materiality in the digital archive

Representing Materiality in a Digital Archive: Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Case StudyMatthew Lavin

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

University of Nebraska – Lincoln

http://matthew-lavin.com

Twitter: @mjlavin80

Digital Texts, or Digital Books?

• Her signature on the front end paper and her parenthetical phrase below it “(personal copy)” (Cather wrote her name in the middle of a cumulus cloud in a landscape of the Southwest.)

• A folded fan letter pasted in the inside cover, which includes a snapshot of Kit Carson.

• A watercolor image of an adobe church on the blank recto preceding the limitation page. (Aside: Mignon says it’s a colored block-print.)

• A pasted photograph of Cather on horseback in a gravel-bed stream (on the contents page)

• Additional personal photographs, on facing pages 16 and 17, following the prologue

(Mignon, Charles. “Cather's Copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Cather Studies 4 (2003). The Willa Cather Archive. Ed. Andrew Jewell. U of Nebraska-Lincoln. Web. 9 July 2013.)

• the interpretive payoff of imagining all digitization work in the context of data modeling

• significant complexities associated with linguistic and bibliographical aspects of book, and resulting implications for digital text models

• the pros and cons of widespread digital text modeling approaches, including text encoding work and digital cataloguing conventions

• sites of future convergence for seemingly incompatible approaches

• the minimum baseline for representing materiality in digital form (as well as what might constitute the optimum standard)

Digital Humanities’ Next Top Model

• Providing a resource • Key versions in circulation during Cather’s lifetime• “item-level” specificity for all books• relationships among multiple types of materials• distinctions among edition, issue, state, and impression• books as products of collaboration• revisions (amounts and scope)• technological processes • history of institutions

The Site Timeline

Item Browse

Technical Documentation

Raw data

TEI and FRBR

Pros: • Versatile / extensible• Machine readable in the most general sense• Includes both textual and “book” information• Provides a core basis for comparison of dissimilar objects• Provides a structure to record textual variance without necessarily making a

judgment• DOM container hierarchies do not match mark-up type hierarchies • (A hierarchical structure mapped to data types could be oppressive)

Cons: • High learning curve• Huge time investment• Lack of (current) analytics payoff• Not a complete book/text model … too much room for variety and

idiosyncrasy?• DOM container hierarchies do not match mark-up type hierarchies • (A hierarchical structure mapped to data types could be useful)• Too versatile and open to idiosyncrasy?

Pro:• Nuanced bibliographical data • Powerful relational data• Designed to facilitate user discovery of related materials• Once you get the hang of it, easy to enter data• Easy to down-code to adhere to other standards

Con:• Hard to explain• Hard to up-code into FRBR• Never fully realized or leveraged• High learning curve• Some question as to the realness of the categorical

distinctions

Potential Connectors• namespace declaration• linked data• hierarchized markup• stand-off markup

Your Metadata is (are) My Data