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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An Electric Current of the Imagination

Illustration from 'Data Sea' by Michael Takeo Magruder (2009)

AN ELECTRIC CURRENT OF THE IMAGINATION: WHAT THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES ARE AND WHAT THEY MIGHT BECOME 

Lecture by Andrew Prescott at King's College London, 25 January 2012

It is a great honour for me to become head of this academic department devoted to the study of the digital humanities. When I first saw experiments in the digital imaging of books and manuscripts in the British Library twenty years ago, it was impossible to imagine that they would develop into an intellectual activity on a scale warranting an academic department. The fact that King’s College London has led the way in this process is due to the work of many pioneers, and I cannot start this lecture without acknowledging their achievements and saying what a pleasure it is to join them now as a colleague. Above all, it is essential to honour the contribution of Professor Harold Short who is without doubt the father of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Harold has been an outstanding international pioneer of the digital humanities, and I feel honoured and humbled to follow in his footsteps.

Slide: Birdsong Compliance: http://itchaway.net/poetry_content/birdsong-compliance/Scene_1.html]

The work you see displayed here is a digital poem called Birdsong Compliance by the British poet John Sparrow. The words are taken from interviews with the composer John Cage and the critic Joan Retallack. This poem illustrates how some artists have become fascinated by the way digital processes can be used to transform texts into new pieces of art. In Birdsong Compliance, two overlapping texts interact with each other. One text is static while the other moves around this background to create random juxtapositions suggesting new and unexpected meanings.

Another poet very interested in processes by which texts can be transformed or, as he prefers it, deformed in order to discover new meanings is my former colleague at the University of Glasgow, Jeffrey Robinson. Jeffrey is not only an interesting poet but also a distinguished scholar of the Romantic period.

In his recent volume of poems called Untam’d Wing, Jeffrey takes the great monuments of Romantic poetry on which he has worked for many years, and subjects them to processes of poetic transformation. He reduces Wordsworth's sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge to five key words conveying the ecstasy of a scene witnessed by early morning light. Jeffrey splices lines and phrases from the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge with lines from Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Gertrude Stein. Jeffrey finds new poems in marginal notes by Keats. He takes lines from famous sonnets of the Romantic period and mixes them up to create new sonnets which reveal surprising interrelationships between the words, rhythm and imagery of the originals. Jeffrey riffs on phrases and words in individual poems, setting out like a jazz musician to renew a body of standard work (in the way that, say, Miles Davies might revisit George Gershwin).

The effect of Jeffrey’s deformations and transformations of romantic poetry is at first disconcerting, then magical. Jeffrey’s reworkings compel us to look afresh at individual words and lines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Eolian Harp, originally published in 1795, has often been taken as the beginning of the Romantic movement in poetry. I have given the text of the first section of The Eolian Harp on your handout. Over the page, you can read one of Jeffrey’s deformations of The Eolian Harp, which picks out words from Coleridge’s poem. I have known The Eolian Harp since I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I read Jeffrey’s version of it that I really noticed Coleridge’s use in this poem of the startling word ‘sequacious’. This word, rarely used in English poetry, meant in the seventeenth century ‘following a leader slavishly’. By the eighteenth century, ‘sequacious’ came to be used with reference to objects, and mean pliability or flexibility. Applying the word to the ethereal sound of the Aeolian harp, Coleridge here gives ‘sequacious’ a further musical inflection.

Jeffrey Robinson’s poems encourage us to focus on the evanescence of individual words like ‘sequacious’, which we might otherwise skip over. Jeffrey reminds us that new insights can be found in single words just as much as in huge quantities of data. Robinson’s juxtapositions of the old and the new seek, in his words, to generate ‘an electric current of the imagination (as the Romantics might put it) [which] causes transformations that constitute a real thing in the world’.

