A few years ago I used to work at several college and departmental libraries at the University of Cambridge. One of the tasks which library staff regularly had to undertake was to cross reference the latest copies of all relevant reading lists with their collections, to ensure that they had copies of all the books that their students and staff needed.

When I was there, the libraries would print out copies of the PDF reading lists published by the departments and then go through each list with a pen or pencil, searching for each item in the catalogue and then ticking it off if they had it. Given that there are over 100 libraries at the university and over 100 faculties and departments which produce reading lists, that adds up to a lot of library staff time.

While I was there I volunteered to try to devise a way to make it easy for departments to create machine readable reading lists, which would mean that the process of cross-referencing them with library information systems could be automated. Then librarians could spend more time doing things that computers couldn’t do – like getting to know their users and their collections.

This received a luke-warm reception from other librarians I spoke to. I had an extended correspondence about this with a systems librarian at the Cambridge University Library, who was keen but busy. I also wanted to link to digital copies of texts which had entered the public domain – either from within the library catalogue or via an ancillary service – but curating and promoting access to freely available online resources (as opposed to subscription based resources) was not considered to be part of the librarian’s role.

Now, years later, I’m very keen to make it easy for people to create and work with machine readable reading lists using TEXTUS, an open source platform for working with collections of texts which is currently being funded by JISC. In particular I’d like to pilot this with OpenPhilosophy.org, to try to create more machine readable versions of reading lists from philosophy departments in the UK.

In this first instance, this would enable students and staff to easily find freely available public domain works which they could read on their computer or device, annotate and print out. In the future, with the help of some clever scripts, it would enable them to find copies of key texts in their local library, or in other libraries. In both cases lecturers could provide students with a single URL for their reading list, which would help them to find copies of the works they need that are scattered in a variety of digital and physical locations.

To make this happen I’d propose working with students and staff in philosophy departments to create machine readable versions of their reading lists. Once we have these, we can start to match them to digital copies and experiment with scripts to run against university library information systems. If you’d like to participate in this as a student, lecturer, or librarian, or if you’re just generally interested in making this happen – please do drop me a note.

Work is now underway on OpenPhilosophy.org, a website that will enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create bibliographies of public domain philosophy texts.

Today we did some basic mockups for what different pages on the site might look like. Here’s a quick look.

Front page

• Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, login and register on top right.
• Top section: Search and browse by author, language and period on left. Beautiful image on right.
• Middle panels: For featured content: e.g. featured texts, featured authors, and active transcription projects.

Text page

• Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, login and register on top right.
• Page body: Formatted text.
• Left hand navigation: Section markers with options to cite section or add section to a list.
• Right hand navigation: Options to add to list, toggle annotations, export (in a variety of formats, including nice PDF edition for print), cite (to get a stable URI for the text or a clipboard ready citation in a variety of common formats), toggle page numbers.
• Text highlight: Options to annotate, cite, and favourite.

List page

• Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, login and register on top right.
• Page body: Title of list. Brief description of list. Optional headings and subheadings. List item, with options to go to full text, add to list, or cite. Optional comment on list item (for annotated bibliographies).
• Right hand navigation: Export in a variety of formats. Sharing options. Ordering options (alphabetically, chronologically, …).

Author page

• Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, login and register on top right.
• Page body: Author name. Author dates. Drop-down menu to sort chronologically or alphabetically. List of items. Options to view full text, add to list, cite, or delete (if an administrator) for each item.
• Right hand navigation: Featured lists with works by this author, e.g. annotated bibliographies, recommended reading lists, etc.

User page

• Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, login and register on top right.
• Page body: User name. User picture. Affiliation, website and contact details. Groups of which user is an administrator. Activity feed, including transcriptions, annotations and uploads.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can request an invite to test the project when it is ready, join the public open-philosophy discussion list and/or follow @OpenPhilosophy on Twitter.

There is an unknown – but probably shockingly large – number of public domain texts on the web. Many of these could be of value to students and scholars. Lots of digital texts have page numbers which can be straightforwardly referenced in papers and publications. For example the journal article, the scanned monograph, born digital word processing documents, and so on. But how should we cite large public domain texts without pages or page numbers? Let’s call this the ‘citation conundrum’.

