Book History: Digital Book History

Our project brings together science, technology and heritage by providing virtual surrogates for fragile and inaccessible objects. We work with archivists, conservators and other members of the heritage industry to scan and then digitally build objects that are would otherwise be unavailable because of their deteriorated physical condition.

The subject of this website is a manuscript of extraordinary importance to the history of science, the Archimedes Palimpsest. This thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written several centuries earlier still. These erased texts include two treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else, The Method and Stomachion. The manuscript sold at auction to a private collector on the 29th October 1998. The owner deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, a few months later. Since that date the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging and scholarship, in order to better read the texts. The Archimedes Palimpsest project, as it is called, has shed new light on Archimedes and revealed new texts from the ancient world. These new texts include speeches by an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C. called Hyperides, and a third century A.D. commentary on Aristotle’s Categories.

Find unique copies of 19th- and early 20th-century books on library shelves. Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them in the stacks of academic libraries. Together we can find out more about what books were and how they were used by their original owners, while also proving the value of maintaining rich print collections in our libraries.

This website offers a collection of resources for the study of comedias sueltas, Spanish plays published in inexpensive quarto editions from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It is aimed at scholars engaged in research on Spanish theater, on book history, and on print culture in Iberia before the machine press period.

EBBA is the most ambitious project to date of the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. EBBA has made broadside ballads from many different holdings easily and fully accessible: gathered together on one site as ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, text transcriptions, and recordings, and extensively catalogued. All ballads can be viewed via a basic search (using the magnifying glass at the top right of the window) and robust advanced search functions.

The goal of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a database to track the circulation of printed "Jewish books" (in Hebrew, other Jewish languages, and books in Latin and non-Jewish vernaculars with Judaica contents). Much information about the movement of early printed books exists, but in scattered form: individual copies, catalogs from libraries and booksellers, estate inventories, subscription lists, and other kinds of archival documents. All of these individual pieces of data can connect to each other in order to build up a composite view of the movement of Jewish texts and ideas from place to place and across time.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, aiming to unite online for the first time the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers, and thereby document their works, life, and thought, including the development of many outstanding pieces of English literature and political philosophy.

A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees.

Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original artist’s book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; an emulation of Gibson’s included poem in its original born-and-die-digital form (it ran from a diskette once before an encryption-like effect made the diskette unrunnable); analysis of the code on the diskette resulting from a 2012 hacker’s contest; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages; full-text scholarly essays and interviews; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum.

The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a research resource for electronic literature and it is open for new contributions and submissions. It provides cross-referenced, contextualized information about authors, creative works, critical writing, platforms, and practices. Current contributors should log in to the knowledge base to enter new records.

VisColl (Collation Visualization) is a system for modeling and visualizing the physical collation of medieval manuscript codices. The Viscoll development team is centered at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is made possible through the support of SIMS. We are currently working on VisColl 2.0, to launch in Spring 2021.

Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users.

With Manifold, you can publish dynamic digital texts with rich media support, powerful annotation tools, and robust community dialogue. Manifold transforms scholarly publications into living digital works. This CUNY installation serves as a free publishing platform for the CUNY community, where you can create projects to house either your own scholarship or custom classroom versions of texts and textbooks that are openly licensed or in the public domain.

An open-source DH platform for open-access workspaces, projects, collaborations, and scholarly publications. The premise of DM is simple: if you have a collection of digital images and texts, then you should be able to develop a project where you can identify specific moments on these images and texts, annotate them as much as you want, link them together, generate searchable content, collaborate with your friends, and publish your work online for others to see and share.
DM was developed on the Heroku cloud-server platform, where installation and administration is straightforward, after which developing individual projects requires no specific IT expertise.

Omeka is a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections. As a web application, it allows users to publish and exhibit cultural heritage objects, and extend its functionality with themes and plugins