A Practical Guide to Electronic Resources in the Humanities

tomlin@vt.edu

Preface

This book has been designed to facilitate the location of key subject-specific online resources in the humanities. Entries are organized so that readers may search for different forms or genres of information – scholarly articles, primary source material, statistical data, and so forth – within a particular discipline. It can also be used to locate essential texts or resources in a particular subject area or to find content related to a general topic. Categories of resources featured in this book include:

 abstracting and indexing databases containing bibliographic information and in some cases full-text versions of scholarly articles, books and other publications;

 web directories and information portals that aggregate and compile categorized links to websites and online resources;

 websites of professional societies and organizations providing useful supplemental information through bibliographies, news feeds and other resources;

 archival collections of digitized and 'born digital' primary texts;

 academic electronic mailing lists relaying disciplinary or subfield discussions and news;

 audio, video and image databases.

Each chapter includes a general introduction outlining the current state of web resources for the discipline or disciplines covered. Individual entries include a URL and a brief annotation describing the scope and content of the resource, along with other pertinent information the reader might need to determine its usefulness. Anyone familiar with the web also knows that it can be fickle – websites that existed yesterday might disappear today. For this reason, the name of the resource creator and, where applicable, home institution are included to assist further contact. Readers will undoubtedly encounter the odd error message or broken hyperlink. Occasionally, scholars move institutions, carrying their online work with them. Domain registrations sometimes lapse. It is our hope that the content provider section of each entry will mitigate this problem.

This guide has been written with different user groups in mind. It is intended, first and foremost, to anticipate the information needs of professional scholars and educators, as well as for undergraduate and graduate students. It may also be used to assist librarians, both generalists and subject specialists, responsible for reference assistance or the creation of online subject guides. Above all, it is designed to assist the general reader unfamiliar with the scholarship of specific fields within the humanities. Of course, few will find everything they need in this book; even fewer will find the entire book – or perhaps even entire chapters – useful. While universal utility may be beyond the reach of any reference book, we have tried to ask the potential questions these diverse audiences might themselves ask, and to gear the level of information provided in each entry to those encountering a subject for the first time.

As to its scope, this book surveys the current state of production in online resources across the humanities: works dealing with any period, movement, relevant methodology or geographic or sociocultural subcategories. This range is qualified, of course, by certain naturally arising emphases. Because it is aimed primarily at English-speaking users, for instance, the guide emphasizes English-language websites and resources (the exception being the chapter on foreign languages). It does include important works in European languages, however, particularly if they offer significant unique content unavailable in English-language sources. Overarching selection criteria include currency, the credentials or authority of resource creators, suitability of scope, and general usability. Given their frequent exhaustiveness, particular attention has been paid to information portals and websites created or maintained by educational institutions or government organizations.

It is hoped that A Practical Guide to Online Resources in the Humanities illuminates a body of primary and secondary sources that will intensify and enhance the research process. In truth, however, this book can only begin to scratch the surface of the rich, complex, and constantly evolving world of online scholarship. If it is presented as an easy remedy to the massive explosion of information with which we are faced in this digital age, it is also recognized that it is ultimately only a complement to the library itself, and even more so the incomparably human intervention of another, necessarily more critical resource: the reference librarian.

1

Introduction

The world wide web is now an established, if not always uncontested, part of the scholarly landscape. Electronic article databases, academic search engines, digital archives of digitized primary materials, online encyclopedias – it is no exaggeration to say that these and other tools are reshaping the possibility and scope of research, writing and pedagogy in the twenty-first century. Cheaper and faster to produce than their print counterparts, online scholarly resources are also now more ubiquitous. Within some fields, in fact, it is possible to conduct much of one’s research using the internet and nothing else – although access to many essential databases may come only by means of a subscription paid for by a library. The web facilitates teaching by providing learning materials ready-made for delivery in the classroom. It serves as a mechanism for quickly and efficiently disseminating writing and raw data, as well as for communicating informally with colleagues and peers. More importantly, it challenges assumptions and provokes increasingly critical questions about the very definition of ‘scholarship’.