First of all, we might wonder about the long term prospects of the page. Usually physical books divide texts into pages more or less arbitrarily. Many document formats divide texts into pages, presumably partly so that they can be easily printed. Many digital devices enable dynamic formatting where the page divisions change with with the size of the font. Should we accept that page numbers are a thing of the past, a convenient metaphor, but one which will not be with us for much longer?

Perhaps in the future we’ll cite line numbers? Perhaps we’ll just search for the passage we’re after? Perhaps the whole textual estate of humankind will be retrofitted with hyperlinks? Perhaps we’ll have algorithms to help us identify the referents of references which no longer refer, obscure relics from a barely recognisable age when people had to butcher trees to capture their thoughts.

Perhaps to all these perhapses. But what until then? Until then people who work with public domain digital texts need to be able to find and refer to passages within them, in adherence with established stylistic principles, practises and standards. I can think of two options.

Firstly we can eschew page numbers in favour of other referential mechanisms. Technically, providing a URL with a date of access is sufficient. The MLA also provides guidance on citing ‘digital files’, which include PDFs, word processor documents, scanned images and so on (Rule 5.7.18). Presumably anyone who wants to put a passage into context can do a plain text search. Or we can use anchors or line numbers to point to precise parts. In this scenario the page number is replaced with a (hopefully) persistent URL.

Secondly we could introduce new (arbitrary) page numbers, or use the page numbers of some (arbitrary) public domain edition of the work we want to cite. Many of the works available on Wikisource have had their page numbers stripped out, and Project Gutenberg has an explicit policy to remove them. So either we can rather laboriously re-insert page numbers from some printed edition, or generate an arbitrarily paginated digital edition (as a digital file, via URL) which can be cited.

I’m very keen to learn more about what other have said, thought or done about this – partly so we can bear this in mind when building TEXTUS and OpenPhilosophy.org. Do you know of an interesting approach, paper, standard, or plugin? If so please do leave a comment below.

A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain.

I’m very excited to say that the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK. The project will be a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, the University of Oxford and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It will also involve students and staff at other institutions in the UK and further afield.

The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts. TEXTUS will power OpenPhilosophy.org. The platform will be developed with input from students and staff who will be using OpenPhilosophy.org in their teaching and research. It will have a strong emphasis on creating something beautiful, simple, intuitive and user-centric.

It will benefit from the wisdom of a distinguished Advisory Board of philosophy professors and digital humanities experts, which currently includes:

• Frederick Beiser, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University
• Tobias Blanke, Head of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London
• David Bourget, Director of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London
• Andrew Bowie, Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Dan Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
• Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at New School for Social Research, New York and Editor of The Stone philosophy forum at the New York Times
• Manuel Dries, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oxford
• Christian J. Emden, Associate Professor in German Studies at Rice University
• Stefan Gradmann, Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Brown University
• Derek Matravers, Professor in Philosophy at the Open University
• Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and Co-founder of the Philosophy Bites podcast

In the first phase of the project we will be developing a prototype of the TEXTUS platform, and sourcing and selecting public domain philosophical texts to include in OpenPhilosophy.org.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop, you can request an invite to test the project when it is ready. If you’d like to come and help out, you are warmly invited to join us on the public open-philosophy discussion list. You can also follow @OpenPhilosophy on Twitter.

Pictures of Roman Ondák’s “Table” (Berlin, 2010) by Marc Wathieu, CC-BY.

TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and annotate texts, and to manage associated bibliographic data.

Here’s the rationale:

The combination of freely available digital copies of public domain works, open bibliographic data and open source tools has the potential to revolutionise research in the humanities. However there are currently numerous obstacles which mean that they are often under-utilised by scholars and students in teaching and research:

• From classic literary and cultural works, to letters, drafts, notes, and other historical documents, there is a huge amount of freely available public domain material that is highly relevant to scholars and students engaged in research in the humanities. But these works can be difficult to find, difficult to work with, and works by a given author may be scattered in a variety of locations. Search results may be confusing or unclear. Automated Optical Character Recognition of texts may be inaccurate or incomplete. The metadata for the work for may be unclear and the provenance and rights status for a given digital edition may be unknown. It is not always clear how to cite passages from digital editions of public domain works.
• Over the past few years, libraries and other cultural heritage organisations have been releasing open data about works they hold. This has the potential to be a rich resource for scholars interested in building scholarly bibliographies and working with large collections of texts. While there are a growing number of tools and services for working with bibliographic data, many researchers may not know how to use these, and online bibliographies may not link through to digital copies of public domain works which are available online.
• There are a growing number of open source tools for transcribing, translating and annotating texts. However many of these are one off projects and it may not be clear how to deploy the tools in relation to a given text or collection of texts.

