objection to Eisenstein’s work is that there is substantial evidence that printing did not standardise texts. Printing was a craft activity and just like manuscript copying there were many points in the processing of printing in which accidents, errors and mistakes could be introduced. As David McKitterick has pointed out:

From the 42-line Bible onwards, thousands of books [printed in the fifteenth century] exist with different type settings for reasons that are not always clear but that always emanate from some adjustment found necessary in the printing house or the binder’s bench …  Of three dozen copies surviving of Fust and Schoeffer’s Durandus (1459), no two copies are exactly alike.

Examples of printed books which differ as much as manuscripts can be multiplied endlessly. Famously, no two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio are exactly the same. William Aldus Wright compared ten copies of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s Essays, and found that none were the same. Wright observed that:

The cause of these differences is not difficult to conjecture. Corrections were made while the sheets were being printed off, and the corrected and uncorrected sheets were afterwards bound up indiscriminately. In this way the number of different copies might be multiplied to any extent.

In other words, it is likely that no two copies of this edition of Bacon’s work are the same. The implications of this for online presentation of early printed books are fundamental and have not I believe been sufficiently discussed. Early English Books Online presents us with images of just one copy of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s work from Cambridge University Library, so we have no way online of investigating the other variant copies. Far from making the text of Bacon’s work more fluid, the online presentation destroys our awareness of the fluidity and variation of the printed text.

The picture which emerges from historical bibliographers such as David McKitterick, Adrian Johns and Sabrina Baron is that Gutenberg’s introduction of the press marked one stage in the long process of the evolution of printing. As Raymond Williams pointed out, the rise in literacy and access to information was a long revolution in which the appearance of the steam-driven printing press in the nineteenth century was just as important as the work of Gutenberg. Moreover, this process was not technologically driven. Political struggles over issues such as censorship and taxes were just as important as technological innovation in opening up access to printed information. As David McKitterick has pointed out: ‘the printing revolution itself, a phrase which has been taken to heart by some historians, was no revolution in the sense that it wrought instant change. The revolution was part technological, and part bibliographical and social. It was prolonged, and like many revolutions its process was irregular, and its effects were variable, even erratic.’

The picture painted by McKitterick and other historical bibliographers of the impact of printing recalls the description of the Arab Spring by Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh. The process was a complex and extended one, involving the realignment and repurposing of media rather than a simple disruptive transformation. In the light of these types of analysis, it becomes very difficult to accept the technologically-led disruptive model of media history proposed by the Toronto school of Innes, McLuhan and Ong. Moreover, the Toronto school privileges technologies of communication, which make it sound as if technologies like the printing press dropped from the sky. The history of media reflects a much broader technological base. Printing presses only became capable of mass production when they began to be powered by steam engines in the early nineteenth century. To feed the new steam-powered presses, it was necessary to devise new methods of making paper. Even then, the new machine-made books would not have been widely distributed without canals and railways. All these technologies were necessary to make printed books everyday objects.

In recent discussion of disruptive innovations, the focus is frequently on the history of the media, and comparatively little attention is paid to one of the most disruptive moments in Western history, the profound economic changes which began in the late eighteenth century and are known as the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. This period is conventionally taken as marking the rise of modernity, and in a wide range of scholarly literature across many disciplines is seen as a major watershed in human history. In contemplating the digital revolution, it may seem as if there is little to learn from looking back to the Industrial Revolution. The clean, hi-tech electronic world of the digital seems utterly opposed to the smoky, muscle-driven factories of early industrialization. The digital is frequently represented as a means of escape from the industrial. Yet our digital world is largely a creation of many of the key technologies of that industrial world. The development of the telegraph was closely linked to the growth of railways, and the concept of the digital was the creation of engineers seeking to improve the performance of telegraph wires. One of the great icons of the Industrial Revolution, Brunel’s steamship the Great Eastern, was used to lay the first transatlantic cable, thereby effectively laying the foundations of the internet. Some of the fundamental concepts behind the computer programme as a sequence of logical instructions were developed in the 1820s from punch card mechanisms used to control mechanical looms. Moreover, it was the machines created by the Industrial Revolution which provided the technological infrastructure to create computers – to create the turbines, valves, transistors, silicon, cathode ray tubes which makes the computer one of the most sophisticated products of Western industrialisation.

