In an exciting turn of events, Adam Hooks and I are organizing the slate of SHARP panels at RSA for the 2014 meeting in New York. If you’ve been following Adam’s “breaking things apart” series on his blog and if you’ve seen my twitter musings recently, you won’t be surprised to learn that the theme we’re working with is fragmentation and gathering. Read our call for papers below, share it with anyone you think might be interested, and consider sending us your submissions!

Call for Papers: SHARP @ RSA 2014

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) will sponsor a series of panels at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in New York City, 27-29 March 2014. SHARP @ RSA brings together scholars working on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, and reception of manuscript and print and their digital mediation.

For the 2014 conference, we are soliciting papers that address the issues of fragmentation and gathering, broadly conceived, in early modern English and/or Continental books and manuscripts. We invite submissions that consider one or more of the following topics:

1. Fragments: How does the production and survival of texts as discrete material objects shape our understanding and use of them? We might think of fragments in terms of how texts were made (pieces of type, leaves of paper) or in terms of how they are experienced today (surviving fragments).
2. Gatherings: How does the grouping of discrete objects into collections of more or less coherence shape our understanding and use of textual objects? Gathering might take the form of the minute to large scale (quires of paper, sammelband, libraries).
3. Fragments and Gatherings: How do fragments turn into gatherings? When do gatherings break down into fragments? What sort of study of book history and material textuality is engendered by these moves?

Please send a 150-word abstract and a one-page CV to Adam Hooks (adam-hooks@uiowa.edu) and Sarah Werner (swerner@folger.edu) by June 7th (note that this is earlier than the RSA’s own deadline).

All participants must be current members of both RSA and SHARP.

For details of RSA 2014, see http://www.rsa.org/?page=2014NewYork. For more information on SHARP, see http://www.sharpweb.org/

Over at The Collation last week, I wrote a blog post providing a quick explanation for what might be gained from looking at multiple copies of digital facsimiles of the First Folio and linking to the eight copies I’ve found. Mostly what I was interested in there was the availability of such things and a taste of the joys of copy-specific reading. Here I want to look at what actually matters to me a bit more: the usability of such resources. It should be perfectly clear, but I’m going to say it anyway, just to be safe. This is my personal site and I am not representing the Folger’s point of view here, only my own as a user of such resources.

Before I look at specific examples, here’s what I want as a scholar:

• high-resolution cover-to-cover images, zoomable to, say, larger-than-life size with full clarity so that I can pick out details on pieces of type;
• choice between viewing as pages and viewing as a book with two-page spreads that, ideally, convey the depth of the book and the shifting balance of pages as you move through it so that I know where in the volume I am;
• navigation synced to plays (with modern acts and scene divisions), to signature marks, and to page numbers so that I can easily find my way to wherever I want;
• cataloging information that tells me something about the copy I’m looking at; at a minimum, shelfmark and identification of which pages are not original F1 leaves, but preferably including information about provenance, binding, marginalia, uncorrected pages, and other copy-specific details;
• cataloging information that tells me something about the digital surrogate I’m looking at; at a minimum, when it was built and who built it;
• a CC-NC or, even better, a CC-BY license that will allow for downloading and reusing at a minimum specific images and, preferably, the entire work, so that I can share it in my teaching and scholarship and so that I can compare multiple copies;
• and since I’m dreaming here, the ability to read offline in a friendly interface so that I can access it even when I’m (gasp!) without a good internet connection;
• and the ability to add my own annotations, so that I can keep track of what I’m finding.

Well. That’s not asking for much. Maybe someday all my desires will be met, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet. And it won’t happen unless we start advocating for what we need in these resources. (My focus here is on the First Folio, but my points hold for any digitized book and, to a slightly lesser degree, to any digitized textual work. We all need transparent records, digital copies that are available to reuse, and high-resolution images that convey not only the words on the item but the physical manifestation of that item.)

So in the spirit of helpful critique, here’s how the 8 copies currently available for free online stack up. (N.b. I’ve linked to catalog records where I can find them in the headlines. West numbers refer to the number given the copies in Anthony James West’s census of First Folios.¹ Full descriptions of all these copies can be found in West and Rasmussen’s Descriptive Catalogue;² quick takes on which copies have leaves missing or in uncorrected states can be found at the end of my Collation post.)

tl;dr I imagine many of you won’t read all the way through this 4,000-word post, so here’s the unsurprising upshot: digital projects don’t age well. For the First Folio, that means that what used to be cutting-edge in terms of quality and interface can, 5 to 10 years later, can be woefully behind the times in offering what users want. We need to plan ahead so that we can offer users the tools they want now while also building in reuse for future users. That means, above all, super high-quality images, open access, clear documentation, and constant exploration.

Folger Shakespeare Library, copy no. 68 (West 126)

Available as page spreads in the Folger’s digital image collection, as page spreads and as a pdf through the World Digital Library; downloadable as individual page openings and as a pdf.

This tends to be my go-to copy of the First Folio when I need to check what’s in it and when I need to zoom in for good details. I like this copy in part because it’s a complete copy—all the leaves are original F1 leaves, rather than facsimiles or replacements from other copies or later editions—and it has some nice manuscript markings setting off some passages. (I always like reminders that books aren’t pristine collectibles but objects to be used.) I also like the Folger’s digitization of it. It’s cover-to-cover, so you can see the Wodehouse bookplate in the front, and the full-page spreads show the depth of the volume as well: in this image from Measure for Measure, you can easily spot from the visible page edges that we’re still well near the front of the volume.

I like, too, that the images are high-resolution enough that you can really zoom in and see details. Here is a screenshot of the most zoomed-in view of the same opening (click on the image to enlarge):

I also like that it’s easy to download individual images from the Folger’s Luna interface; the full-page spread that you see above is the maximum size that is allowed for downloading; click on it and you’ll see how big it is. And it’s easy to link to individual openings (see the examples that I’ve included above). If you’re a more adept Luna user (or if you’ve read Jim Kuhn’s tooltip posts in The Collation), you’ll find that you can link to zoomed-in views or to view of multiple images, too (see, for instance, this comparison of two copies). Information from the Folger’s incredibly thorough catalog records is included in Luna, so it’s easy to understand what you’re looking at without leaving the image; information is also provided identifying the image, including the signature marks (but not, however, page numbers or modern act/scene divisions). There isn’t any obvious information about when the images were taken or anything else about the dates or tools involved in the production of the digital images and interface.³

But what I don’t like about using this also comes from the Luna interface. It’s not particularly easy or intuitive to quickly find your way to specific places in the volume. If you’re looking for something in King Lear and you know your way through the First Folio already, your instinct will be to scroll through the thumbnails until you find the beginning of the play. But that gets annoying. When I was looking for a page that included some of the marginalia I mentioned, the easiest way to do it was to flip through the pdf I downloaded from the World Digital Library, find the opening that looked good, and then locate that in Luna by skimming the thumbnails. The pdf is not very high resolution in and of itself, so while it’s fine for full-page spreads, if you try to zoom in to see details, it blurs out pretty quickly. Here’s a rough equivalent to the zoomed-in view from the online version, this one from the pdf (it’s about 200%):

So I switch back and forth between the two when I’m trying to locate the details of something specific. It’s also worth mentioning, speaking of ease of use, that the pdf file has most of the page openings rotated 180°. The best option is to download it and then use a tool like PDF Toolkit to rotate all but the first and last two pages of the file.

