Out of morbid curiosity I had wanted to read an article written about a project that I had worked on, Early English Books Online (EEBO), and this article by Diana Kichuk explores the layers of remediation in the project's production of its digital archives of Early English Books. As Kichuk defines it, remediation is the "re-presentation of one medium in another" (2) as well as the "appropriation or re-purposing of old media in new media" (a definition she attributes to R. Grusin and J.D. Bolter's Remediation: Understanding New Media [2000]). EEBO provides an interesting case study because its associated projects involve several levels of remediation.
EEBO consists of an archive of images of over 100, 000 books printed in English between 1473-1700, and EEBO-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP)--the part of the project that I worked for--now offers hand-keyed searchable, reading texts for 25,000 of these titles. Access in both cases is through individual or institutional subscription. The project entails several levels of remediation. The majority of the images of the Early English books come from the Early English Books microfilm project, which was began in the mid-1930s to preserve copies of Britain's important early books, and the project continued in the years following the Second World War. Beginning in 1998, these microfilms were then digitized to produce EEBO's digital archive of images. The clear reading texts produced by EEBO-TCP are drawn from human transcriptions the digitized microfilm images. Accordingly, Kichuk asserts that EEBO is a surrogate of a surrogate, with remediation acting like a "distorting lens or opaque veil through which the scholar 'sees' the mediated Early English book" (6). Though Kichuk states that the collection is of "formidable scholarly valuable," her article emphasizes the need to recognize that that EEBO does not offer an exact copy of the original and that scholars must be better aware of the limitations entailed in remediation.
Kichuk sees ProQuest's decision to digitize the microfilm facsimiles rather than print copies as ultimately wise: digitizing print copies that it did not own would have been prohibitively expensive and slow. Moreover, the technological limitations present at the time the project was initiated would likely have meant that the original books would have to be dis-bound to be scanned, thus endangering the original artifacts.
There are, however, important sacrifices associated with this decision, resulting in content amputation and page distortion, among other things. The EEB microfilms generally do not include the endpapers or bindings of the books, and the pages were often cropped, resulting both in the loss of some marginalia and the misrepresentation of the physicality of the original book. The page curvature resulting from open book photography generates distortions in font appearance and darkens the gutters, affecting both legibility and accuracy of representation. Also, the resolution used by the EEB microfilms was too low for grayscale capture, so the images are bi-tonal black and white, which makes capturing any traces of color in the original works near impossible. Also, in the transition from microfilm to digital image, EEBO again sacrificed detail by further lowering its image resolution in order to ensure acceptable download transmission rates (the images are 440 PPI [pixels per inch], too low for a preservation quality facsimile).
(This figure, taken from the EEBO homepage (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/eebo_demo11_tcp.htm) offers a sample of what the EEBO interface and text images look like.)As a digital codex, Kichuk notes that the project does not accurately reflect both the text and the physicality of the original--to achieve this would require applying the latest imaging technologies to the original books. It would be a different project carried out at a different time. In terms of improvements though, Kichuk would like EEBO (and the scholars who use it) to be more conscious of and clear about the loss remediation entails. She argues for the vendor guard to against claims of authenticity and identical-ness. She would also like to see EEBO include duplicate copies, which would be of use to bibliographers (this seems to me a slightly odd request given that EEBO fulfills so little of a bibliographer's needs).
Though I think the issues of remediation are fascinating, the questions that EEBO and Kichuk's article leave me with are ones about what it is we want from our digital surrogates. EEBO is a hugely important source of access to the content of rare early printed books that most users would never have the opportunity to access otherwise. EEBO-TCP adds further value by allowing readers to engage in full-text searches across over 25,000 titles. This said, it is not as useful a resource if you are interested in thinking about the book as object. Its images are not high-quality representations and it has only limited functionality to support this type of investigation. (For example, I had a friend who was interested in using EEBO to study investigate the significance of when blackletter was used as opposed to roman or italic fonts in early English books. Since EEBO-TCP doesn't specify font-type in its encoding and only records emphasis by noting the distinction between the normative font for the book and any "highlighted" font by using
tags, there's simply no way of searching for this short of examining each text.)I would argue, however, that in many cases consulting EEBO could help someone in determining which books to examine in person.
Ultimately, reading about EEBO foregrounds important questions about how we should prioritize financial feasibility, technical limitations, functionality, and speed of collection development in generating digital libraries and large curated collections. Though EEBO is more about access than preservation, the issues it raises overlap at least partially with the discussion of essential elements in this week's reading (Harvey 16). Though Ross Harvey's context is somewhat different, his question: "Is the value tied to the way the material looks? (Would it be lost or significantly degraded if the material looked different?)" remains instructive in thinking about EEBO. In developing such projects, we must decide which features of the original are most important to capture and at what cost, while keeping in mind that remediation entails both loss and gain.
Ultimately, reading about EEBO foregrounds important questions about how we should prioritize financial feasibility, technical limitations, functionality, and speed of collection development in generating digital libraries and large curated collections. Though EEBO is more about access than preservation, the issues it raises overlap at least partially with the discussion of essential elements in this week's reading (Harvey 16). Though Ross Harvey's context is somewhat different, his question: "Is the value tied to the way the material looks? (Would it be lost or significantly degraded if the material looked different?)" remains instructive in thinking about EEBO. In developing such projects, we must decide which features of the original are most important to capture and at what cost, while keeping in mind that remediation entails both loss and gain.
