Humanities Program Spotlight:

From Page to Screen: Electronic Texts and Digital Libraries

A legal battle has erupted over Google's efforts to scan the collections of The New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and Stanford University. Focusing on the economics of publishing, media coverage of the debate has said relatively little about the cultural and educational issues involved in the mass migration of text from the printed page to the computer screen. To ensure that our students understand those issues, Associate Professor H. Lewis Ulman (English) regularly teaches courses in which students learn to evaluate and create electronic editions of manuscript and print materials, thus preparing them to read online texts critically and to help shape the design of new electronic texts and digital libraries.

In a recent book about electronic texts, Jerome McGann writes, "[W]e stand on the edge of a period that will see the complete editorial transformation of our inherited cultural archive" (Radiant Textuality 18). Inevitably, more and more people will read and study materials in our print and manuscript archives online. The Library of Congress, our national print archive, has already launched an online American Memory Project, and it has proposed a World Digital Library.

The humanities play a key role in ensuring that online texts meet the needs of serious readers and in helping a generation of readers who have grown up with computers to read and create electronic texts critically. Working in cooperation with OSU's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, students in a recent section of Professor Ulman's class created "My Dear Elizabeth: Letters from Sophia Peabody Hawthorne to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, ca. 1837–1868," an electronic edition of five previously unpublished letters written by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne—Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife—to her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. This edition combines images of the manuscript pages with encoded transcripts of the text, allowing readers to choose various "views" of each letter, including a familiar page layout; a view that reveals the line breaks, corrections, and various other features of the manuscripts; and a side-by-side view of the text and page images.

By increasing awareness of, and access to, the Hawthorne letters, the edition has already aided scholarly research that will be published in two forthcoming books: Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier's edited collection of essays, Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (University of Iowa Press, 2006), and Susan K. Williams's Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850-1900 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). You can read and learn more about the Hawthorne letters online at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/ulman1/Sophia_Hawthorne_Letters/