If you’re looking for a specific play, it’s possible to construct a search to just pull up, say, Measure for Measure in copy 68. Use “Advance Search” to search “Call Number” for “STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68″ and “Image Details” for “Measure for Measure”; when you get the results, sort them by “Multiple Page Sort Order” and *phew* you’ve got your play. There used to be links on the Folger’s website for early copies of the plays, including in F1 and relevant quartos, and my understanding is those should be restored soon (I’ll update this with the relevant link when that happens).

The World Digital Library’s interface is built around the same images that the Folger provides through Luna. It seems like it should be slightly easier to navigate (instead of going through thumbnails, you can click arrows to turn to the next or previous opening), but I find the transitions between the images to be so slow as to be more frustrating than helpful.

The Folger has licensed this, as with the rest of the items in its digital image collection, with a CC-NC license.

Folger Shakespeare Library, copy no. 5 (West 63)

Available as page spreads in the Folger’s Digital Image Collection, as a pdf from Octavo editions, and as page spreads through the Rare Book Room; downloadable as individual page openings and as a pdf.

This is my go-to pdf, though not my go-to online digital copy. It’s a good copy of the First Folio—only a few original leaves missing⁴—and was one of the first really high-resolution digitizations of the First Folio that was easily available. Octavo chose it as the basis of their edition of the First Folio, published on CD-ROM in, I think, 2001. That edition, available for purchase but also freely through the Folger’s catalog record, is rich not only for the nice digitization of the First Folio, but for the incredible contextual material accompanying it, including essays by Arthur Freeman, Stephen Orgel, and A.R. Braunmuller, as well as a copy of Peter Blayney’s amazing booklet on the First Folio. It’s a wealth of information. (The pdf file at the Folger has been corrupted; at the moment it has the contextual material, but not F1 or Blayney. I think it will be replaced with a better file soon; I’ll update this when that happens.) If I had to recommend one digital First Folio to an interested non-specialist, the Octavo pdf is what I’d choose, given the strengths of its digitization, its ease of navigation, and its fabulous contextual material.

The pdf is easy to navigate—you can use the arrows to move back and forth, of course, but each play and act/scene is bookmarked so that you can jump straight to it. And the resolution is ok, maybe slightly better than the WDL pdf of copy 68:

The digital copy in Luna has the same interface advantages (cover-to-cover! full-page openings showing depth!) and disadvantages (argh, navigation!) of copy 68, but you can’t zoom in to quite the same level of detail in copy 5:

The images through the Rare Book Room are the same as in Luna, but with a different interface. I like the ability to use arrows to navigate through the book, but it doesn’t let you zoom in very much.

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Arch. G c.7 (West 31)

Available online in page spreads, downloadable as individual page images, and eventually as a pdf (I’m positive I saw something about this latter point somewhere, but now I’m not finding my steps back to it; I hope it’s actually true and not something I totally hallucinated).

This is the most recent addition to the collection of digitized First Folios; you can learn more about the publicly funded campaign to digitize it on the project’s blog, “Sprint for Shakespeare.” It’s also a (kind of) infamous copy of the First Folio. The Bodleain acquired it in 1624 and then—gasp!—subsequently got rid of it, apparently in 1664 when the Third Folio (which it purchased) made the First “obsolete.” The Bodleian’s copy of the First reappeared at the University in 1905, when Gladwyn Turbutt (an Oxford undergraduate whose family owned the book since the early eighteenth century) brought it in for advice about the binding. It was immediately recognized as the long-gone Bodleian deposit copy and the Turbutt family delayed its sale to the highest bidder (*cough cough Henry Folger*) to give the Bodleian a chance to raise the money to purchase it, which it did. What makes this copy interesting is not only the Bod’s foolishly getting rid of it and its spectacular return, but the fact that the book remained in its original binding and showing all the wear-and-tear of its usage.

The online interface of this copy’s digitization comes in two options. The first is through the BookReader interface developed by the Internet Archive. It lets you navigate the book either through thumbnail images or in one-page or two-page spreads. There are bookmarks to let you easily jump to specific acts and scenes in specific plays, and in the two-page opening view, you can easily see a visualization of page edges to show where you are in the volume and to flip ahead to specific pages:

I generally find this a good way to navigate a book—it’s easy to work out where you are and to get to where you want to be. The fake visualization of the fake edges is a little weird, though, and while I love the pop-up that shows you where your mouse is when it’s jumping ahead, I couldn’t actually get the book to jump when I clicked on the margins. And in this particular incarnation, however, I’m disturbed by the gutter issues. Since many of the images of individual pages includes a glimpse across the gutter of the opposite page (not a bad thing for an individual image), when they’re stitched together into a page opening, the weirdness across the gutter is, well, weird.

On the other hand, working with the individual page images is super easy. There’s a link that takes you to pages of thumbnails, each of which is identified both by signature mark and by play title and page number; the image below, for example, is labeled “F4v / MM p.68.”

It’s a good resolution (click on the image above to be able to enlarge it to its full size), and I like the touch of including the ruler to indicate the leaf’s size. It’s also wonderful that the Bodleian has released this under a CC-BY license and clearly indicates what that means in terms of usage. They have a great statement on the site’s accessibility, too (it looks like that’s something required by Oxford; I wish more places would keep accessibility in mind as they are designing their sites). I wish the site was more clearly linked to the cataloging information (I got to the catalog record by navigating through the link to the Bodleian’s main website in the upper right corner of the site and the searching in the catalog for the shelfmark). And I haven’t figured out an obvious way to be able to link to specific openings in the book view, although you can link to individual page images (check out the front pastedown, for instance!).

The Bodleian’s biggest strength is combining ease of use for non-scholars and for scholars. By using the Internet Archive interface, they’ve made it friendly for general browsers to look through the book. (As Pip Willcox said in a tweet to me, given that the public funded the project, the Library felt strongly that it had to be fully open-access—and, obviously, that it had to be friendly to use.) And by separating the book into individual page images, they’ve made it usable for scholars like me. That, I think, is key to successful digital First Folios—they need to work not only for the finicky experts but for the general user. And I think the Bodleian has mostly achieved that, unlike most of the other digital copies.

 Meisei University (West 201)

Available online as individual page images with transcriptions of marginalia; downloadable as individual page images. Akihiro Yamada’s book on the marginalia and his transcriptions is available in its entirety as well.

This is a fascinating copy of the First Folio, and the most interesting copy of the ones that have been put online. It has extensive early modern marginalia dating, according to Akihiro Yamada’s study of it,  from the 1620s or 1630s in a Scottish hand. There are underlinings, dots, and marginal notes focusing primarily on summarizing the play. The annotations are understandably the focus of this interface; it’s really not designed to read the play easily, but does offer a range of ways into the marginalia. You can navigate to individual pages by choosing the play and either act/scene/lines or through-line numbers; you can also navigate by signature marks or by image number. Once you’re at a page, you can then use the arrows to browse to the next or the previous image. It’s not instantly obvious—the landing page is a black screen instructing you to “Please Search Page Image” rather than the first leaf of the volume. But once you’re on an image, you have the option of enlarging the page (the initial result is thumbnail sized), enlarging the marginal notes, and reading a transcription of the note.