[Slide: OPTE project: http://www.opte.org]

This is an image from the OPTE project which was started by Barrett Lyon in 2003 and seeks to create a visual representation of the internet. This image represents the internet connections of a single computer in November 2003. The purpose of the OPTE project is to map the growth of the internet, to identify gaps in the internet’s structure, and to analyse the effect on the internet of major events such as wars and natural disasters. But the images are also aesthetically pleasing, and they have been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This image conveys something of the scale of the internet, but gives little sense of its growth over the past fifteen years. In 2000, there were about 361 million internet users. Since then, the number of users has grown four fold, so that there are currently just over two billion internet users, about one third of the world’s population. There are currently estimated to be about 12 billion indexed pages on the indexed World Wide Web (and how odd that our unit of measurement for the web continues to be the page).

In 1997, Michael Lesk calculated that the entire holdings of the Library of Congress amounted to about 20 petabytes of data, and guessed that the total information in the world amounted to a few thousand petabytes. By 2003, Lesk reported that the total of new information created every year amounted to 1.5 exabytes, which is over 1500 petabytes or 1.5 billion gigabytes. As of May 2009, the size of the world’s total digital content was estimated at 500 exabytes or over a trillion gigabytes – about 160 gigabytes for every man, woman or child on earth, or about 480 gigabytes for each internet user. Most of this information has been created since 1997. It is also estimated that during the single year 2013 internet traffic will be equivalent to all the information currently in existence.

These figures are dizzying and perhaps rather terrifying. Michael Lesk also calculates that the works of a single author such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Wordsworth occupy about one hundred megabytes of data, not so much a drop in the ocean of information, as an atom in a universe of data. How in this context are we to hang on to the resonances and evanescence of a single word in a single poem like ‘sequacious’? In this huge and inhuman world of information, poems start to look as fragile as butterfly wings.

[Slide: Square Kilometre Array: http://bit.ly/rOsHEU]

Scientists frequently deal with vast and intimidating problems of information. When the Square Kilometre Array, a sophisticated radio telescope, is built, it will produce four petabytes of data an hour. Each day, the Square Kilometre Array will process more information than is found in all the printed books in the world’s national libraries. Although film and video can for example generate large quantities of data, humanities scholars in general do not at present confront the same problems of scale of information that astronomers have to deal with. Humanities scholars are often much more preoccupied with the complexities of the smaller scale – with the problem of a word like ‘sequacious’. Nevertheless, in their approach to information, humanities scholars have tended to use approaches more appropriate to the large quantities of data dealt with by scientists. The main concerns of humanities computing have been with such issues as the modelling of data, its interoperability and sustainability, and the control and management of its growth. Yet many of the books, manuscripts, pictures, films sound recordings and artefacts with which humanities scholars are concerned resist such managerial approaches – they are messy, damaged, ambiguous in their meaning and complex in their structure. They refuse to be sequacious.

[Slide: Literature Online: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/]

Among the many commercial online packages on which humanities scholars and students have become increasingly reliant is Literature Online, which is produced by Proquest and contains a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. Here is how The Eolian Harp appears in Literature Online, and this is nowadays likely to be the way in which many students first encounter the poem. We are presented with the text from the 1912 edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and everything looks reassuringly simple and straightforward. Admittedly this isn’t the most recent and authoritative edition of the poem, which was published by J. C . C. Mays in 2001, but there are problems running deeper than this. A study by Jack Stillinger has emphasized how Coleridge constantly revised and altered his poems, so that there are something like sixteen different versions of The Eolian Harp in manuscript and printed form, all dating from Coleridge’s lifetime. These range from 51 to 64 lines in length. Sometimes Coleridge presented the poem as a single section, and at other times he divided it into three, four or five paragraphs, so that the poem’s development could be more clearly followed. The various versions of the poem have different titles, reflecting Coleridge’s uncertainty as to the best way to convey the poem’s abstract and reflective character. Among the titles with which Coleridge experimented were ‘Effusion XXXV’ and ‘Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire’, and he only settled on the title ‘Eolian Harp’ in 1817. Stillinger comments: ‘There are too many differences [between these versions] to enumerate… they change the tone, the philosophical and religious ideas, and the basic structure rather drastically. The first recoverable version, ‘Effusion XXXV’, recounts an amusing incident of early married life, while the latest version is a much more serious affair’. Many of Coleridge’s poems are characterized by this textual instability – Stillinger calculates that there were at least eighteen different versions of The Ancient Mariner. In this context, we might wonder how far there was ever a single settled version of a poem like The Eolian Harp or The Ancient Mariner. Jeffrey Robinson’s process of ‘deforming’ The Eolian Harp can be seen as the continuation of a process in which Coleridge himself engaged for more than twenty years.