Here’s what it would do:

The TEXTUS platform will enable users to:

• Transcribe texts from images, PDFs or other non-machine readable sources.
• View texts and translations side by side – and create new translations of texts for use in teaching or research.
• Annotate texts, and share annotations with groups of users, or with the public.
• Curate, share and export collections of bibliographic metadata (scholarly references), including metadata associated with texts published on the platform.

Here’s a peek under the hood:

TEXTUS builds on and utilises existing best of breed open source components and software packages such as:

• Annotator – an open-source Javascript tool to enable annotations to be added to any webpage
• Bibserver – which includes numerous tools, services and standards for working with bibliographic metadata
• Open Literature – which powers OpenShakespeare, OpenMilton and other sites
• Public Domain Works – a nascent directory of works which have entered the public domain in different countries around the world
• Scripto – an open source tool that enables users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects
• WordPress – due to its popularity, ease of use, and extensive plugin system, TEXTUS will use WordPress as its main CMS

If you’re interested, you can join discussion on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-humanities mailing list.

But how can we use pictures to represent processes? Otto and Marie Neurath’s Isotype Institute from the 1940s was interested in using pictures to represent processes as well as numbers. For example, here’s one showing how Reuters’ news editorial process works:

Here’s a few more which aim to compare various aspects of political systems in different countries:

Here’s another much more recent example showing how laws are passed in the US, which was a winner of the Sunlight Labs Design for America competition:

I’d love to see more information graphics that helped people to understand official processes. For example:

• Local decision making
• How lobbying works
• How elections work – from ballot box to outcome
• Legal processes in particular areas – e.g. immigration
• International organisations – e.g. the UN security council
• Public finance – from taxation to budgeting to expenditure
• Public procurement

One could imagine that graphical representations of an official process could have common elements that could be used to represent similar processes in other countries – for example icons to represent voters, lobbyists, political representatives, laws, decisions, revisions, budgets, and so on.

One could do something like the Noun Project‘s Iconathon aimed at building a set of icons to help to represent official processes. The Iconathon 2011 produced a suite of collaboratively designed new civic symbols which anyone is free to use:

I’m sure Marie and Otto Neurath, who pioneered the Isotype picture language (International System of TYpographic Picture Education) would heartily approve. For comparison, here are some of the Isotype designs created by Gerd Arntz, who produced over 4000 symbols for the Isotype picture language:

For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts.

The project could include:

• A collection of public domain philosophical texts, in their original languages. This would include so called ‘minor’ figures as well as well known thinkers. The project would bring together texts from multiple online sources – from projects like Europeana, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons, to smaller online collections from libraries, archives, academic departments or individual scholars. Every edition would be rights cleared to check that it could be freely redistributed, and would be made available either under an open license, with a rights waiver or a public domain dedication.
• Translations of public domain philosophical texts, including historical translations which have entered the public domain, and more recent translations which have been released under an open license.
• Ability to lay out original texts and translations side by side – including the ability to create new translations, and to line up corresponding sections of the text.
• Ability to annotate texts, including private annotations, annotations shared with specific users or groups of users, and public annotations. This could be done using the Annotator tool.
• Ability to add and edit texts, e.g. by uploading or by importing via a URL for a text file (such as a URL from Project Gutenberg). Also ability to edit texts and track changes.
• Ability to be notified of new texts that might be of interest to you – e.g. by subscribing to certain philosophers.
• Stable URLs to cite texts and or sections of texts – including guidance on how to do this (e.g. automatically generating citation text to copy and paste in a variety of common formats).