Here, for example, is a screenshot of a page from Measure for Measure, enlarged to its largest side, along with a detail of the marginalia and its transcription:

As you can tell, the page itself doesn’t enlarge particularly well, though the details of the marginal notes are a bit better. You can also download a page image:

It’s pretty small, but its resolution is okay (as elsewhere, click to enlarge to its full size). Their copyright page states that “All rights reserved; no part of this database may be reproduced or reprinted in any form, except for non-profit-making, educational or scholarly use. In such cases, please cite the copyright of Meisei University and write to the contact address.”

As I said, though, the point of this digitization isn’t to read the First Folio, it’s to study its marginalia. So while you can search by page image, you can also search the marginalia, using either the “lexicon” option (words that appear in Yamada’s index) or the “concordance” option (words from the entire marginalia corpus):

I don’t really have a project that would use this, but I like that they’ve enabled it. The (comparatively) low resolution and the sometimes not-intuitive interface are likely residues of the project’s age: it began in 2002 and ended in 2008. Quibbles about that aside, it’s wonderful that Meisei, which bought the book in 1980, has taken these steps to make its riches explorable.

Since I’ve already gone on long enough, and am feeling a bit burnt out, my examinations of the remaining online First Folios is going to be speedier.

University of Pennsylvania, Furness Library (West 180):

Available as individual page images and possible to save as jpegs. Penn’s interface makes it easy to navigate the First Folio by play or by page number. It’s also possible to compare F1 to other works if you follow the “select a text for comparison” option in the upper left—if you’re interested in Hamlet, there’s a lot of goodies in there, and it’s nicely displayed side-by-side. Information about the specifics of the copy or of the image aren’t obvious. (I happen to know that this interface was put together in the mid-1990s, since I had grad school friends who worked on it.) The book begins not with its cover (although you can catch glimpses of it and page edges here) but with the blank recto of Ben Jonson’s poem, “To the reader” (sig. ΠA1r). (Penn also has a copy of the Peter Blayney booklet I mentioned above, which is handy to know if it’s not available through the Octavo pdf.)

Brandeis (West 153) and New South Wales (West 192)

I’ve grouped these together because they are both available at Internet Shakespeare Editions as individual page images than can be saved as jpegs. The Brandeis copy is also available through Perseus, though I find that interface doesn’t have much to recommend it over the ISE. Neither one of these is a great facsimile (the NSW is oddly pink and there’s a lot of bleed-through in the Brandeis—shooting with a black page behind the leaf would have helped with that, wouldn’t it?), but the interface is easy to navigate. I particularly like how if you’re looking at a specific place in one copy, you can jump straight to that location in the other copy. There’s also a nice “compare” feature, just as in the Penn above, but here with more options.

Miami University (West 174)

Available online as individual page images that can be saved as jpegs. I love that Miami has done this but it’s very hard to use and the quality of the digitization, by current standards, is not good. It’s easy to initially find your way through the book to a specific play, as you can see from the screenshot below, and it generates a stable URL to bring you back to a specific page (here’s my MM example).

Once you’re at the page you want, you can zoom in pretty deeply (the pull-down menu says “100%”) but it’s actually larger-than-life-size, as you can tell if you click on the image below to see its full size.

I’m not a big fan of the quality of the image (bleed-through is a lot more distracting in images than it is in real life), but it’s more than usable. What I find really difficult is that once you’ve zoomed into the image, you lose all the navigation tools—the sidebar menus that let you move to different pages completely disappears. Even if you return to a smaller size (the zoom level pull-down is still at the top of the screen), that doesn’t return the sidebars. Perhaps there’s a metaphor in here, about not being able to see the forest for the trees.

A final note, for those of you who actually read all the way through this: I am delighted that all these copies exist and that all these institutions have made them openly available. Where I offer criticisms it’s in the spirit of love and improvement. As I said above, it’s amazing how quickly these projects age: ones built just a decade ago look impossibly old-fashioned and not up to snuff. By looking at how they all stack up, I hope anyone thinking about how to digitize copies of books not only thinks about how they’re being used but how they can be remade so that they continue to be used.⁵

1. Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols (Oxford UP, 2001).
2. Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, eds, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave 2012).
3. My experience of using the Folger’s Digital Image Collection that the record usually indicates when the image is a digitization of film and when a full-page spread is the result of stitching together two page images, so I would assume those are not relevant here.
4. I’m pretty sure my notes from West have it as only missing one leaf, but the Folger’s catalog shows it as missing three
5. Also, if you really did read this far, you’re my kind of nerd. Thank you.

I’ve been thinking about the social ties that connect us to our scholarship.

Last week I was at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting (or #shakeass13, as it was lovingly hashtagged), a conference that I’ve been going to every single year since (have mercy on me) 1994.¹ It’s a great conference, in part because it is organized around seminars: the bulk of the work of the meeting happens in seminars in which participants circulate papers in advance; there are also paper panels, with only two or three happening concurrently. The result is a conference with a lot of room for active participation and common conversations. It’s invigorating, and that’s one of the reasons I keep returning.

Another reason is that I have a huge number of friends and colleagues that I only ever see at SAA. I’ve been going for a long time, I keep meeting more and more people, and while I’m lucky to work at a place that has a lot of Shakespeareans passing through, most of my friends I only see at conferences. This isn’t surprising news for anyone who goes to things like this: the social element of conferences is much of what makes them wonderful (or exhausting, if you’re an introvert). And the format for SAA is really great for socializing—not only is conversation built into the seminars, the conference even ends with a dance. (Thank you, Malone Society, even if I never actually go.)

But this time, I’ve been aware of how much social ties are built not only into my favorite conference, but into my life as a scholar.

I trained as scholar focused on modern productions of Shakespeare. I wrote a book on the subject, edited a collection, presented at conferences, published articles, all on aspects of Shakespeare and performance. I did that solidly from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. And in the process, I met great people in the field, people I enjoyed collaborating with and being friends with. But then, around 2006, I started retraining myself as a book historian, thanks to the program I started on the subject at the Folger. And with that came blogging, and tweeting, and going to conferences, and even publishing. And in that process, I met a new crew of collaborators and friends.

What this means is that when I go to SAA, I find myself pulled in two directions: do I want to be at sessions focused on book history or at ones about performance? That experience of being pulled in different directions will be familiar to any scholar who is interested in more than one thing. But what I had not fully appreciated before this most recent experience at SAA was how much of the intellectual tugging went hand-in-hand with a social tugging. Sure, we all find ourselves socializing with the people with whom we share intellectual interests. That is the pattern I just described above. But what I recognized this time is that it works in the opposite direction, too: my choices in who I was socializing with generated who I wanted to share my intellectual energies with.

Here’s what I mean: the socializing I did at this conference tended, primarily, to be with my performance studies friends, and it jump-started my brain so that I’ve now got new questions and possible projects bubbling away. Talking with R and A and S, among others, made me want to continue those conversations by thinking about fragments and travel and how we experience, share, and archive theatrical performance. I was interested in those things before, but my drive to sort them out is connected to my drive to continue to hang out with these people I like. I don’t want to hang out with them so that I can better work out these questions that are bugging me; I want to work out these questions so that I can continue hanging out with them.