The industrialization of the late eighteenth century was a process which first gained momentum in various regions of Great Britain, such as South Yorkshire. There can be no better place than Sheffield, one of the great centres of the industrial revolution, to consider the industrial dimensions of the digital and contemplate the Industrial Revolution as a disruptive moment. Does the Industrial Revolution, and the associated developments of the Agricultural Revolution, have anything to teach us in considering potential digital transformations? This was clearly a period when technological innovation was important. It felt like a period of transformation. Tourists travelled from Europe to admire such wonders as the Ironbridge at Coalbrookdale and artists such as Joseph Wright and Phillip Loutherbourg celebrated these new technologies. In works of literature such as Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, the rights and wrongs of the manufacturing system were earnestly debated, with one character praising the profound researches, scientific inventions and complicated mechanisms which had given employment and multiplied comfort, while another denounced the innovations: ‘Wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are death-doomed from their cradles. Look for one moment into a cotton mill, amidst the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and complicated motions of diabolical mechanisms’. Wide-ranging cultural and social transformations have been attributed to these technological changes, such as regular working hours and standardized timekeeping.

Sheffield has an industrial tradition as a centre of cutlery manufacture which goes back to the middle ages. It was partly the specialized skills available in Sheffield which prompted Benjamin Huntsman to establish himself in Sheffield to undertake his experiments in the production of crucible steel which laid the basis of Sheffield’s steel industry. Sheffield’s light trades remained important even after Thomas Bessemer’s inventions allowed the production of steel in bulk from the middle of the nineteenth century.  As, thanks to Bessemer, huge steel plants appeared in the city, making rails, steel plates and armaments, the transformative effect of the new technologies was evident in the physical fabric of the city itself. As early as 1768, a visitor commented that ‘Sheffield is very large and populous, but exceedingly dirty and ill paved. What makes it more disagreeable is the excessive smoke from the great multitude of forges which the town is crowded with’. By 1842, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick declared that ‘Sheffield is one of the dirtiest and smokiest towns I ever saw. One cannot be long in the town without experiencing the necessary inhalation of soot…There are however numbers of persons in Sheffield who think the smoke healthy’.  The importance of industry in the history of Sheffield in the Victorian town hall, which is surmounted by a statue of Vulcan and incorporates statues of figures representing electricity and steam who hold scrolls with the names of such great technological pioneers as Watt, Stephenson, Faraday and Davy.

In this Victorian view, the Industrial Revolution was the achievement of technological genius and enterprise. If this was indeed the case, then perhaps the digital world does have something to learn from its industrial great-grandparents. This view still holds sway, as is suggested by a recent comment of the Sheffield MP Nick Clegg that it was the likes of Brunel not the bankers who made Britain great. However, since the Great Western Railway cost 6,500,000 million pounds (over 300 million pounds in modern value, and twice the original estimate), presumably the bankers were of assistance in facilitating this technological revolution at some point. For politicians, it is convenient to hope that genius and inventiveness can quickly bring prosperity and wealth. But the history of industrialization suggests that this process of change can be amorphous, patchy in impact and above all subject to long timescales. Just like the printing revolution of Gutenberg, the industrial revolution dissolves under closer examination and become very difficult to pin down.

The term industrial revolution was not used as a shorthand for the changes which began in Britain until the late nineteenth century. It expressed the idea that Britain had gone through changes at this time which comparable in scale and importance to the political revolutions in France and Germany. Clearly something of profound importance had happened in Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century, but economic historians have struggled to get a clear view of the nature and structure of the process. The period from 1760 to 1830 was characterized by a wealth of disruptive innovation, yet most recent research suggests that economic growth during this period was not particularly marked. It appears that productivity growth and technological progress were confined to a few small sectors such as cotton, wool, iron and machinery in remote regions such as south Yorkshire, whereas much of the rest of manufacturing remained stagnant until after 1830. For some historians, the important features of early industrialization were not so much economic developments or technological changes as the social and cultural changes introduced by the growth of factory working and changes in farming. Just like the printing revolution or the Arab Spring, the Industrial Revolution proves to closer examination to be a much more complex and amorphous process than is suggested by the use of the word revolution.

This is vividly illustrated by the story of industrial development in Sheffield, which has been described by such distinguished historians from Sheffield University as Sidney Pollard and David Hey. Like other major industrial cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow, industrialization did not take place in Sheffield by accident. The availability of water power had made Sheffield a centre of craft production of cutlery since the middle ages. It was partly the availability of skill and expertise in metal working which encouraged the scientific instrument maker Benjamin Huntsman to move from Doncaster to Sheffield to undertake his experiments in creating crucible steel. However, despite Huntsman’s innovation in steelmaking, the initial industrial growth in Sheffield was in its historic light trades such as the making of tools, cutlery and silver plate. The techniques in Sheffield’s light trades changed very slowly. Before 1850, the only major change was the use of steam instead of water to drive the wheels used by grinders. The light trades remained dominated by the ‘small mesters’ who hired rooms in works with steam-powered wheels. It was only in the 1850s that factory production and mechanization began to be introduced in the light trades. Similarly, steel production and heavy industry only began to dominate Sheffield from 1850, chiefly as a result of the establishment by Henry Bessemer in 1859 of a steelworks using his new method of bulk steel production. The creation of heavy industry in Sheffield was a product of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1851 and 1891, employment increased over 300% in the heavy trades, compared with 50% in the light trades. In 1851, less than a quarter of the workers in the city were employed in heavy industry; by 1891, two thirds of the city’s workers worked in heavy industry.

