n 1965, computer scientist Theodor "Ted" Nelson conceived the "hypertext" technology that 30 years later became the system by which Internet users of the World Wide Web can point their cursors and click their mouses to move instantly from document to word to picture to document in any combination.
From that success, Nelson embarked on a visionary project he calls Xanadu, a universal electronic library and publishing system that would link every book, movie, poem, song and software program ever written. Silicon Valley has given up on Nelson and his dream, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Japanese have backed him with a lab and funds, and he is trying to come up with a Xanadu software system.
Some experts think the technical and legal complexities are too great for the construction of a universal software system that could perform the tasks Nelson envisages. But it isn't far-fetched to imagine that a network of interlocking roads on the expansive information hyper-highway might one day take us near Nelson's Xanadu. One of those roads is being built in Ann Arbor right now, where John Price-Wilkin and his
colleagues in the Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) are building a library without walls for faculty, students, staff and others.
The Future Is Now
"The new library will not be judged by its collections but by its potential for connecting users with information," predicted Borge Sorensen, the director
of Copenhagen's public libraries, at an international conference of librarians at the New York Public Library in May.
So far as Sorensen's prediction goes, the future is now. The U-M Library is already meeting his criterion, thanks to John Price-Wilkin, director of the Library's Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and his assistants Christina Powell and Nigel Kerr.
"Imagine a personal library of thousands of titles including current reference works, both popular and little known works of literature, and great works of culture, including visual images and music," Price-Wilkin says. "The Humanities Text Initiative is a
pioneering effort to provide electronic access to a wealth of such resources by extending the walls of the University Library to the desktops of researchers involved in humanistic scholarship."
Price-Wilkin was on hand to launch the University's electronic text effort in 1989. At
that time, the staff's main goal was to obtain or build comprehensive electronic text archives of Old English, Middle English prose, pre-20th-century English verse, all of American verse, and of various encyclopedias and dictionaries. The effort has involved
building electronic collections from scratch and purchasing expensive electronic text
archives from commercial publishers. The volumes of books in the collection
already number 19,526 titles.
The achievements of Price-Wilkin and the HTI staff include devising fast,
efficient and easy-to-use "access mechanisms" and "analytical mechanisms"the complex array of computer programming that enables scholars to identify,
mark, sift through, compare and move words and texts to facilitate research. The
HTI devised the mechanisms by working closely with humanities scholars
including those in the "Collaboratory for the Humanities," created largely with
funding from the University of Michigan Presidential Initiative Fund.
"A lot of collaborative learning goes on here between the Library and the
faculty," Powell says. "We library people can see how the faculty work, ask them what they want, and then we can go back and figure out how to give them what they need." The HTI librarians are also literary scholars and enthusiasts with an ability
to select important but obscure authors and texts that other collectors might overlook.
Price-Wilkin moved to the University of Virginia in 1992, but returned to U-M in '94 because he saw Michigan as "uniquely poised to take advantage of the startling new development on the Internet called the World Wide Web."
"This remarkable technology," he continues, "enabled HTI to migrate from access mechanisms best understood by specialists, to straightforward and attractive interfaces used by vast numbers of individuals on the Internet. Almost overnight, in 1993, a gateway was created allowing all users of the World Wide Web to access many of the collections of the HTI, and all U-M users of the WWW to access all of the
collections of the HTI. That is, we have several significant resources (our American Verse Project, the Middle English texts, the Bible, Quran, Book of
Mormon, the Michigan Early Modern English Materials, and the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines) that we can provide to the entire world on the Web. And we have licensed collections, including the Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopedia Americana, the English poetry collections, and a few other things, that are accessible only to U-M people."
U-M was the first to make this material available over the
Internet, although other schools have now followed suit. "We continue to
define the market," Price-Wilkin says. "Our collections are significantly
larger than any other institution's, and we have successfully developed
faster access mechanisms to collections that others have struggled with."
It is costly to purchase rights to databases, but Price-Wilkin says
the University feels the investment is "well worthwhile in view of the
relatively low per-use cost by the many thousands of students and
faculty who will increasingly use them."
Hyper-Scholarship
Prof. Frances McSparren and Rachel Hearshen '96 of Oak Park, Michigan, a student in McSparran's course "Medieval Women," are sitting before a computer monitor in the Humanities Text
Initiative's Collaboratory, a suite on the second floor of the Graduate Library. They are examining on-screen a collection called The Paston Letters.
The Paston Letters comprise 1,000 documents involving three
generations of a "Horatio Alger" English family over the period 1420 -
1500. Without the HTI hypertext collection, undergraduates would be
unlikely to have easy access to the Paston documents, McSparran says, and
even if they gained access to them, they wouldn't have the time for deep
thematic explorations.
"Thanks to the search mechanisms that John developed,"
McSparran explains, "students can organize their research to suit their interests.
They can pull out, for example, all the letters that deal with wills, or
marriage arrangements, clothing, family relations, or disputes over property
and inheritance."
Hearshen used these search mechanisms to pull out all of the
letters written by Margaret Paston, whose husband John, an ambitious
attorney, spent most of his time in London, leaving Margaret to run the
family estate in Norfolk.