Obviously, my entire intellectual life is not driven by who shares my love for food and drink.² I’ve got another project bubbling that doesn’t come out of any socializing impulses, and it’s a great one, and I chose my collaborator not because he’s someone I like to hang out with, but because he’s the right person for this project. And obviously what I get out of conferences isn’t only seeing my friends; I heard some really exciting papers in Toronto and that’s what really made it a great conference. (Let me tell you, I’ve been to other conferences that have been good social scenes but when it’s built around lousy papers, the whole experience brings you down.) But the connections between who I like to be friends with and who I like to talk shop with are not accidental. One of the delightful things about moving into a new field of scholarship has been that it introduced me to not only to exciting new ways of thinking about texts and books, but that it connected me to some really interesting and fabulous people. I love that.

But I’m now realizing how much I miss my old field, too. Yes, I know I can do both and that I could even combine book history with performance studies so that one foot is planted firmly in each realm, and I do try that. But let’s face it, that’s also exhausting and since my work explicitly pulls me towards book history and material text, that’s where I’ve gone. I’m not going to stop thinking about those things. I’m too embedded both intellectually and emotionally in the book history world (see some of you at SHARP in Philadelphia?) to walk away from it. But I’m going to let my love for performance stay in my life, too, and I’m excited about that.

So consider this my paean to the value of friendships and the ways they inspire us to be better scholars. And a big, hearty THANK YOU to all my #shakeass13 peeps: the ones who created the silly hashtag and wore our silly t-shirts, the ones who ate and drank with me, the ones I didn’t have a chance to do more with than wave across a crowded room and the ones who let me chill with them when the rest of the conference was too much. You’re what makes being a Shakespearean fun and smart.

1. Ok, I missed one year, in 1995, when it was held in Los Angeles and I was living in London, but I’ve been every other single year always.
2. Although thank you, Fairmont’s Library Bar, for introducing me to Peat Monster, which is a goofy name for what was an entirely enjoyable whiskey.

Below are the slides for and the approximate text of a talk I gave at the 2013 MLA convention as part of a panel on “Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital” organized by Alex Mueller and Mike Johnston. I spoke ex tempore, so my text here won’t precisely line up with what I said at the MLA, but the gist should be the same. I’ve indicated where the slide changes are and after each change have inserted a footnote linking to source and, where available, a link to the image. I’ve also indicated my indebtedness to other scholars, particularly Jeffrey Todd Knight and Adam Smyth, in the notes.

I want to talk today about how early print complicates any trajectory from manuscript to digital, focusing on some common mistaken assumptions that are made about early print. The first assumption we make is that print replaced manuscript, that once the printing press was invented, writing by hand withered away. [slide 2] But print is not the opposite of manuscript. Indeed, we might understand print as having spurred on an increase in handwriting. When people think of the first printed work, they usually think of the Gutenberg bible. [slide 3]¹ But Gutenberg’s first printed work was an indulgence, printed in 1454 and, as you can see, filled out by hand on 27 February 1455. Gutenberg wasn’t the only early printer to print indulgences. [slide 4]² This is an indulgence printed in 1498 by Wynken de Worde. It hasn’t been filled out; in fact, it wasn’t ever cut into individual indulgences to be sold. What you’re looking at is a sheet of indulgences and the only reason it survived is because it was used as part of the binding of a book. Other categories of printed forms were popular aside from indulgences. [slide 5]³ This is a legal document, a summons from the Exchequer filled out on 1 August 1622. [slide 6]⁴ And this legal document from 1677 makes Francis Read of Giggleswick Bailiff of the Wapentake of Ewecross.⁵

All of these documents were designed for the insertion of handwriting. But writing flourished on texts even when the print wasn’t inviting it. [slide 7]⁶ In this copy of Polychronicon, printed by Caxton in 1482, an early user has supplied the missing final leaves with his own manuscript copy. Is that book manuscript or print? It seems pretty clearly print: the bulk of the volume is print and the manuscript provides access to missing print. [slide 8]⁷ This copy of Aristotle’s Ethics was so  heavily annotated by its owner that the margins of the pages were not enough: he added in blank leaves to give himself more room for his notes. Is this book print or manuscript? We value it for the manuscript additions, for the dialogue between print and hand.

[slide 9] As these books make clear, print is not closed, finished, done at the moment of printing. [slide 10]⁸ We all know that print wasn’t fixed; books were printed with errors all the time, and errata notes calling attention to them. This 1624 example is one of my favorites: “There are many other errors, which being but small, I entreat the courteous reader to correct as he findes them.” [slide 11]⁹ In this 1673 book, a user has gone through and made the corrections the errata list invites him to, here crossing out “company” and writing in “presence.”¹⁰

But not all marginalia responds in the way that a book invites. [slide 12]¹¹ In this copy of Caxton’s 1483 printing of Confessio Amatis, a mid-sixteenth-century owner has gone through and crossed out “pope” and, in this instance, cleverly substituted “abominable” for “honourable.” But not all of the marginalia in this book responds to the text, or even works against the text. [slide 13]¹² In the blank space on this leaf is recorded the date of the writer’s marriage: “Chrystofer Swallowe was marryed the 12th day of July in the yere of oure lorde 1553 whiche was the seventhe yere of the Reigne of kinge Edward the Sixth …. and in the firste year of the Reigne of our most Excellent and worthie princes Queyne marie the fyrst.” [slide 14]¹³ And across the bottom margins of another opening is a deed of land involving Swallowe and “Dorithe his wife.”

[slide 15]¹⁴ Early readers also used print for their own purposes in other ways, taking books apart and reassembling them to make their own meaning. A famous example are the Little Giddings bible concordances (here showing one at Harvard). The Little Giddings community wove together the four different gospels to produce one narrative of Christ’s life, cutting words out of the gospels and pasting them together in their harmonies. If you look closely at this image (or follow this link to see other pages from Harvard’s copy), you’ll see the small slips of paper that have been carefully rearranged and glued to make a new text.

The Harmonies are a particularly famous example of this reworking of texts, and are often discussed by later readers as shocking: Can you imagine cutting apart your bible and remaking it? [slide 16]¹⁵ But there are other examples of what Adam Smyth calls “reading with scissors” in this period.¹⁶ John Gibson’s commonplace book, put together while he was imprisoned in the 1650s, cuts out and repurposes print material with his manuscript additions. [slide 17] Gibson is not the only one to remix works. This copy of Mary Sidney’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death (1600) has been supplemented an early user with images cut from Richard Day’s A booke of Christian prayers, hand colored and pasted in, and with manuscript couplets.¹⁷

It didn’t always take wielding scissors to remake texts. [slide 18]¹⁸ Since many early books were not sold bound, buyers could choose how and when to bind them, sometimes bringing together multiple works within one binding. In this case, a seventeenth-century reader created a compilation of verse works, ranging from narrative poetry to love lyrics and epigrams and binding together five printed works and one manuscript. As the work done by Paul Needham on Caxton and Jeffrey Todd Knight on Renaissance sammelbände shows, sometimes the books early modern readers created are surprisingly different from what we expect.¹⁹

One of the reasons for our surprise is that we don’t often encounter early modern works in the same manner in which early modern readers would have. [slide 19] Our notion of what is important, of the difference between print and manuscript, of what readers do with texts, has been shaped by the assumptions and practices of collectors and curators in the nineteenth century. The questions that I asked about whether we consider a specific work print or manuscript are not questions without important implications for researchers. In most libraries, print and manuscript are cataloged separately, often with different curators in charge and with different policies and grants in place. Early modern readers might not have differentiated between print and manuscript, but nineteenth-century caretakers of those books did, and often remade them according to their notions of what was appropriate, assumptions that continue to govern how we treat and encounter early books.