Users of Mays’s monumental edition of Coleridge’s poetry immediately realize how important this textual instability is in understanding both Coleridge and his poetry. The wealth of evidence for the changes in particular texts led Mays to divide his edition between, on the one hand, reading texts and, on the other, a bewildering variorum edition. In the case of The Eolian Harp it was even necessary for Mays to include in the Variorum edition photographs of annotated copies of Coleridge’s 1817 collection, Sibylline Leaves, illustrating Coleridge’s continued reshaping and development of his poem, and I have included one of these in your handout. None of this is even hinted at in Literature Online or other online presentations of the poem. Literature Online irons out the complexities and uncertainties of The Eolian Harp and reduces it to a piece of information which could be transmitted by telegraph. There is an irony here in that cultural commentators frequently emphasise the (often false) perception of online information as inherently ephemeral, volatile and unstable. Yet here the online version presents a very fixed image of a text that is, in its manuscript and printed version, very volatile and unstable. This instability reflects Coleridge’s attempts to replicate the fluidity and interconnectedness of conversation, and so is important in understanding the poem. These are precisely the issues we need to confront in considering the humanities in an information world: how to represent flux and fluidity, how to explore instability and uncertainty, how to represent the complexity of the minute. Scientists want to map the universe; humanities scholars want to investigate the universe contained in a single poem. And, as Coleridge’s work demonstrates, that poem may turn out to be more complex in its structure and interconnections than an entire galaxy.

[Slide: Coalbrookdale at Night: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._002.jpg]

We have been here before. This is a celebrated scene of the early industrial revolution at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. A sense of being overwhelmed by technology, of anxiety about the way in which new technologies are transforming society, while at the same time feeling excited at the material improvements which these changes might bring is a familiar – perhaps even a necessary – condition of modernity. A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth. The prostitute Susan in Simpson’s interpretation is one of an army of alienated and rootless people who pervade Wordsworth’s verse: beggars whose anxious movements reflect the pointless and repetitive movements associated with the introduction of machines; vagrant farmworkers who have been disconnected from the land by enclosure; discharged soldiers who move through the landscape like ghosts. Concerns about the nature of the society emerging at that time united such disparate figures as Burke and Cobbett. Burke fretted that the state was becoming ‘nothing better than a partnership agreement in trade of pepper or coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties’. From a completely different stance, Cobbett expressed his horror at the way in which the cash nexus was becoming all pervasive: ‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.

Part of our role as scholars of the digital humanities should undoubtedly be to challenge those glib historical claims frequently made about modern developments in information technology. A longer historical perspective suggests that today’s developments are but another step in a long revolution in in the structuring of knowledge and its representation. The invention of the codex at the beginning of the Christian era was just as remarkable as the appearance of the iPad. The creation of the biblical concordance in the twelfth century was equally revolutionary – the idea that sacred text could be broken up according to an external and abstract pattern of alphabetization verged on the sacrilegious. Without the Western adoption of Arabic conceptions of zero at about the same time, digitization would have been still born. And of all the mechanical inventions which transformed human life, few have had greater impact than the appearance of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, factories and railways transformed the very structure of time. Each age has had its information revolution, but nevertheless it seems that what happened at the end of the eighteenth century dwarfed them all. We can see this by the way in which reactions to those changes which so alarmed Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke and Cobbett are still evident in our everyday language.