The project could also include a basic interface for exploring and editing structured data on philosophers and philosophical works:

• Structured bibliographic data on public domain philosophical works – including title, year, publisher, publisher location, and so on. Ability to make lists of different works for different purposes, and to export bibliographic data in a variety of formats (building on existing work in this area – such as Bibliographica and related projects).
• Structured data on secondary texts, such as articles, monographs, etc. This would enable users to browse secondary works about a given text. One could conceivably show which works discuss or allude to a given section of a primary text.
• Structured data on the biographies of philosophers – including birth and death dates and other notable biographical and historical events. This could be combined with bibliographic data to give a basic sense of historical context to the texts.

Other things might include:

• User profiles – to enable people to display their affiliation and interests, and to be able to get in touch with other users who are interested in similar topics.
• Audio version of philosophical texts – such as from Librivox.
• Links to open access journal articles.
• Images and other media related to philosophy.
• Links to Wikipedia articles and other introductory material.
• Educational resources and other material that could be useful in a teaching/learning context – e.g. lecture notes, slide decks or recordings of lectures.

While there are lots of (more or less ambitious!) ideas above, the key thing would be to develop the project in conjunction with end users in philosophy departments, including undergraduate students and researchers. Having something simple that could be easily used and adopted by people who are teaching, studying or researching philosophy or other humanities disciplines would be more important that something cutting edge and experimental but less usable. Hence it would be really important to have a good, intuitive user interface and lots of ongoing feedback from users.

What do you think? Interested in helping out? Know of existing work that we could build on (e.g. bits of code or collections of texts)? Please do leave a comment below, join discussion on the open-humanities mailing list or send me an email!

If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with an internet connection has access to a vast wealth of cultural and historical material: novels and poems, essays and manifestos, constitutions and scriptures.

As well as accessing and sharing this material, the law says that anyone can translate and republish works which have entered the public domain. But translations constitute new creative works and are hence covered by copyright and related rights, which means that by default they cannot be shared online.

This is, of course, perfectly understandable. There is money to be made from producing new translations of classic works, which means publishers and translators are incentivised to assert their rights. Literary translation is a fine art: translators must unpick constellations of connotation and navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of fidelity and perspicuity as they reconstitute the work they are translating into its target language. It is natural to reward translators in the same manner we reward authors of original texts – for translations often are new literary works. Things like Seamus Heaney’s rendering of Beowulf, Baudelaire’s Edgar Allen Poe, or Schegel’s Shakespeare testify to this. So if I want to read a work in a language that I do not understand, I must go to a bookshop and buy a new translation. Such is life.

But wouldn’t it be nice if some new translations of public domain texts were freely available for people to read online? If the commercial translations were complemented with a stronger culture of translators sharing the fruits of their labour?

One could imagine this could be encouraged with a mixture of stronger norms and alternative incentives. For example, students could be encouraged to share translations made during the course of their studies. There could be more avenues for scholars and professional translators to publish works which they are unlikely to get a contract to publish or derive income from, such as shorter or more obscure works. And there could be awards, stipends or bursary funds for outstanding translations of public domain works which were freely published on the web.

At the Public Domain Review we’ve been thinking about how a literary translation fund for public domain texts might work. We’re currently thinking:

• There could be an initial focus on short works (e.g. under 10,000 words), with a token stipend or cash prize to recognise outstanding translations.
• It could be overseen by an advisory group of writers, scholars, translators, publishers and critics – who would help to give direction and focus to the fund, evaluate submissions and publicise it.
• Translations would be published under a Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license and uploaded to the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikisource.
• It could be financially supported by a mixture of cultural and academic funding bodies and augmented with sponsorship from the private sector (publishers, literary publications, technology companies, etc).

We’d like to try and launch a small fund to do this to coincide with Public Domain Day 2012. Do you have thoughts about how this could work? Know of anything like it that already exists? Or know people or bodies who might be interested in supporting this? If you have any cunning ideas, please do send me a message or leave a comment below!

In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles?

Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to understand them and their works better. For example, I may notice a certain idea or metaphor in a text, which reminds me of something someone else has written a hundred years before. Is it possible they knew about the earlier text? Is there evidence they were acquainted with it (directly or indirectly)? Similarly I may notice something in a text which reminds me of something which somebody said much later. Is there any evidence of influence? Is a comparison anachronistic? Did the author of the passage I’m reading know about another influential essay or tract on the same topic pubished a couple of decades earlier? Knowing what someone read gives us a sense of where they are coming from, gives us a sense of the contours of what Gadamer would call their Horizont, their ‘horizon’.