[slide 20]²⁰ As we just saw, binding together different works into a single volume was one way early readers made and encountered their books. It was a particularly handy way of treating plays, which were slim works that didn’t always need to be bound individually. This list shows the contents of one such volume, a collection of thirteen plays and interludes housed in one binding. But this is no longer how we encounter this volume. [slide 21]²¹ In 1961, these plays were separated from each other and rebound individually. The binder’s note in the back of each play records what it once was; the original table of contents remains with the first play in the collection. But the sense of the plays as a gathering is gone. [slide 22]²²  What we see are slim, tidy playbooks, not the heterogenous collection they once were.

[slide 23]²³ Sometimes we are lucky and we catch a glimpse of what was. [slide 24]²⁴ But more often we encounter early works through the interventions of later assumptions about what they were, our view of the seventeenth century shaped by nineteenth-century lenses. What we think we know about early print—that it is distinct from manuscript, that it is fixed and stable—are mistaken lessons that obscure the ambiguities and complexities of what print was and can be.

1. Gutenberg indulgence, Mainz 1454, John Rylands Library, Manchester; http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/s/l023vj
2. Indulgence for the benefit of the confraternity of St. James of Compostella printed by Wynken de Worde (1498), Cambridge University Library. shelfmark Inc.Broadsides.0[3552]; http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/inc/history_37.html
3. Summons from the Exchequer to the Fee farmer of the Priory of Caxford, 1622, Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dkfy3d
4. [Miscellaneous Public Documents.] Noverint universi per presentes nos [manuscript] printed not after 1677. Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/2h197c
5. The idea of print spurring on manuscript through an increased use of forms comes from Peter Stallybrass, who has given numerous talks on the subject (see, for example, his 2013 Miraeus lecture.
6. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon, as translated by John Higden and edited by William Caxton, 1482, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161534 image by Sarah Werner: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8422379404/
7. Aristotle, Ethics, 1562. Sixteenth-century Annotated Books: A Collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes (Warboys, Cambs.: Roger Gaskell Rare Books, n.d.). The books in this catalog are now owned by Houghton Library.
8. John Smith, A Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134 image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8421544841/
9. Richard Flecknoe, Epigrams, 1673, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=134774 images of book: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dp4552
10. For more on the mistakes in that book, see my blog post “Correcting mistakes” in The Collation.
11. John Gower, Confessio Amatis, 1483, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161517 set of images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/sets/72157628802792177/
12. ibid
13. ibid.
14. Bible. N.T. Gospels. English. Authorized. 1630. [Little Gidding concordance] [Little Gidding, 1630.] Vault A 1275.5. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45243608
15. John Gibson, commonplace book, 1650s, British Library (BL Additional MS 37719). For more on Gibson, see Adam Smyth’s “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” English Literary Renaissance (2012) 452-81.
16. Smyth’s work on fragmentary texts and cut-ups has influenced my own sense of the practice. See his “Shreds of holinesse” (cited above) and “‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England” in The Seventeenth Century (2004) 36-52.
17. For more on this book, see Heather Wolfe, “Dye to live, live to dye” The Collation April 2012; http://collation.folger.edu/2012/04/dye-to-live-live-to-dye/.
18. British Library C.39.a.37. For more on this volume, see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 304-340, esp. 335-38
19. Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Library of Congress, 1986). In addition to the two Knight works cited here, see his forthcoming book Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (U Pennsylvania P, 2013).
20. Table of contents on front flyleaf of Folger STC 4965; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/t1nq03; for more on this volume see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection” Criticism 51 (2009): 79-104.
21. Binder’s note in the back of Folger STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/i1bd29
22. Binding for STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/4054tw
23. A sammelband of early plays; Folger STC 4619; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/bi7cg8
24. A view of some of the Folger’s Shakespeare quartos; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/66x7b7

What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our “Altac” Jobs.” The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation.

“Make your own luck” (MLA 2013)

I am the Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a position I’ve held for six years. It’s a job that combines working in one of the premier special collections of early modern literature and culture with teaching a small number of highly motivated and curious students. This is the story of how I got here.

I did a PhD in English, researching modern feminist performances of Shakespeare. After finishing, I was fortunate to get a two-year teaching postdoc, and after that, a one-year research postdoc. At the end of that, I got married to someone who had a job lined up in a Washington DC law firm, and so we moved and I started my life as an independent scholar.

I spent the next year writing my book at the Folger. During that time, I became friends with a local Shakespearean who told me that her department was looking for someone as a leave replacement. So I spent the next year teaching drama and composition at The George Washington University and the following year as an adjunct at George Mason, a job I found again through my Shakespeare friend.

Then I heard from my friend that the head of the Folger Institute wanted to take a year off. And so Gail recommended me to Kathleen, Kathleen went to write her book, and I ran the Institute for a year. At the end of that gig, another contact asked if I’d adjunct at Georgetown, covering his Shakespeare classes, and so my George-trifecta was complete.

At the end of my year at Georgetown I gave birth to my second child (I’d had the first one after my GW stint) and I spent the following year trying to catch my breath and work out how to mother two children with a spouse who was frequently traveling and parents who were aging more rapidly than I was ready to admit. The lesson I learned was that I was not cut out to stay at home.

Luckily, at that point my friend Gail, by now the Folger’s Director, hired me as a consultant on a planning grant for developing undergraduate programming in book history at the Library. So I became an independent contractor, put together an implentation plan, and then became the inaugural Folger Undergraduate Program Director, a job that I love.

I’ve used the word “luckily” to describe how I got to this place, and I certainly benefitted from luck. I live in a town rich in possibilities for Shakespeare scholarship, and I know people who led me to temporary jobs and to my current career. And for a long time I thought of how I got here as a product of luck.

But another way to think about luck is to see it as the residue of design. I wasn’t simply lucky. I worked hard—persistently and creatively—to be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that might come my way. I didn’t always know what it was that I was working toward, but I was working nonetheless. So here’s another version of the story of how I got my job.

While I was turning my dissertation into a book, I submitted an excerpt to Shakespeare Quarterly. My article wasn’t accepted, but I had a nice correspondence with the editor and our paths later crossed at the Shakespeare Association conference. That editor was Gail Kern Paster, and when I moved down to Washington DC, we were both regulars at the Folger and we would chat about our research.

Because she knew my work, she recommended me to fill in at GW. Because I knew the Folger as a reader and program participant, had administrative experience from grad school, and was an active scholar in Shakespeare circles, I was a good fit for the Institute. By this point, I’d come to know the Folger’s culture and resources and that of faculty, students, and administrators at three of the area’s largest schools.

I’d built a network of colleagues across Washington DC and across the Shakespeare community. When the Folger needed to hire someone who knew the Library and local schools, who had the administrative skills and the intellectual breadth to set up a new program, I met those needs. It wasn’t luck that I got my job, it was years of hard work.

Despite what I’ve just said—what I firmly believe about how I came to this #altac career—it took me a long time to believe that I hadn’t just accidentally lucked into it. I’d never intended to do this line of work. I’d intended to be a tenured faculty member; I spent years on the job market trying to get a job like that. But I didn’t.