In his seminal work Culture and Society, Raymond Williams described how the great social and economic changes in Britain between 1760 and 1830 resulted in the development of new meanings for such key words as class, industry and artist. For example, the idea that the terms art and artist refer to the imaginative or creative arts first appears in this period, and was an attempt to affirm essential spiritual values in the face of the dehumanizing effects of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Of these major ideological and conceptual shifts at the time of the Industrial Revolution, Williams singled out as particularly significant that term which has become a modern intellectual catch-all: culture. The modern concept of culture as meaning a general body of artistic achievement and activity and, eventually, a whole way of life was, again, a reaction to the appearance of modernity. Williams traces a tradition running from Burke and Cobbett through Romantic artists such as Coleridge and Wordsworth through to John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, and still evident in twentieth century commentators such as Eliot and Leavis, which articulates the idea of culture as a mechanism for preserving essential human values in the face of a society increasingly dominated by trade, manufacture and the earning of a living. Coleridge is a pivotal figure in this development, declaring to Wordsworth that there was a need for ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. In his Essay on the Constitution of the Church and State Coleridge called for the creation of an endowed class known as the Clerisy or National Church whose business would be ‘general cultivation’. The Clerisy would consist of ‘the learned of all denominations: the sages and professors of all the so-called liberal arts and sciences’. Coleridge had a profound influence on the early development of King’s College London and may in many ways be seen as its presiding genius.

The idea of the humanities was at the heart of this early nineteenth century debate about resisting that mechanistic Utilitarian society which so entranced figures like Jeremy Bentham. Coleridge declared that his Clerisy would counter this mechanistic death of the spirit. The Clerisy would ‘remain at the fountainhead of the humanities, in cultivating the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science’. The humanities are thus another of those keywords which reflect the ideological shifts associated with the rise of modern society. Just as the definition of art shifted, so the older form of the word humanities, associated with the study of the litterae humaniores was discarded and replaced by a focus on that knowledge which would encourage, in Coleridge’s words, ‘ the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’. Coleridge declared that his intention was to undo the entire philosophical and scientific superstructure associated with the measurement and geometry of the Newtonian world. In his view, this mechanistic concern with numbers and measurement threatened to destroy the life of the mind and crush the human spirit. The humanities were a reaction against modernity, and an affirmation of the human spirit against the cash nexus.

In this context, the idea of the digital humanities is problematic. At one level, the computer is simply a sophisticated spinning jenny. Indeed, the great-grandfather of the computer, Babbage’s difference engine, with its programmes developed by Ada Lovelace from the mechanisms used to control looms, was the most sophisticated and forward-looking product of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. The present information revolution could be seen as an attack by the heirs of Babbage on the very cultural arena established as a refuge against the mechanistic impulse. If we see the digital humanities as merely extending mechanistic arithmetical procedures into the realm of cultural endeavour then they indeed mark that death of the spirit which Coleridge so much feared. Alan Liu has brilliantly described in his Laws of Cool how modern computing is an instrument of that managerial impulse which seeks to make knowledge work as mechanical and controlled as work on a production line. Liu reminds us how the aesthetics and language of computing, with its excitement about the latest ‘cool’ medium, are a refuge from the grim reality of a cubicle in an open plan office on an industrial estate. In the end, Liu sees the digital humanities as an escape from the tyranny of the cool, but there is a sense of despair in his conclusion that the only reaction to art in such a situation is to deform and deface it, in a way which anticipates some of Jeffrey Robinson’s procedures in Untam’d Wing. The work of Liu and other commentators reminds us that the modern information revolution is not simply about machines and the capabilities of new technology. It is about how knowledge is being turned into a commodity, a data steam disconnected from those who produce it and turned to commercial advantage by monopolistic corporations. This is surely something which must be resisted, but it will not be achieved by using open source software or even by engaging in a strategy of resistance. We need precisely what Coleridge called for in his letter to Wordsworth: ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. This cannot be achieved by escaping the digital; there is no escape from the digital, any more than there was from the industrial revolution. What is necessary is to reshape the digital world in Coleridge’s model. The creation of such a world is the mission of the digital humanities.

It would be easy to see Samuel Taylor Coleridge as opposed to science. However, as Nicholas Roe and others have recently emphasized, Coleridge was deeply preoccupied with science. He sought to ‘warm his mind with universal science’ and declared ‘I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine’. The Eolian Harp was partly prompted by Coleridge’s reading of materialist scientists such as Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin, and for Nicholas Roe the poem demonstrates that ‘for Coleridge at this moment there was no separation between imaginative writing and advanced science or ‘natural philosophy’. Coleridge’s preoccupation with science reflected his concern that physicians such as John Hunter only offered ‘mechanical solutions’ to the understanding of life. In 1824, Coleridge supplied notes on the ‘Idea of LIFE’ for Joseph Henry Green, who afterwards became the first Professor of Surgery here in King’s College London. For Coleridge, then, the first step in resisting the mechanistic spirit of the industrial revolution was a profound engagement with science. Likewise, if humanities scholars wish to ensure that their understanding and engagement with human knowledge does not become another Californian commodity, it is essential to engage with the digital world, and not as consumers but as creators.