The Pastons began as small farmers but rose to prosperity,
Hearshen says, thanks in no small part to marrying well. Margaret, herself, was the ideal bride of the time---an only child with a sizable inheritance and good connections. Nevertheless, family fortunes remained vulnerable; the
100 Years War against France, recurring outbreaks of plague and
England's dynastic War of the Roses made life hard, dangerous and violent
for everyone in that era, from nobles down. Neighbors fought with
each other in mini-conflicts that mirrored the struggle between the houses
of Lancaster and York.
"What I learned about Margaret's life through her letters didn't
match at all with my preconceptions of how women lived at that time,"
Hearshen says. "I knew the law and the church were against women and I
thought they lived entirely dominated lives, but I found that Margaret ran
their large household when her husband was away."
After rivals claimed part of the Paston property, attacked the
estate with armed supporters and drove Margaret off
while they pillaged the place, she wrote her husband to
ask him to send crossbows, axes and handguns and
successfully defended their lands.
"I steered clear of courses that require historical research like
Professor McSparran's until my senior year," Hearshen says, "and I
also avoided computers." But working on the Paston letters and her experiences in using HTI resources changed her outlook. "The course made me want to read more and more and more about the subject
I was studying. Now that I've graduated, I'm even working for a
computer company that develops CD-rom games."
Machyn's Diary
McSparran's colleague in the English department, Richard W. Bailey, is working with four graduate students to edit the definitive edition of the Diary of Henry Machyn. Machyn, a merchant tailor in London, supplied costumes, banners and other gear for public ceremonies. His diary entries from 1550 to 1563 describe the funerals of noble persons, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I, the murder of Arden of Feversham by his wife and her lover, and other features of life in 16th century London. The varieties of English Machyn used offer a wealth of information on dialect, usage, grammar and spelling in the London of his day.
"Students in my freshman seminar on the history of the English language came over to the Collaboratory," Bailey says, "and I had a worksheet of things for them to do that would be difficult or impossible without this technology. It makes it possible for first-year students to investigate topics that would have been covered only in graduate seminars."
Cynthia M. Epler '99 of Columbus, Ohio, said her research team tried to identify the locations in and outside London mentioned in Machyn's diary. "We studied how spellings had changed and other linguistic features of the language at that time. There were no bounds on spelling then, and they spelled by ear, so we looked at Machyn's spelling to gain clues on how they pronounced words at that time and why some of our current English spellings are so irregular and peculiar."
"Until now, students exploring the history of the English language were obliged to accept and repeat back textbook accounts of the growth of the English vocabulary and change in its grammatical structure," Bailey says. "I have other students who select from the Oxford English Dictionary all the words introduced in a given year or decade covered in the diary, or perhaps just those with special meanings in philosophy or astronomy, and then compare them with words in early English texts. Electronic searches allow questions to be answered that were impossible to answer with printed books."
Access From Norway
William Ian Miller is a professor of law, but he also holds a PhD in English, and his research, especially into feudal law, linguistics and Medieval literature, is multidisciplinary. When he focuses upon legal issues, he is used to having at his disposal powerful on-line research engines developed by commercial publishers.
"Now HTI lets humanities types like me have the same quality of on-line reference works that my Law School colleagues have long enjoyed," said Miller in a recent e-mail interview from Bergen, Norway, where he is currently researching a project. "Thanks to HTI," he said in a recent e-mail interview, "I can have a virtual library in my office and home here. Take, for instance, a recent essay I wrote on gluttony. From HTI's ever growing body of materials I was able to access Alexander Barclay's long poetic essay on the miseries of courtiers (c. 1510) which has a delightful treatment of the psychology of feasting and also a witty treatment of the same vice in William Combe's (1742-1823) The English Dance of Death.
"Both of these were texts that I had once sampled briefly in graduate school more than 20 years ago, although God only knows why, and I recalled that they would have something relevant to my topic. The computer led me right to the passages I wanted. But suppose I had never heard of those texts? A simple word search would have brought their insightful treatments to my attention in any event.
"By the way, one can see by titles such as these that HTI is not just presenting well-known canonical texts but also a rich collection of 'lesser' texts. In a sense one can say that HTI is thus committed to a widening of the literary canon and in fact will effect it. Barclay and Combe are much more likely to be read now than they were a mere 10 years ago. And they are well worth reading. But it is not just texts such as
those which are only known by specialists if known at all, that are available. There are also full texts of the B-text of Piers Plowman in Schmidt's solid edition, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and of course Chaucer, much of Milton and Hobbes, and all of Shakespeare and Hume. Even the entire Patrologia Latina, a compendium of Latin writings, is available, and in that database I was able to pull Gregory the Great's Moralia with its discussion of gluttony, all without leaving my room. This is an exciting prospect and it will only get better as more and more texts are made available.
"But the remarkable thing is that instead of having to ship five boxes of books to Norway and England, I have it all available to my laptop either via Telnet or the World Wide Web."
. . . June 1996