Because of that history, among other things, it was hard for me to see the planning that had gone into my good fortune. Because I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, I didn’t think I deserved the thing I’d gotten. As some of you no doubt know, it’s really hard to come out of an unsuccessful job search without feeling like you’ve failed, that you’ve fallen short.

In my case, that feeling was exacerbated by the shape my family life had taken. My low-paying jobs were made possible by my spouse’s high-paying job, and while I was grateful, I also felt like a kept woman. Add to that the problem that his career wasn’t highly relocatable, and that once we had kids, it was not going to be practical for me to live apart from them.

With only part-time work coming my way and small children to raise, I squeezed my teaching and my writing into the hours I had childcare and spent the rest of my time playing and teaching and coaxing my kids to eat and nap and use the toilet and make friends and give me kisses, and while I loved my family, I was exhausted.

How grateful I was, then, to have a real job! How fortunate to be dealt such good luck! Gail Collins, in mulling over Hillary Clinton’s wide-ranging and impressive career to date, with its twists and turns from despised to beloved, wrote that she has played the cards she’s dealt. That’s one way to look at it. But I prefer Hillary’s answer:

“I choose my cards. I choose them. I play them to the best of my ability. Move on to the next hand.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with seeing yourself as the beneficiary of good fortune, except for its flip side: if you got where you are by luck and then your luck dries up? You’ll never get anywhere again. You’ll never be more than your spouse’s appendage.

My point here is that I might not have been actively planning my #altac career, but I was keeping my eye open for opportunities to learn new skills and to meet potential colleagues. The years I thought I was nothing but lucky were the years I was unhappy and insecure. Once I realized my own strengths, I knew I could succeed at other things I wanted to do.

Here’s one thing I went on to do: I knew the Folger needed to do a better job explaining the scholarship we do in publicly accessible terms, and I knew that I could do this. Since my job with the Undergraduate Program was ¾ time, I had ¼ of my time I was willing to use to start a new blog for the Library. And I so convinced them to hire me to start The Collation.

Whether you’re looking for an #altac career or you’re not, my biggest piece of advice to you is not to wait for a giant hand to point you in the right direction. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not going to see signposts leading you there. You need to make your own luck and trust that you’ll recognize your place when you arrive.

As part of my pre-hurricane planning, I’m pushing out a few pages that I’d put together but not announced. So…

In celebration of Open Access Week, here’s the fruit of my negotiated contributor’s contract: my book chapter on audiences for Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme’s collection, Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). The collection as a whole is geared towards exploring the practicalities of working with Shakespeare as a play texts intended for performance; my contribution explores how to think about the relationship between audiences and actors and what role each plays in shaping the other’s response. I talk about a couple of productions at Shakespeare’s Globe (a King Lear and an As You Like It), Toneelgroep’s amazing Roman Tragedies, and a Folger Theatre show of Measure for Measure.

And in celebration of the upcoming Modern Languages Assocation conference (where I’ll be participating in two roundtable discussions, “Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital” and “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs”), I’ve compiled a list of book history-related sessions. Please let me know if I’ve missed any sessions, and I’ll add them to the list.

For anyone in the path of the storms, please stay safe. And for those of you outside the myriad zones of danger, you stay safe, too!

As some of you know, I am the queen of folding exercises.¹ It’s the only way to understand early modern book formats, and I like puttering around coming up with better ways to demonstrate this to my students and even to my blog readers (see here and, most recently, here). Because it’s that time of year when I get my syllabus in order and because, thanks to my week at Rare Book School’s Introduction to the Principles of Bibliographical Description, I have format on my brain, it suddenly dawned on me that instead of just handing out my one-sheet syllabus (the bulk of my syllabus is online), I could hand it out as a folding exercise!

And so, after much fiddling with Word (which really isn’t the right tool for this sort of thing), I have at long last produced my syllabus in quarto format!

I’m pretty crazily excited about this. I didn’t number the pages of the syllabus, because that would be giving the game away, but I did try to include lots of hints to figure out what order the pages go in: there are signature marks on the second and third leaves, lots of numbered sequences, and a clear title page. I’ll let you know how it goes in class. I had fun, if nothing else, but I think it might help us start a semester-long conversation about the physical properties of texts.

If you want to examine it more closely, a pdf of it is here; just print as double-sided to try it out yourself. And if you want to make your own quarto syllabus (or quarto text), I made up a Word template that will make it a bit easier for you. Take it, use it, and have fun folding!

1. I’m not really the queen of folding exercises. If I was, I’d do more than the easy formats. I’m more like the JV champion of folding, having mastered 4° and 8°. I still stumble over making my own 12°s and I aspire to 18°s. Then I’ll be the Empress of Folding.

In my last post, I discussed the contibutor’s contact I had been presented with for a chapter I have in a forthcoming collection. It was much more restrictive than I liked, including requiring that I ask them before I reuse my material in my own future publications and not allowing for any digital repository use at all. After emailing my editors and the publisher, and going through some back-and-forth, I’m happy to say that they presented an alternative contributor’s contract that I’m willing to sign!

Here are the key details in how this happened for those of you who might be contemplating this sort of negotiation:

I let my volume editors know that I intended to do this. I’m not sure they entirely understood my objections (one pointed out that he’d already put his contribution on his institutional repository; I didn’t counter that that didn’t seem permissible according to the terms we were given). But they also expressed willingness to pass my concerns and proposed amendment on to the publisher. After that informal exchange, I sent them a formal email detailing my concerns and attaching an amendment that I based on the CIC guidelines so that they could forward it to their contacts at the publishing house.

The initial response I got from the publishers was not encouraging. It laid out in fairly defensive language why their contract was structured the way it was, the reasoning having mostly to do with protecting their financial investment (“we can only publish this because we’re counting on multiple years of sales to break even and that won’t happen if there are free bits floating about!”¹ ) but also expressing concern that any agreement they made with me couldn’t take precedence over their contract with the volume editors. But they also asked for clarification on what exactly it was that I wanted to be able to do.

So I sent the following response:

I have two primary concerns, both stemming from the fact that my contribution is my intellectual property and the result of a lot of time and effort into getting the substance of it right.

The first is that I want to be able to reuse my contribution in my own work without asking for prior permission. If I want to expand this contribution into a longer article or if I want to incorporate it into a monograph that I am writing, I will of course credit its original publication in XXXX. But since this is my intellectual property, I do not want to cede the right to reuse it in my future publications.

My second concern is that I want to be able to reuse the text of my contribution and share it on my own or an institutional repository so that I am assured of continued availability and its being part of the scholarly conversation. I understand that Publisher  has made a financial investment in the publication of the book, including this contribution. And I would agree to an embargo period in which I do not share the text of my contribution. But I do not see the availability of the text of my contribution as an impediment to the collection’s marketability, especially given what I know about Publisher’s preference for collections in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, some studies have suggested that making parts of a book, or even an entire work, available freely online have resulted in higher sales, with the free samples functioning as a marketing platform for the entire work; Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (NYU 2011) is one example of a work that has much higher sales than anticipated in part because the availability of the work online has driven interest and generated sales. More importantly, while I see making parts of  the text of a book available online for free as generating interest in and sales for the book, I also see it as a way of protecting my own intellectual investment in this work. Should Publisher no longer be interested in distributing this book, or in my contribution to it, I need to still be able to have my work be part of the scholarly conversation. My being able to place a copy of my text in my own or an institutional repository ensures that my own investment in this piece is protected.