Large scale collaborative research in the humanities does not always make sense. Many academics may feel that they scarcely have time apart from teaching and admin to do their own research (writing books, etc), let alone big research projects with people with whom they do not know, and whose work may be only approximately or tangentially related to their own. Certainly people sitting on research funding councils and so on should be careful not to unreflectingly promote collaborative research models in arts and humanities disciplines from other research areas, for example in the sciences, where large scale collaboration is ubiquitous or necessary. That said, I do think that a lot of meta level activities – such as creating and maintaining comprehensive bibliographies – are more suited to being undertaken by large communities of scholars working in collaboration, rather than by lone experts in isolation. Mapping influence in intellectual history is arguably an endeavour where it is desirable to have as much input as possible from as many pairs of eyes as possible.

How might we get started? How can we enable collaboration between scholars to start systematically mapping influence between different writers? To start with we have an increasing amount of freely reusable information about authors and works, e.g. open data from the British Library, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. These can often tell us who wrote what, and the dates of publication of work, and the birth/death dates of authors. Building on this, we could create a basic tool which enable scholars to create new relations between these basic elements, and to explore those relations.

Ideally one would want to have a minimal number of these relations, and for each of these to be as well formed and unambiguous as possible, and each able to be substantiated with some kind of textual reference. E.g. rather than having ‘author X was influenced by author Y’ or ‘author X was aware of author Y’ one would want to break these down into very simple, concrete things like:

• Work A quotes from Work B
• Work A cites Work B
• Work A alludes to author X
• etc

One could even imagine using other sources (library lending data, lecture lists, reading lists, catalogues, letters, notes and other sources) to try to systematically establish things like:

• Author X corresponded with author Y
• Author X met author Y
• Author X was taught by author Y
• Author X attended lectures on author Y
• Author X possessed a copy of work A
• Author X borrowed book A from a library
• etc

This kind of tool would have to be used with a good measure of caution, to ensure one does not:

• Shoehorn one’s interpretation of influence into a certain pre-defined (and to a certain degree, arbitrary) scheme. Hence the first cluster of relations may be more solid start than the second, which are a bit more tentative.
• Take this kind of data as anything other than a very rough guide, an initial basic reference pointing scholars to further sources and citations, which should be interpreted carefully. As I blogged about recently , I don’t think guidance from digital tools will replace immersion in a given domain any time soon!

The image above is from Timothy Stotz, and shows teacher-student relationships between artists, 1435-1935

Of course new technologies may change our modus operandi, and may alter the kinds of research we do. For example the (arguably disproportionate) dominance of the monograph and the article as the sole legitimate ‘units’ of contribution to scholarship in the humanities, may be challenged as digital tools make it easier to share annotations and micro observations, and to create vibrant, dynamic, living conversations around texts and topics. Technology will make it easier for us to traffic in small things like footnotes, asides, linkages, and momentary reflections in addition to the big things, like five-hundred page theses or multi-volume Festschriften.

But I strongly suspect that many of the core virtues of scholarship will remain the same. We may have tools and technologies to help us out with things which were previously a lot more laborious such as creating comprehensive concordances, searching for the occurrence of a certain name in literary Nachlässe, collaborating more easily and more effectively and so on. Lone researchers will be able to do things which perhaps in the past could only be undertaken by large teams of researchers over decades. But these tools and technologies will predominantly be there to support the creation of interesting insights and interpretations, hypotheses and meditations, to support scholars in continuing doing things which they have been doing for centuries.

If we can compare scholarship to walking around in the countryside, then perhaps digital tools are like satellite navigation systems. They can help us plan routes and get a big picture of where we are, but they are no substitute for direct acquaintance, or years of immersion. A good scholar will still have an intimate knowledge of the landscape: which part of the river dries out in the summer, the way that that tree has grown over time, where that stile crosses the path, the way to lift the gate on its hinge to make it turn more easily, the way the path slopes down the hill, and so forth.