We assume that new digital technologies will very rapidly bring major cultural and social transformations in their wake, but the lessons of industrialization suggest that the process may be longer and more complex than we generally imagine. Huntsman first produced crucible steel in the 1740s and steam power arrived in the city in 1786, yet it took nearly a hundred years for Sheffield to become a steel city. The history of industrialization suggests that the process of digital transformation may be both more extended and more complex than is often assumed. The model of disruptive innovation is not a helpful way of imaging the process of industrialization. It was actually the ability of industrialization not to disrupt but instead to support sustained change which was important. In Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘The Industrial Revolution was “revolutionary” because the technological progress it witnessed and the subsequent transformation of the economy were not ephemeral events and moved society to a permanent different economic trajectory’. (p. 3) If industrialization is seen in this way, as a sustained trajectory of economic change, it is a process which still continues, and the digital world can simply be seen as an extension of a process which began in the eighteenth century. Indeed, this continuity can be seen as stretching further back. As we have noted, Sheffield’s growth reflected skills developed since the Middle Ages, and such long-standing commercial traditions fed into the early development of industrialisation.

The Industrial Revolution suggests that the model of disruption and transformation we use in thinking about the digital world may be over-simplistic. Are there other ways in which thinking about industrialization can help us in understanding the digital world? I would like to suggest that there are. In thinking about the digital humanities, we tend to focus our attention on tools and methods, but it is striking that in cities like Sheffield and Birmingham at the time of industrialization, tools and working methods often did not greatly change, but environment did. Sidney Pollard has pointed out how ‘a visitor to the metalworking areas of Birmingham or Sheffield in the mid nineteenth-century would have found little to distinguish them superficially from the same industries a hundred years earlier. The men worked as independent sub-contractors in their own or rented workshops using their own or hired equipment … These industries .. were still waiting for their Industrial Revolution’. Yet, as Pollard emphasized, the environment in which these workmen operated had been completely transformed. Their wheels were now powered by steam and there were other gadgets which speeded up minor operations such as stamping and cutting. The workshop might be lit by gas and have a water supply. Railways made distribution easier and cheaper and gave access to a larger labour market. Cheap printing would assist in advertising products. While the ‘small mester’ may have been working in an old-fashioned way, his environment had been completed transformed. Likewise, it may be that the most important changes in the digital humanities will be in the environment in which researchers into the humanities operate, and we should perhaps be giving more attention to this.

The fascination of the digital lies in its immense variety: 3D printing, multispectral imaging, mobile technologies, RFID: these all have their part to play in humanities scholarship as well as more familiar methods as linked data, geo-spatial visualisations, text encoding and many others. This need for a pluralistic outlook in dealing with the digital is one that is reinforced by the history of industrialization. While developments such as steam, telegraph and steelmaking were important, they only formed a part of an enormous spectrum of technological developments. It is striking how the interests of such celebrated figures of the Industrial Revolution as James Watt were very wide. Watt was as preoccupied with the making of musical instruments or the copying of sculpture as he was in the application of steam power. Likewise, among Thomas Bessemer’s inventions were an early type-composing machine, new methods of making pencils, machines for making plate glass and an (unsuccessful) ship to avoid seasickness, as well as his new method of steel manufacture.  The examples of men like Watt and Bessemer remind us of the importance of an eclectic approach to the digital humanities, of embracing an approach that affirms that there is no single answer, no single piece of kit or method which will unlock the digital humanities. Digital transformations will involve a variety of approaches, embracing both risky short-term experimentation and support for sustainability, embracing both mash-ups made in bedrooms and experiments with synchrotrons, as well as digital art works and huge quantitative visualisations. The digital humanities will not only be a critical and theoretical debate but will also code. It encompasses both data and materiality.