This then is the challenge for the digital humanities: to create a new type of humanities which will transform science and technology and achieve a revolution comparable to that revolution of understanding sought by Coleridge. How have the digital humanities risen to this challenge? There can be no doubt that the practice of humanities scholarship has been transformed by the increasing availability of digital tools and resources over the past ten to fifteen years. A recent study by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown found that 89% of a sample of 149 humanities researchers used the Web on a daily basis and 77% had been using the Web for five years or more. Likewise, in the LAIRAH study, 81% of a sample of humanities researchers identified themselves as extensive users of digital resources, and 83% agreed that digital resources had changed the way in which they did their research. However, these studies also indicate a problem for the digital humanities. Overwhelmingly, the digital resources used by humanities scholars are commercial packages produced by libraries and digital publishers such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online, Literature Online or JSTOR. Usage of the specialist packages produced by digital humanities centres based in universities is, by contrast, very low. For many humanities scholars, the most pressing need in developing digital infrastructures is not to increase engagement with the digital humanities but rather to secure access to commercial packages which their institutions cannot afford, such as the monstrously expensive Parker Library on the Web.

The digital revolution has occurred, but its course was dictated by libraries and commercial publishers, and the digital humanities as formally constituted has largely stood on the sidelines. The well-known digital humanities centres in British universities such as King’s, Glasgow, Sheffield and Belfast have of course produced dozens of digital projects over the years, but the impact of these has generally been very limited compared with the major commercial packages. A great deal of effort has gone into developing subject associations for the digital humanities such as the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, but these look increasingly irrelevant and marginal to wider digital scholarship. The international Digital Humanities conferences are, as Jerome McGann has recently emphasized, preoccupied with inward-looking discussion on metadata and standards, and seek to establish what McGann calls ‘tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands’ . Patrick Joula has recently produced a devastating analysis of academic journals for the digital humanities, showing that they are rarely cited by other scholars and fail to attract contributions from scholars in leading universities. The digital humanities consistently punch beneath their weight.

[Slide: Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: http://www.toddpresner.com/?p=7]

There are signs of change on the horizon. The enthusiasm for the digital recently evident at major subject conferences such as MLA and the American Historical Association has received a great deal of publicity, but perhaps this is just another example of the digital humanities being proclaimed yet again as the next big thing, as has happened many times in the past. More exciting is the work of new groups such as HASTAC, which has been very successful in attracting to the digital humanities large new communities of young scholars who are not only culturally and critically engaged but also emphatically wired. It is striking how many of these younger scholars reject the older institutional structures of the digital humanities and seek, as a recent twitter and blog discussion urges, to transform DH. The case for a new digital humanities is also proclaimed in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 drafted by Todd Presner, Jeff Schnapp and others, which declares that ‘The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative … the second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character’.

Despite these recent bursts of optimism, however, the record of the digital humanities remains unimpressive compared to the great success of media and culture studies. Part of the reason for this failure of the digital humanities is structural. The digital humanities has struggled to escape from what McGann describes as ‘a haphazard, inefficient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instruments, free-standing centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university’. Such structures, McGann observes, ‘are expensive to run and the vast majority of the faculty have no use for them’. The only answer is to move these various labs and centres into the main academic structure, and this is why the decision by King’s to establish its long-standing Centre for Computing in the Humanities as an academic department and to merge its Centre for e-Research into the Department is very important. A second problem is that the digital humanities has not generated an intellectual programme and, more particularly, a teaching agenda comparable to the work of (say) Thomas Tout in pioneering history programmes at the University of Manchester at the beginning of the twentieth century or Leavis and Richards in creating the study of English literature in Cambridge in the 1930s or more recently Richard Hoggart at Birmingham in developing cultural studies. Pioneers like Leavis or Hoggart did not lack ambition for their new subjects. Both Leavis and Hoggart felt that their new academic disciplines would generate major social and cultural reforms. In the digital humanities, we need to emulate the ambition of a Leavis or a Hoggart and create new teaching programmes articulating new intellectual and social aspirations. I hope that a priority for King’s over the next few years will be to develop a single honours undergraduate programme in the digital humanities which will enable us clearly to set out our overall intellectual agenda.