The impact of these developments is especially apparent in the humanities, where computing capabilities and digital technologies are transforming not only the conditions for humanistic scholarship, but also the ways in which entire disciplines are configured (Katz, 2005). Keyword searching in and across thousands of articles indexed by a full-text database is now possible within a matter of seconds, enabling work on the reception of an author’s entire corpus of works, for example, with an efficiency and meticulousness heretofore inconceivable. Indeed, the use of individual keywords or short strings of terms now fundamentally shapes our conception of what it means to look for information (Bell, 2003). Traditional print resources, too, are being steadily transformed by the presence of the internet: digitized, enhanced with deep search capabilities, accessible anywhere, at any time.

Of course, ubiquitous does not mean unchallenged. Certainly there has been great debate among educators and librarians about students’ use of the web (Hogenboom, 2005; Jones et al., 2008), given their susceptibility to what Herman Simon has called ‘satisficing’, or the preference of adequate but easily retrievable resources over optimum ones (Warwick et al., 2009). Perhaps this is why no reference work has emerged to offer the online researcher a way to navigate the sprawling – and frequently murky – depths of this ‘sea of information’. This book was written to rectify that omission. Contained herein is a straightforward and practical point of entry into the virtual spaces the humanities have come to occupy on the web.

Writing this book was an intimidating project at times. While what is offered here is a selective guide to online humanities resources – a narrow slice of the most authoritative, comprehensive, and erudite websites and tools – finding these resources meant foraging across a network of websites that, according to Google’s estimate in 2008, has already surpassed the 1 trillion mark (Google, 2008). A new innovative and freely accessible resource appears every day. Hardly a week goes by in which an academic library is not faced with allocating precious funds to a newly launched commercial database. Nor were we interested in culling simple print-to-digital translations of standard reference works: although e-books, e-journals and abstracting/indexing databases abound, the range of free born-digital humanities resources has multiplied exponentially in a remarkably short period of time. Scholarly resources on the web continue to multiply at a daunting pace. Thus, what this book offers is something akin to a snapshot. It captures a moment in time, documenting the most vital resources for posterity, but also serving to illuminate information sources worthy of closer scrutiny.

If the extraordinary speed and breadth with which the humanities have assumed a place on the internet make monitoring the emergence of new resources difficult, defining the humanities is itself hardly an easy task. Exactly what, after all, are the humanities? The ranks of the humanist disciplines have expanded since the term first appeared in the eighteenth century; individual identities and affiliations have shifted, disciplinary interconnections and points of contact grown more nuanced and multifaceted since the humanities emerged as a distinct field of study in the nineteenth century. What forms and genres of scholarship belong to the humanities? How are they different from those in the sciences?

Naturally, such questions of organization and disciplinarity speak to the heart of the humanist enterprise. The American Council of Learned Societies has offered this definition:

[H]umanistic inquiry is not limited to particular departments or fields but encompasses all areas of research and learning that ask fundamental questions about the way individuals and societies live, think, interact, and express themselves … The humanities, like the sciences, involve the analysis and interpretation of evidence, but their subject matter concerns those aspects of the human condition that are not necessarily quantifiable or open to experiment. The results of humanists’ scholarship may be as esoteric as a highly theoretical, scholarly book or article or as practical as a dictionary, thesaurus, website, or encyclopedia. (ACLS, 2010)

Robert Scholes puts it even more simply: ‘Part of what we humanists do is look at the past through its texts and other objects, and we try to help others gain access to that past as a way of enriching their sense of human possibilities and expanding their lives’ (Scholes, 2005: 8).

This book surveys philosophy, religion, the visual arts, the performing arts, and language and literature. If, as both the ACLS and Scholes suggest, the humanities are shaped in no small part by their investigation of the past, one might reasonably wonder about the absence of history in these pages. In placing history within the domain of the social and behavioral sciences, we follow in the tradition of Santa Vicca’s Reference Work in the Humanities (1980), Bazlek and Aversa’s The Humanities: A Selective Guide to Information Sources (1994), and the more recent Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities by Condron et al. (2000). While there is an undeniably strong historical dimension to many of the resources compiled herein, the general methodological direction of the discipline and the information needs which many history websites are designed to meet are different from those resources represented here.