While we tend to associate the Industrial Revolution with such major inventions as the steam engine, a key driver of industrialization was the small improvement or adjustment – tinkering with and progressively improving technology. The first steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Watt’s invention of the separate steam condenser was a microinvention which made steam power economically viable. Watt’s low pressure steam engine was not suitable for locomotives, and it was further refinements by many others which eventually made a high pressure steam engine practicable. It is tempting to assume that economic transformation is associated with the paradigm shifting macroinvention, but this is not necessarily the case. Two of the great macroinventions of the eighteenth century, the hot air balloon and the smallpox vaccine, had limited economic impact, whereas Henry Cort’s invention of puddling and rolling was technically modest, but by allowing the production of wrought iron had enormous economic impact. We are regularly urged by research councils and others to deliver the macro-invention, to demonstrate the paradigm shift. Yet the history of industrialization suggests that the small improvement, the micro-invention, can be more important. Moreover, it is perhaps precisely this kind of micro-improvement that the digital humanities is particularly well placed to deliver.

Some of the technical developments of the Industrial Revolution were linked to new scientific theories. Watt’s separate condenser was influenced by the theory of latent heat proposed by Watt’s mentor at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Black. However, for the most part, as Joel Mokyr has observed, ‘The inventions that set the British changes in motion were largely the result of mechanical intuition and dexterity, the product of technically brilliant but basically empirical tinkerers, or ‘technical designers’’ (p. 75). The late eighteenth century was a period of scientific and technological ferment, but this took place outside any formal academic structure. This is illustrated again by James Watt in Glasgow. James Watt is one of the outstanding names associated with the University of Glasgow, but he was never a member of the University’s academic staff. He was employed to repair scientific instruments. It was in the process of repairing a model of a steam engine owned by the University that Watt hit on the idea of a separate condenser. Although Watt wasn’t a lecturer but a mere craftsman, his workshop became the intellectual hub of the University.  His friend John Robison, who afterwards became Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, recalled how: ‘All the young lads of our little place that were any way remarkable for scientific predilection were acquaintances of Mr Watt; and his parlour was a rendezvous for all of his description. Whenever any puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr Watt. He needed only to be prompted; everything became to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and we knew that he would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance, or had made something of it’.    

     

Watt was not exceptional. In Sheffield, Benjamin Huntsman was also a scientific instrument maker. Sheffield plating was accidentally discovered in 1743 by a Sheffield cutler Thomas Boulsover while repairing a customer’s knife. Henry Bessemer received only elementary schooling, preferring to gain practical experience in his father’s type foundry. When Bessemer was invited to describe his steel process to the British Association, he protested that he had ‘never written or read a paper to a learned society’. Stainless steel was developed in Sheffield in 1913 not in the University but in the research laboratory of the steel firms Firth and Brown by Harry Brearley, a self-taught metallurgist who had never received any formal education. One of the great challenges which digital technologies present us is the need also to develop spaces which allow theory, making and tinkering to collide – a digital equivalent of Watt’s workshop at Glasgow. Ideally, this would be precisely what a digital humanities centre should be like, but sadly we have rarely achieved this. The pressure of university funding structures means that most digital humanities centres are soft-funded and are on a treadmill of project funding which restricts the ability to act as centres for innovative thinking. Moreover, in Britain at least, universities are increasingly making a stronger distinction between academic and professional staff. This is without doubt a retrograde development, but the political and administrative drivers behind it are formidable. In this context, it is difficult to see how digital humanities centres can become more like Watt’s workshop or Harry Brearley’s laboratory at Firth and Brown, yet I think we must try.

Such new spaces of making and collaboration of course need not necessarily be physical spaces, but they must embrace different skills, outlooks and conversations. We need to create spaces which would embrace the digital equivalent of a James Watt or a Harry Brearley. The creation of such spaces was a fundamental feature of early industrialization. Economic historians are increasingly emphasizing the role of social capital as fundamental to understanding early British industrialization. Historians have frequently been puzzled as to why the first industrialization occurred in Britain. There were other more technologically advanced countries such as France. It seems that an important part of the reason for Britain’s early lead was that it had social structures which facilitated the spread of ideas and the making of contacts and partnerships. The multitude of clubs and societies in eighteenth-century Britain helped spread expertise and encourage new enterprises. A celebrated example is the Lunar Society, based in the West Midlands, which include many of the mos famous names of the period such as Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin. Such friendships were vital to the new enterprises. Watt had struggled to develop his team engine in Glasgow, but Boulton in Birmingham had access to the necessary precision craftsmanship which allowed the successful manufacture of steam engines. Moreover, while the specializations of the Lunar Society were distinct, their fascinations overlapped tremendously--so they were able to support each other's ideas and endeavors well outside their own field proper in a kind of early inter-disciplinarity. The Lunar Society was not exceptional. Britain contained hundreds of philosophical clubs, masonic lodges and statistical societies which were essential in encouraging that hands-on, tinkering culture which encouraged early industrialization.