And then I waited. Their response, when it came, was essentially, “Hey, it turns out that another division has something that says nearly exactly this!” The key, apparently, is that I was dealing with the textbook division, which did not have provisions to handle this sort of permission, but the monograph division did.

Here’s what the new contract includes:

• specific permission to reuse my piece in my teaching and to distribute to colleagues for their personal use (though not in any systematic way);
• specific permission to reuse my piece after publication and pending notification to the publisher in other works I’ve prepared that are not direct competitors to this one;
• and specific permission to post my pre-copyedited piece on my website or an institutional repository as long as I’ve notified the publisher; there is no embargo before I can post my piece.²

So, yay! This is hardly groundbreaking, but it lets me do what I want to do, which is archive my text here and to potentially reuse it in my grand collection of my writings (which, you know, is surely imminent). Keep your eyes open for when the book is finally out in print, when I’ll share my piece here. And then prepare to be so excited about it you’ll go out and buy a copy for yourself and ask your library to buy it too!³

My take-away from all this is as follows:

• Always ask for what you want. They can’t say no—or yes—until you do.
• Be clear about what you want. I found Paul Fyfe’s comment on my last post helpful in this regard.
• Know what your exit point is. I knew what I was prepared to negotiate on and where my line in the sand was, which took the anxiety of negotiating out of the picture.
• Be polite and persistent. If they don’t say yes on your blanket request, spell out precisely what you want to be able to do and ask if another division might have an agreement that is suitable.
• Finally, ask for help from your colleagues! I am hugely grateful for the recommendations I got here and on twitter on how to go about this. And I’m extra hugely grateful for my conversations with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who was really generous in helping me work through this.

And one plea to all of you: Ask for what’s in your right to have. Please do this. And please tell us about doing this. Scholarly publishing is in a world of change right now, and we are all finding our way. My experience is that most publishers are finding their ways just as much as most authors are. The more we work together and share our experiences, the more chance we all have of finding a fair way forward.

1. n.b.: This is not an exact quote.
2. It’s worth noting that this is a contract with a UK publisher and that copyright in the UK is assumed to remain with the author, so that was never really something I had to battle over.
3. One small note: I hadn’t named the publisher while this was happening because I believed that was going to make negotiating in good faith difficult. But I’ve linked to the forthcoming collection and, really truly, I believe it will be a good one.

6 July update below

So, on top of everything else I’m dealing with at the moment, I just got an email requesting a super fast turn-around on a contributor’s agreement for a chapter I wrote. The book collection has already been accepted and is already in production—it’s really not clear to me how things got this far along without contributor’s agreements being worked out. But it has. So here’s my situation: this agreement sucks. It leaves the contributor with no rights. It doesn’t even let me republish my own work in, say, my own monograph without asking the publisher for permission. Here are the key details:

• “Author grants to the Publisher for the full term of copyright and any extensions thereto, the exclusive right and licence to edit, adapt, publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Contribution . . . in all forms, formats and media whether now known or hereafter developed (including without limitation in print, digital and electronic form) throughout the world”
• Author grants to the Publisher the exclusive right and licence “to translate the Contribution into other languages, create adaptations, summaries or extracts of the Contribution or other derivative works based on the Contribution”
• “The Author shall only be entitled to republish the Contribution with the Publisher’s prior written permission which shall not be unreasonably withheld, and provided that, when reproducing the Contribution or extracts from it, the Author acknowledge and reference first publication of the Contribution in the Work.”
• “The Author irrevocably and unconditionally waives the Author’s moral right as provided in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to the extent the Publisher reasonably deems necessary to allow the Publisher to exercise and license the rights granted to the Publisher under this Agreement.” update: This sentence is preceded by one in which the Author asserts moral rights, so it looks as if I’m not being asked to waive all my moral rights, just the ones the Publisher wants me to. (I am, crazily, reading a bit more on what “moral rights” might mean by speed-reading the Act referenced and linked above.)

Yup. I don’t even know what that last point means, but it doesn’t sound like it’s in my favor.

What’s not in this agreement? Any statement that the Author retains copyright over her contribution or that she has any ability to store her work in an institutional or personal repository. I’ve put up a pdf of the whole agreement here, with details blacked out, in case you’ve never seen one of these before and are curious. And if I’m missing something even more horrible, do let me know.

Here’s my question to you, dear readers: How should I proceed? I don’t want to sign this. Ideally, what I want, is an agreement that lets me post my contribution on my own repository (aka, this website) and to reuse my own material in any collection of my own writing that I may put together. What can I realistically get? Probably the latter point, maybe some version of the former point, with some sort of pre-print provision and perhaps after some period of embargo.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick went through something very similar to this and was able to negotiate a better agreement by using the CIC Author’s Copyright Contract Addendum. My inclination is to try a similar approach. My first step is going to have to be letting my volume editors know that I’m doing this. I don’t know that they’re going to be happy, given that the ball is already rolling on this. And I don’t want to delay the book that they’ve been working so hard on for so long (they first got in touch with me in 2008 when they started mulling it over; I think I got my draft chapter to them in the spring of 2011). On the other hand, I just can’t bring myself to sign this as is, and it’s a publisher that I’ve already had unhappy dealings with so I’m happy to wrestle over this.

I’d welcome any suggestions you have if you’ve done anything along these lines, and I’ll keep you posted on what happens!

UPDATE 6 July 2012

I’ve just emailed an addendum based on the CIC one linked above to my editors to pass on to the publisher (the only real change to the CIC addendum is the 4th point):

1. The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s academic and professional activities.
2. After a period of six (6) months from the date of publication of the article, the Author shall also have all the non-exclusive rights necessary to make, or to authorize others to make, the final published version of the Article available in digital form over the Internet, including but not limited to a website under the control of the Author or the Author’s employer or through digital repositories including, but not limited to, those maintained by scholarly societies or funding agencies.
3. The Author further retains all non-exclusive rights necessary to grant to the Author’s employing institution the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make copies of the work in electronic, digital or in print form in connection with teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and all academic and professional activities conducted at the Author’s employing institution.
4. The Author retains copyright and asserts her moral right of paternity in the Contribution. The Publisher is prohibited from subjecting the Contribution to any derogatory treatment as defined by the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

My editor seems a bit baffled but supportive, so we’ll see what happens next! I did also send a separate email requesting that all contributors to the volume have the opportunity to receive this addendum. I’ve seen one reply-all email that suggested that person was happily signing and returning the publisher’s agreement, but I don’t really know how the others feel. And I do think that, as Monica comments below, that if more of us actually read these things and understood their implications, we wouldn’t sign them so often!

UPDATE 8 July 2012

While we’re waiting, some links to similar adventures:

Martin Paul Eve is asking Taylor & Francis to let him use their more author-friendly agreement instead of the standard boilerplate. They have this option hidden away in their arsenal already, so I’d guess this will go well.

Jeffrey Pomerantz wrote up in full detail his engagement with Taylor & Francis for a better agreement for a journal article he co-wrote. He ends up, after much back-and-forth, being offered their License to Publish form, rather than the Copyright Assignment Agreement, but it still includes an 18-month embargo before a post-print version can be posted. They end up withdrawing their article from the journal, and posting it openly as a Google Doc.