What are the information needs of the humanistic disciplines? The centrality of primary sources is an oft-noted characteristic of humanities research – even if what amounts to ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ can blur from subject to subject and researcher to researcher. A less than exhaustive list of primary source material might include handwritten correspondence, literature, diaries, photographs, artworks, transcripts or recordings of oral histories, film, public records, mundane material artifacts like silverware or furniture, ephemera such as graffiti or advertisements, even websites, not to mention the various and sundry files and programs produced by computers. All could serve as fodder for the researcher. Each item, moreover, might be put to different purposes by individual scholars. A photograph, for instance, could be viewed within several interpretative frameworks, not only for the scene it depicts but also for its status as a material artifact, the moment and location of its taking, and the context of its viewing.

This hermeneutic richness also speaks to the long life of the primary sources driving humanities scholarship. It is difficult to imagine a scientist continuing to defend theories of vitalism or a doctor turning to hemlock, and even more difficult to believe that they would find a receptive audience. Yet nineteenth-century philosophical tenets and medieval medical illuminations continue to serve as fodder for scholarly articles and books in the fields of, say, philosophy and art history. Similarly, humanist analyses – usually falling under the ‘secondary sources’ category – often remain relevant much longer in the humanities than in the sciences as well. In stark contrast to the popular ethos of the web, ‘recent’ and ‘relevant’ are not always equal terms. Nevertheless, the internet has mitigated many of the fundamental obstacles facing researchers in disciplines like art history, philosophy, literature and religious studies. From online archival finding aids to thumbnail images of works in a museum’s collections, simply locating objects of study around the world has grown significantly easier.

While the monograph continues to occupy a central place as the principal mechanism for formally disseminating research, scholarship in the humanities can assume a varied assortment of forms. These include, alongside monographs and articles, critical editions with accompanying annotations, catalogues raisonnés, and professional literature such as the publications of professional societies – not to mention reference works like encyclopedias, dictionaries and annotated bibliographies. Each of these formats is reflected in the following chapters. Moreover, as the existence of this book attests, more and more scholarly research in the humanities is emerging first, if not solely, on the web, as digital endeavors. Projects such as the International Dunhuang Project (http://idp.bl.uk/), a ground-breaking database of Central Asian manuscripts, challenge established notions of scholarship – who can create it, what form it may take, and how and when research materials may be accessed (Maron and Smith, 2008).

Related to the newfound transformation of humanities scholarship is a peculiarly obdurate stereotype long dominating the public conception of the humanities: the lone scholar. Often depicted in popular culture (one thinks of films like The Da Vinci Code and Indiana Jones) as engaged in esoteric, even myopic research, disconnected from the world around him (the stereotype almost invariably assumes a male form), this image belies the rich culture of collaboration currently spreading throughout humanistic disciplines, thanks in large part to digital humanities initiatives (Siemens, 2009). Despite the prevailing mode of scholarly individualism, undertakings like the dynamic Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/) are founded upon international collaboration among authors. In addition, a growing number of resources are engaging the user in collaboration, augmenting content by adapting the model of user contribution pioneered by Wikipedia, implementing user customization systems such as personal tagging (Columbia University’s The Encyclopedia Iranica), or allowing users to contribute essential descriptive information to archival materials (as found in ‘The Commons’, a joint image project aligning Flickr with several significant cultural institutions). The full potential of these new directions remains to be explored.

Research and the web

Table 1.1 lists several essential resources for conducting general online research across the disciplines of the humanities, but it would be impossible to adequately represent the magnitude of the environment waiting for the web-savvy researcher. From stunningly-designed digital libraries to unadorned websites created by independent scholars, from blogs to continuous news feeds, the sheer diversity of information available at all times is staggering. The range of quality is equally striking: for better or worse, the web knows no difference between information and misinformation, authoritative and fraudulent websites (Mintz, 2001).