We may feel that in learned societies like ALLC or ADHO we have the equivalent of a Lunar Society in digital humanities. But the model of something like ALLC is that of a nineteenth-century learned society, and the Lunar Society was more flexible and informal than that. Bodies like the ALLC or ADHO are designed to affirm the respectability and seriousness of their members, to show that they are worthy professional people. But the informal, drunken societies of the eighteenth century show the value of using much looser and informal arrangements to generate social capital. We need to think about how we can recreate that kind of eighteenth century social excitement in the digital sphere. What is particularly important about these eighteenth century clubs is that they operated a particularly big tent. There was not set view in the eighteenth century as to whether the engineer or the money man should take the lead. It has been suggested that the key skill was ‘to identify a need or opportunity, then cooperate with others who possessed a different skill to take advantage of it’. This  description of the skills necessary for success in the eighteenth century is, I would suggest, equally applicable to the digital world. However, in the eighteenth century this also involved an appetite for risk. Watt was constantly terrified by what he saw as Boulton’s imprudence. Two of the greatest engineers and entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution, Richard  Trevithick and Richard Roberts, died penniless. I wonder whether, in the dot.com age, we have the same appetite for risk.

But what is particularly striking about industrialization is the passion for making. John Robison described how for James Watt, ‘everything became to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and we knew that he would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance, or had made something of it. No matter in what line – languages, antiquity, natural history, - nay, poetry, criticism, and works of taste; as to anything in the line of engineering, whether civil or military, he was at home, and a ready instructor’. According to Robison when Watt was asked to repair the University of Glasgow’s model steam engine, it was ‘at first a fine plaything to Mr Watt…But like everything which came into his hands, it soon became an object of most serious study’. The mixture of play, tinkering, science and hands-on experimentation is the most powerful legacy of the Industrial Revolution and it is in that art of making, that materiality, that perhaps the most potent legacy of industrialization lies.

For Watt and the others, this making was an aspect of data. One of Watt’s earliest inventions was a perspective machine to assist artists. One great contribution of the Soho Manufactory was the production of the first precise slide rules, essential to calculate boiler pressures. Watt envisaged the production of a mechanical calculating machine, but felt that the engineering techniques of the time could not produce sufficiently precise parts – a problem that Babbage was later to encounter.  Towards the end of his life, Watt became preoccupied with developing a sculpture copying machine and his workshop was littered with busts and casts associated with this project. The creation of this machine required both accurate data and methods to make the sculpture – as a mixture of issues of data and making, it was very characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. When the contents of Watt’s workshop were recently moved into a new display at the Science Museum, a mould of an unknown bust was found there. It was realized that the mould could be imaged and the resulting 3d model could be used to print out the bust. The work was done by a team from Geomatic Engineering at UCL, and when the bust was printed, it was found to be a previously unknown bust of James Watt (For more on this, see: www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892)

This exercise seems to me to bring the story full circle, and the way in which new methods of fabrication are giving use new approaches to data seems to me to bring the story full circle. Industrialisation and making will, it seems to me, become more pertinent than ever as digital fabrication becomes increasingly important. I’d like to conclude my lecture by quickly sharing with you some video clips that seem to me to make this point very well. The first is a news report on an exhibition last year at the V&A called, appropriately enough, Industrial Revolution 2.0:

Industrial Revolution  2.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUo6EqAix-o 

From this it is a short step to using fabrication machines to replicate objects in museums, and this clip shows the Makerbot, an affordable 3d fabricator, used to replicate objects in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I hardly need to point out the parallekls with James Watts’s sculpture copying machine:

Through a Scanner, Getty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blKcIsEEoag

The Makerbot was recently used for a hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in which artists used fabrications of objects in the Museum’s collection to create new works of art. Here’s a short glimpse of the evenr in Bew York in June:

Met Makerbot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dqXVe2GVo

It is striking how in these clips there are frequent references to revolutions and disruptions. What I think we have seen is that in fact these new methods echo deeper continuities. The Arab Spring, the arrival of printing and the Industrial Revolution all show us how change is not necessarily revolutionary or disruptive. The processes we think of as revolutionary can be lengthy, patchy in character, amorphous, difficult to measure and unpredictable, and there is no reason to think that the digital will be any different. It’s the continuities and the parallels that are often as striking as the disruptions. Let me end with one last quick clip which shows the Fab Lab in Manchester which to my mind inescapably recalls James Watts’s workshop in Glasgow, and points us towards one digital space of the future which is deeply rooted in the past:

Fab Lab Manchester: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8_K2ctNWs

   

     

  

    

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