In America, the growth of digital humanities has often been linked to English Departments, and Matthew Kirschenbaum has given a fascinating account of ‘What Is Digital humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?’ In Britain, digital humanities has struggled to find a similar relationship with an academic discipline. It has often developed from libraries and information services and it is frequently seen as a support service. One of the things that I am proudest of in my career is the way in which I have moved between being a curator, an academic and a librarian. Museums, galleries, libraries and archives are just as important to cultural health as universities. Indeed, I have found my time as a curator and librarian consistently far more intellectually exciting and challenging than being an academic. Institutions such as the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the House of Lords Library contain communities of scholars who possess the skills and understanding that will be essential to our society in negotiating a new digital order. I am particularly delighted tonight that my audience includes scholars from all these institutions. Digital innovation is more likely to come from libraries and information services than university departments. One of the great tragedies of university life in recent years has been the way that a distinction has grown up between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ staff, so that for example research active staff in university libraries are no longer eligible for return to the REF, effectively excluding from the academy precisely those people who are most needed by it at the moment. With the collapse of American academic job structures in recent years, there has been a great deal of talk about ‘alternate academic careers for scholars’ or alt-ac as the twitter tag puts it. But I worry that this suggests that libraries or museums are a kind of second best to universities. Far from it - libraries, museums, galleries should be at the heart of the academy. An important current experiment in this area is at the National Library of Wales, where the Chair of Digital Collections of the University of Wales is based within the Library. I am delighted that the holder of this first digital humanities chair based in a cultural institution is Lorna Hughes, previously from King’s, and we look forward to working closely with Lorna.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto declares that ‘Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar’. I think that hits the nail on the head as to what the digital humanities could become. The process whereby the curator became disconnected from the academy is a mysterious one, and deserves more study. When Frederic Madden, the great Victorian manuscript scholar, was prevented by family circumstances from pursuing his academic studies at Oxford, an appointment as an Assistant Librarian at the British Museum placed him at the heart of Victorian literary and historical scholarship. Likewise, Antonio Panizzi’s appointment to the British Museum in 1831 was a definite step up from his uncertain position as a Professor of Italian at University College London. It is a paradox that, in the late nineteenth century when modern scholarship was stressing the importance of rigorous documentary and textual analysis, the relationship between academic scholars and curators became fatally weakened. By the 1920s Sir Walter Greg and others were lamenting the failure of universities to undertake systematic work in descriptive bibliography. A similar story can be told of palaeography. Although Maitland declared at the beginning of the twentieth century how all history has been rewritten because of the study of manuscripts in libraries, and notwithstanding the initiative of King’s College in appointing Hubert Hall of the Public Record Office to a Chair of Palaeography in 1919, provision for teaching in palaeography has always been patchy. Palaeography has found it difficult to escape the stigma of being an ancillary discipline – something to be got out of the way before one got on with the real research. I look forward to working with our newly appointed Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, Professor Julia Crick, in trying to address these issues.

Yet, despite the semi-detached relationship of disciplines like bibliography and palaeography with the academy, they should be recognized, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has reminded us, ‘ as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved’. Digital humanities offers a means by which disciplines such as bibliography, palaeography, diplomatic and museum studies can be brought back to the heart of the academy. Moreover, at the heart of these disciplines is the perception that our understanding of knowledge is inextricably bound up with the nature of the medium by which it is transmitted to us. The cultural threat of the digital lies in its commodification of knowledge – the way in which (as Robert Darnton has eloquently described in the case of the Google Book Settlement) knowledge is being turned into a monopoly generated and owned by private corporations. Yet this is only a risk if we see knowledge as data and forget its complex material base. The digital humanities should constantly engage with the materiality of knowledge. Kirschenbaum has forcefully reminded us how data is material, and in his grammatology of the hard drive reminds us how data is recorded on a funny whirring object which functions in a way very similar to a gramophone record. The study of such materialities of knowledge requires a much larger and more expansive engagement with science than if we simply see science as data crunching. By forming closer links with such curatorial disciplines as bibliography and palaeography, and connecting these with the theoretical insights of media and cultural studies, the digital humanities can reshape the academy and address those cultural imperatives which confront it.

