"The New Machine": Discovering the Limits of ECCO

Spedding, Patrick

doi:10.1353/ecs.2011.0030

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Partly, this is to take advantage of new digital technologies, such as Google Books, which make available, at zero cost, many of geography’s key 19th- and early 20th-century texts. In much the same way that commercial digitization projects such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collection Online have prompted novel types of scholarship and pedagogical innovation, improved access to geography’s print culture might be facilitative of new forms of understanding, and of teaching, geographical thought (Berland, 2006; Gadd, 2009; Spedding, 2011). The Historical Geography Research Group together with the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) are, for example, currently drafting plans for an electronic bibliography to provide centralized access to freely available digital copies of 19th- and 20th-century geography texts.…”

Section: On Possibilities and Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

On canonical geographies

Keighren

Abrahamsson

Dora

2012

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.

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Section: On Possibilities and Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

On canonical geographies

Keighren

Abrahamsson

Dora

2012

Dialogues in Human Geography

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“…It is not surprising, then, that OCR is the most well-known topic in discussions of ECCO (Gadd, 2009;Greenfield, 2010;Spedding, 2011;Dane, 2012;Mandell, 2015;Hine, 2016;Prescott, 2018;Hill & Hengchen, 2019). For example, Ian Gadd revealed that 'the word "fuck" or versions thereof appear over 28,000 times,' revealing the OCR engine's tendency to misread the long 's' as an 'f'.…”

Section: From Film Image To Metadata: Digitising the Eighteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Gregg

2020

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with his point that the term 'texts' should go beyond the printed text to encompass the very broadest set of human communication media and evenmost vital for us -'computer-stored information'; there is, he argues, 'no evading the challenge which those new forms have created' (McKenzie, 1999: 13). The discipline of bibliography 'studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception' (12). Perhaps the strongest argument for my history is that a 'sociology of texts' should allow 'us to describe not only the technical but the social processes of their transmission', and it 'directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the role of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present' (McKenzie, 1999: 13, 15). Sociocultural forces, institutions, technology, and human agency all play their part in this history.Eighteenth Century Collections Onlineor any digital entityis not a static or an unchanging entity: it has a history. The rapidity with which commercial publishing technology supersedes older versions of itself has meant that some circumstances of its development are now obscure and others are irrecoverable. Tellingly, a part of ECCO will become invisible from 2020 when its original interface is scheduled to be turned off: it will literally be history. So this book is partly an act of recovery. The third chapter, 'Beginnings', turns to the development of ECCO itself. In the first section, I examine the immediate contexts that shaped how ECCO was to work and to be sold. It was decisively influenced by the downward movement of the academic publishing market and the emerging so-called disruptive technologies in the 1990s (Bower & Christensen, 1995). I focus on the techno-commercial choices facing Gale by illustrating contemporary digital resources created by two of its key commercial competitors in academic publishing of the time: Chadwyck-Healey and ProQuest. In addition, some aspects of how ECCO works 'under the hood' arein common with many digital productssimply invisible to the public. The chapter goes on to explain Gale's digitisation of the microfilm collection, discussing the problems created by the use of optical character recognition (OCR) software to

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“…17 Indeed, in the early 2010s, the inadequate rendering of all the texts through OCR in ECCO caused a plethora of worries about the potentially severe shortcomings of keyword searches and other ways of examining the digitized sources in the collection. 18 As an example, in her survey of how ECCO has been used for eighteenthcentury scholarship, Holahan notes that ECCO has been used for various argumentative purposes to compare how often the phrases "creative genius," "breeches," "creativity," "system," and "young invader/young pretender" appear in the corpus for different years. For the sake of argument, let us say that the frequency of one of these terms drops in the later part of the eighteenth century.…”

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confidence: 99%