Jason Mittell, as he notes in his comment below, wrote about his experience two years ago with a contribution to a collection to be published by McFarland. It sounds pretty badly handled on the publisher’s part—they refused to speak to him directly, so all the negotiations had to pass through the volume’s editors, putting them in a pretty wretched position—and the upshot is that Jason withdrew his piece.

I’d read the PomeRantz piece last summer, and then forgot about it in my current flurry of activity. I’m sure there are other accounts out there and I’d love to hear about them. I have heard from many folks that challenging the boilerplate contracts hadn’t occurred to them or that they didn’t know where to begin that conversation until reading accounts like these.

Hello, and welcome to Carnivalesque 86, the early modern edition! Step right up for a look at things small and large in the world of early modern blogs.

I’ve been puzzling through the relationship between the fairly new field of big data in the humanities and what might be its opposite, small data, and so many of the posts that caught my attention are ones that are navigating between individual objects and networks of data. One of the objections that I have to big data is that I’m drawn to the ephemeral and the hard-to-measure. In “Early printed book contains rare evidence of medieval spectacles,” The Harry Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog takes a look at that trickiest of ephemera, not the object itself but the traces it left behind. The medieval manuscript used as the endpapers to a 1568 printed work show the outline of a pair of medieval glasses. The post, by Micah Erwin, provides a quick history of eyeglasses and some context for how unusual it is to come across such traces. What should we learn from such traces? I’m not sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

Sometimes the traces left behind are not of things, but of people and institutions. In “Pew-hopping in St Margaret’s Church,” from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s The Collation,¹ Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts) and Kathleen Lynch (Executive Director of the Folger Institute) look at a pew chart from around 1600. The chart shows the names of the people who occupied specific pews, including successive holders, with later names written over and obscuring earlier names. With the help of some multi-spectral imaging, some names that hadn’t been visible were revealed. Working with some account books, they begin to suggest some of the stories that lie behind this document, small pieces of data that point to a larger story about societal structure.

You never know what you’re going to find when you’re working with early modern documents. Early Modern John has a lovely post about the bits and bobs he’s come across in his research, things that aren’t going to make it into his thesis but that are nonetheless compelling moments. In “Mountebanks and mounted priests: An International Archives Day post,” EMJ describes finding references to a mountebank and his son selling wares on the Pont Neuf and reflects on the power of that image: “the image of man and boy hard at work on the lord’s day, hanging their crocodile skins, setting out their jars, and preparing to dazzle a crowd – of believers, sceptics, hecklers, passers-by – has stayed with me all week.” The impact that image has on us today is one of the things I find most compelling in small data research: the glimpses of past lives, the daily minutiae of days gone by. I know there’s a big picture out there, but I care about that big picture because of these small moments.

If you’ve been a reader of my blog, you’ll know that one of my favorite places of these small glimpses is in the text and margins of books. We interact with books in such personal ways, and books can travel far and wide across place and time. Alun Withey’s post on “The mystery of ‘Sansom Jones’ – the phantom Welsh doctor” (at the eponymous Dr Alun Withey) tells the story of exploring an early modern manuscript and its authorship and provenance. A twentieth-century annotation describes the book as having belonged to a Sansom Jones, but Withey hasn’t had success in tracking down this person, nor in tracking down any of the sources for the material in the manuscript. It’s a book of medical remedies that appears to date to the early seventeenth century, but who are the people whose names appear in the book? (If you’re looking for confirmation that the past is a different country, by the way, Lisa Smith’s post at Wonders and Marvels on “The Puppy Water and Other Early Modern Canine Recipes” will tell you more than you probably wanted to know about the use of puppies in health remedies.)

But if books are great examples of traces of individual histories, they are undoubtedly equally part of a large network: if texts didn’t circulate, if there weren’t important intersections of commerce and culture, books wouldn’t end up in anyone’s hands. Early Modern News Networks has been sharing some information from a fairly new research project on methods of studying transnational circulation of news and newspapers. In “Rennes and some thoughts about mapping communication networks,” Joad Raymond explores some of the challenges the group is facing in thinking about how to visualize these networks. What are the limitations of maps for these purposes? On the one hand, their man-made features aren’t consistent from one period to the next (country boundaries are notoriously unstable), but using geographical features to locate the networks misrepresents the factors that shaped the circulation of news. This gets at one of the trickiest aspect of thinking in big data terms: how do we determine what differentiates one set of data from another, and how do the tools we choose to explore the data affect what questions we can ask? I know that we face similar challenges in thinking about small data, and I know that adept researchers are aware of the limitations of sets and tools, but this post nicely illustrates some of the problems in thinking about how we represent and work with print networks. (Not connected to my network theme here, but related to the question of circulation and commerce, is “Hans Peter from Langendorf,” a lovely post at The Renaissance Mathematicus about some early Nürnberg printers.)

There are networks of booksellers and buyers in the early modern period; there are networks of booksellers and buyers in the modern period, too. Brooke Palmieri (who blogs at 8vo) and Daryl Green (from St Andrews’ blog, Echoes from the Vault) co-wrote a compelling piece about the benefits of blogging about rare books. In “Bloggers of the World Unite: Rare Book Bloggers and the Links They Build” (cross-posted at their two homes) they write about the benefits of writing public-facing posts about what might seem an esoteric subject (I know you, faithful readers, need no convincing on this part!) and the community that is created through such work. It is, again, a vision of a world of people and things that moves between near and distant, small and large.

Next up, a post that looks at how we teach the next generation of scholars: Michael Ullyot’s “Teaching Hamlet in the Humanities Lab” (at another eponymous blog) describes a course he taught that had undergraduates explore Hamlet with various text mining tools that allow fairly easy explorations of networked information. The post is from a talk he gave at the Renaissance Society of America conference and it gives a good overview of some of the big data work that is being played with out there. If you’re curious about how these tools might be used to help us understand early modern drama, you’ll find lots of leads here. I would love to see a follow-up post that reflects on what sort of work the students ending up doing and how they responded to the tasks set them. Maybe if we ask nicely . . .?

Ullyot actually describes the course as “an introduction to digital methods of reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet — or rather, to the digital methods of provoking, testing, and tweaking their hypotheses about the text.” And I guess I could accept that reading Hamlet meaning working with its text. But Hamlet is more than that: it is its physical incarnation, in the many forms in which it has circulated, from early printed book through post-modern theatrical performance. And digital methods is more than focusing on textual analysis. I’ve written before about some of my hesitations about digital tools and what they aren’t yet offering the study of early modern books. I haven’t yet worked through what I imagine an explicitly small-data approach to humanities might offer us, but that articulates some of where I’m coming from.

I’m going to going to give Adam Hooks the last word, since he’ll bring us back to small data and what it tells us about the larger world. In his most recent post at Anchora, “Breaking Shakespeare Apart,” he writes compelling about the value of thinking about Shakespeare in terms of bits and pieces. How much is Shakespeare actually Shakespeare when the great book that we fetishize is made up of bits and pieces that come apart and get put back together again?

Thanks to all of the great writers whose posts are featured here; I learned a great deal from each of them, and from the many other wonderful early modern posts that I didn’t include here. It’s a privilege to be part of this network, large and small!

1. disclaimer: I run and write for this blog