[caption id="attachment_442" align="alignnone" width="621" caption="British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B.X, f. 54v"]

This digital image is now more than twenty years old, but for me it is an emblem of what the digital humanities can be. In 1731, the great manuscript library of Sir Robert Cotton was severely damaged in a fire. The library was afterwards one of the foundation collections of the British Museum and the unconserved fragments rescued from the fire were preserved in an attic room in the Museum. Sir Humphrey Davy was consulted as to means by which the fragments could be opened up for public use, and a large number of manuscripts were restored, but Frederic Madden was nevertheless horrified to discover in 1837 that thousands of burnt fragments like this one were still preserved in the attic. Madden began a conservation programme for this material which took over twenty years. Yet badly burnt fragments like this one, from an eleventh-century collection of Old English saints’ lives, remained illegible. By 1913, the American forensic scientist Elbridge Stein had demonstrated that ultra-violet light could be used to read damaged writing. In 1934, an ultra-violet cabinet, manufactured by a firm in which the Glasgow scientist Lord Kelvin was a partner, was installed in the British Museum and allowed documents such as this to be read. It was difficult however to get a stable image of the ultra-violet readings.

In the 1980s, my friend Professor Kevin Kiernan was working on these damaged Cotton manuscripts and wondered if there were other scientific methods available which could assist in this study. He was given advice on specialist imaging technologies by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found the medical imaging equipment could be used to create digital images. He longed to try this new equipment on the burnt Cotton manuscripts. Finally, in 1993, I was able to assist him in getting the necessary access and the medical imaging firm Roche Kontron provided a camera and operator. The result was this image of a phrase in the burnt fragment. Nervous about transporting this image back to the United States only on a hard disc, a second copy was sent by phone modem and as far as I am aware this was the first digital image of a medieval manuscript transmitted across the Atlantic. The initial image was flooded with the blue of the ultra-violet light and required extensive image processing by Kevin to reveal the remnants of Old English script.

This was an experiment which was dependent on collaboration between the scholar, curator, conservator, scientist and imaging technician. We didn’t know whether the imaging equipment would work. The methods we adopted were dependent on scientific advice and guidance. We didn’t know whether the resulting image would ever reach the United States. But we definitely produced important research results.

[Slide: Hyperspectral imaging of the Declaration of Independence: http://engt.co/cVQmFL]

The history of the Cotton collection has been one of engagement with cutting edge science, ever since Humphrey Davy was consulted about the conservation of the fragments. Since our 1993 experiment, digital imaging of manuscripts has become routine and images under special lighting conditions have been produced of manuscripts ranging from early papyri to the early biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, and the eighth-century Chad Gospels. It might be objected that such very specialist imaging techniques are only relevant to very early materials. This slide, however, shows hyperspectral imaging of a detail in one of the most celebrated modern documents, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. This imaging under a variety of light wavelengths by the Library of Congress has recently revealed how, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson first used the words ‘fellow subjects’ and gradually altered them to ‘fellow citizens’. A similar project at the National Library of Scotland has recovered the illegible text of David Livingstone’s diaries. There are countless further research projects in this field which require close collaboration between scientist, humanities scholar, curator and conservator. Thousands of manuscripts were damaged in the nineteenth century by the application of chemical solutions in an attempt to read faint text. The residue of these solutions means that we cannot use the fluorescent effects of ink at different light wavelengths to recover the text. To address this problem requires further research into the chemistry of the ink and manuscripts, which in turn requires closer collaboration with scientists. This is the kind of project which should be at the heart of the digital humanities. The Diamond Light Source, Britain’s national synchrotron science facility, has recently been used successfully to investigate objects ranging from 18^th century Spanish manuscripts to Catalan altarpieces. This engagement with ‘big science’ will eventually give birth to a ‘big humanities’ but in order to achieve this we need new forms of dialogue with our scientific colleagues. Such methods are of course familiar in archaeology and art history. The digital humanities must strive to make this creative engagement with cutting-edge science more widespread.

