Books.Files: Access Problems for the Contemporary History of the Book

NYC. 30th April 2018.

A book

Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London

Two Primary Problems

  • Access to editorial processes/correspondence
  • Access to non-DRM plaintext

Part of scholarly work: Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Stanford UP, 2019)

Textual Variance and Editorial Correspondence

Sankey visualization

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas Structure

Texts as Statistics, or: Close-Reading with Computers

Part of speech trigrams with more than 1.9 standard deviations of variance in any one section

Texts as Statistics, or: Close-Reading with Computers #2

Dating the words in Ewing Part I

Analogue Loops

  • Born-digital texts with DRM
  • Copyright exemptions for research
  • EU Directive 2001/29/EC and US DMCA
  • Re-keying or feed scanning

The End

Thank you!

Presentation licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Images excluded from CC license. Available to view online at https://meve.io/BooksDotFiles2018.