Table 1.1

Some indispensable general interest or interdisciplinary academic search engines, databases and information portals for finding humanities resources and data

The array of general-purpose search engines multiplying over the past decade presents researchers with a peculiar contradiction. Although initially effortless to use – merely drop one or a string of loosely related keywords into a search field and watch the hits roll in – the immense list of results ensuing from any given query usually means that nothing is as easy as it looks. As anyone who has used Google or any other search engine knows, slogging through hundreds, potentially even thousands, of irrelevant search results to find those few useful websites is time-consuming and frustrating. Moreover, general search engines like Google are incapable of indexing, and thus making available to the searcher, a significant portion of scholarly material – often existing in what is referred to as the ‘invisible’ or ‘deep’ web – otherwise indexed or archived by commercially-licensed academic databases (Price and Sherman, 2001). The apparent wealth of information they generate with such astonishing speed and simplicity is deceptive. One point implicitly underscored in the selective nature of this book, then, is the often false sense of authority projected by the sheer magnitude of the web.

Put differently, sometimes simply knowing where to look is the most difficult part of conducting research online. By pointing researchers in the direction of quality resources, this book is intended to ameliorate that problem. Still, there is no substitute for developing effective research strategies; the ability to ask the right questions, effectively generate and combine search terms, and in general hold a critical eye toward the web are all essential skills for the researcher (Graham and Metaxas, 2003). As a research medium, the internet is notoriously imperfect. Website longevity is never a sure bet. Resources change owners, names and focus. The reticent researcher can easily rely upon the substantial number of free government (.gov) and academic (.edu) websites as regularly dependable suppliers of data, digitized print analogs, and other research materials, but the terrain grows more difficult the further one travels beyond them, especially if a specific edition, image or translation is needed. Although the minimalist interfaces and easy access promoted by most general search engines might suggest otherwise, well-honed research skills remain as valuable as ever.

There is no denying the significance the free web has assumed in the research habits of most college students. In 2002, a Pew Internet and American Life Study reported that 73 percent of surveyed college students began their research with the internet and used it more than the library to find information for assignments (Jones and Madden, 2002). Indeed, whether viewed as a tragic intellectual decline or simply a natural cultural progression – and a great deal of ink has been spilled arguing both sides – this book would likely have found no purpose if the web were not the launching point for many research papers. As reference librarians, we readily recognize the value and freedom represented by the general web, even as we acknowledge the ongoing centrality of scholarly databases accessible only through institutional subscription. But as in the real world, the virtual realm is populated by both good and bad characters. For every resource encountered on the web, the reader is encouraged to question its origins, the authority of its author or creator, the extent to which it meets the specific information need, and whether there are other resources, including those in print and in a library, that would better fit that need. Taken together, it is hoped that the resources presented in A Practical Guide to Electronic Resources in the Humanities stage a space where the online research process might be illuminated and viewed from new perspectives.

Open access: electronic journals and repositories

The majority of resources presented in the following chapters are freely accessible for anyone with an internet connection. However, subscription-based databases continue to play a significant role in providing access to scholarly literature online, often enhancing the value of their interfaces with robust search functionality and deep indexing beyond the practical and economic reach of individual, and even many institutional, creators. To this end, major commercial and other subscription-based databases have been included.

Many in the academic community – foremost among them librarians, scholars and information professionals – have joined together to search for an alternative to toll-access scholarship. Faced with rising journal prices and the increasingly restrictive licensing practices of some commercial publishers, a solution to the obstacles confronting access to scholarship seems not only desirable but also critical. This ‘open access’ movement, as it is frequently called, aims to utilize the particular properties of the internet – namely its facile capacity for sharing, preserving and searching for information – to alleviate the current pricing and permissions crises confronting the scholarly ecosystem. As most scholars write to gain recognition from their peers rather than for monetary profit, it is possible to use the web to make their scholarship available to the widest possible audience, in the process potentially securing a much greater degree of impact. Put simply, open access literature is free of charge and free of most licensing restrictions regulating access (Suber,