Again, it might be felt that this stress on the materiality of our cultural heritage ignores sound or vision, both of which have become much more readily accessible as a result of digital resources. However, a digital version of the music on a cylinder or record only tells part of the story. We cannot understand the cultural significance of an album like Sergeant Pepper by accessing it on iTunes. The cover of Sergeant Pepper was a celebrated artwork in its own right and even the inner sleeve containing the record added to the overall impact of the album. It is impossible to understand the order and structuring of the music of an album like Sergeant Pepper without knowing that an LP record had two sides, or that there was a lock groove at the end of each side

[Slide: Mitchell and Kenyon: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk]

Likewise, our understanding of film is inextricably bound up with its material basis. I was very lucky while I was at the University of Sheffield to be a member of a group of scholars who worked on the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, a remarkable archive of films of Edwardian life found in the basement of a shop in Blackburn. The restoration of these fragile nitrate films by the British Film Institute was itself a remarkable feat of scientific conservation. The sense we gain from the Mitchell and Kenyon films of proximity to everyday life was in part due to the fact that only the master negatives of the films survived. Most Edwardian films usually survive only in scratched and damaged copies which increase our sense of distance from the scenes depicted. The clarity of the Mitchell and Kenyon films change our relationship as viewers to these depictions of the past, in a fashion that raises questions about the relationship between viewer, cameraman, participant and medium.

[Slide: Data Sea: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns030/]

Coleridge’s The Eolian Harp demonstrates how an engagement with the latest scientist discussion can directly contribute to great art. Jeffrey Robinson has also shown us how scholarship can inspire poetry. Both Coleridge and Robinson remind us that, in this dialogue between humanities scholar, scientist and curator, the creative artist also has a vital role. Digital art is increasingly breaking down many familiar disciplinary barriers and it has a key role to play in developing the next wave of the digital humanities. I was fascinated on my arrival at King’s to learn about the collaborations between the artist Michael Takeo Magruder and members of the Department of Digital Humanities. Michael’s artwork, Data Sea, created by him for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and installed in Thinktank at the Birmingham Science Museum, uses astronomical databases to create a three-dimensional artwork. Michael’s associates in creating this artwork were Drew Baker, for the 3D visualisations, and an astrophysicist, Johanna Jarvis. This is the kind of collaboration which would have delighted Coleridge, and it makes one think of how those vast data flows produced by the Square Kilometre Array may also provide material for artists.

[Slide: Abbey Theatre project: http://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/posts/visualisation]

Visualisation techniques may seem like an escape from the material, but they are a powerful way of reengaging with a lost materiality. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin was destroyed by fire in 1951, but a virtual reconstruction by DDH’s Hugh Denard with colleagues from Trinity College Dublin enable the nature of the Abbey as a performance space to be explored and events such as the riot at the first performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to be investigated in their material context.

[Slide: Oplontis: http://www.skenographia.cch.kcl.ac.uk/oplontis/index.html]

Visualisation is thus intimately bound up with the exploration of lost materialities and the recreation of old cultural spaces. An engagement between the virtual and the material is at the heart of this reconstruction by DDH’s Martin Blazeby. It shows a fresco from a Roman villa at Oplontis near Pompeii, and is one of a hundred rooms reconstructed in this way. On the left, you can see the surviving fragments of the fresco, and on the right its reconstruction by Martin.

[Slide: Vanishing Points: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/sl005/]

The work in reconstructing the lost villa at Oplontis has itself become the basis for an artwork by Michael Magruder and Hugh Denard called Vanishing Points which was commissioned for the 2010 Digital Humanities conference and was displayed in the Great Hall here in King’s.

In this and other examples I have shown you, science is used to explore the materiality of our engagement with the past and the nature of our achievements as human beings, thereby producing new art. This is surely the stuff of the ‘universal science’ which Coleridge sought to recreate. Such a new conjunction of scientist, curator, humanist and artist is what the digital humanities must strive to achieve. It is the only way of ensuring that we do not lose our souls in a world of data.

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