Five or 10 years ago the excitement surrounding digital books was all about access: imagine being able to call up a copy of the 1851 British edition of The Whale (later Moby Dick).
It didn’t take long for readers to discover that scrolling through 1,000 pages was an eye-numbing task. Naturally, industry rose to the challenge, and the “electronic ink” inside devices from Sony (Reader) and Amazon (Kindle) is good enough that I now can imagine curling up by the fireplace with a good e-book. But even the most technically enthused remain skeptical about the value added, and those of us given to nostalgia are not likely to forgo the tactile pleasure of turning a page.
So if not to read, why are digital books so doggone valuable? Search would seem the obvious answer. In a digital world containing billions of words, search is king.
But search can be ineffectual. A query for “whale” in Google Books produces 19,600 hits. Narrowing the search by typing in “whale” and “god” results in a more manageable 1,830 hits. In the top-ranked books is the very promising Complete Literary Guide to the Bible. But it is promptly followed by less promising links to Introductory Sociology: Order and Change in Society and On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God: Further Confessions.
The lesson? There is a lot of useless straw in the haystack. Unless I know, more or less, what to look for—say a quotation only partially remembered—searching for re-search purposes, as opposed to browsing for discovery purposes, is not so practical.
More interesting and exciting than the mere searching of digital texts is the ability to leverage computation to process and analyze textual data. The folks at Google recently added a “Popular Passage” feature to their book interface, which reveals a list of quotations from Moby Dick, for example, that are also present in other books in the archive. From here it is easy to see how Moby Dick’s wake sends ripples through the pond of prose.
Digital libraries and computation offer ways of understanding literature as a ‘macroeconomy.’
This is what I call macroanalysis: a method of literary text analysis akin to macroeconomics. Literary macroanalysis does not concern itself with single books but rather with an entire “economy” of texts. English professor Franco Moretti has theorized along similar lines with what he terms “distant-reading,” an alternative to the close reading of texts that steps back in order to consider all the texts of a given genre or period, not just the handful that have come to represent the period. A computer-based macroanalysis of digital books offers a way of realizing this goal.
This sort of analysis motivates the workshop Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. The participants hope to reveal new kinds of literary information and thus develop a better understanding of literature as a system, as an aggregate.
In the past, scholars had few digital texts to analyze. Today we have millions. But barriers remain. To be useful to students of literature, who want to better understand literary history and how literary style evolves, these books cannot simply be dumped into a massive online bucket. Classification (and, thus, the librarian) is necessary so that we can sort out the romances from the self-help guides, the novels from the legal tracts. And the digital surrogates need to be accurate.
Electronic texts, digital libraries and computation offer us unique ways of researching, analyzing and understanding the literary record. This is a moment of extraordinary opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine our objectives, our methodologies and perhaps even the very subject of our literary scholarship. Exactly how we will do this remains to be seen.
MATT JOCKERS is a consulting assistant professor and academic technology specialist in the English department.
When I arrivedat Stanford in 1971 as a graduate student in the English department, Green Library was one of the most accessible buildings on campus. You could park in a large lot directly behind the library and move books in and out with ease. This, of course, is not the situation today as the demands for space are steadily encroaching on every corner of the University, calling for constant prioritizing.
As a teacher and scholar in the School of Humanities, I regard libraries as infinitely more than storage facilities. If we study history, it’s evident that the library functions as one of society’s vital and persistent institutions. Consider the clay tablets that were found in ancient Mesopotamia as early as 5,000 years ago, or the papyrus scrolls unearthed in ancient Egyptian cities dating as far back as 1300 BC. Aristotle is said to have acquired a large private collection of books made available through the painstaking work of copyists. The legendary Library of Alexandria, founded circa 300 BC, is held to have been the most distinguished literary repository in the ancient world.
For those of us whose research and teaching are grounded in the humanities, the library is our laboratory. By browsing in the stacks, leafing through the pages of books, scanning an index, and stumbling upon unknown volumes that offer new and unexpected insights, our knowledge about our fields of study can grow exponentially. And we want to pass along the training and excitement of this exploration to our students.
This is not to say that electronic databases are failing to provide valuable re-search tools. In fact, new computerized search engines have been vital to my own work. But students often tell me they dislike “reading” texts online, where the reading experience is impersonal and mentally constraining. They often describe texts they’ve read online, books I thought had great aesthetic value, as little more than sources of information. There is something fundamentally essential to the nature of the created book and our reading of it that resists losing it as a physically present “object” written to occupy the reader’s own space and time. In this way, the act of reading functions as a constitutive part of the book’s meaning.
Then there’s the collaborative spirit that books nurture. Students often bring favorite books to class or to professors’ office hours—especially those that contain illustrative material. A similar sharing can occur when students visit the library, where they meet with classmates and often strike up conversations about their reading and research. New ideas emerge from these encounters, which are similar to the teamwork one finds more often in the sciences. As a result, the library provides a collaborative space for humanities research that could otherwise be isolating. But time constraints and the Internet may deter undergraduates from paging off-site books important to their research.
What is more important in a library than anything else . . . is the fact that it exists.
-Archibald MacLeish
What compelling arguments can be put forward to convince universities and state boards that the Internet and electronic databases are not substitutes for a quality library such as we find at Stanford? Many online items have not been refereed by specialists in the field, and e-books and electronic academic journals are not always comprehensive and up to date. At the same time, the ongoing cost of staying current and digitizing new materials—along with prioritizing what will be digitized—has no final price tag.
It seems to me that we may have lost sight of the truism that it is literacy that builds libraries, and that the presence of libraries and their comprehensive collections testifies to the continued growth of literacy and with it the production of knowledge. Reducing library holdings and moving books to off-site locations may signal an otherwise invisible decline in what we have labeled literacy.
Many of my colleagues in the sciences have told me they feel certain that much of the analytical and creative thought at work in their research derives from their education in and continued contact with the humanities. This process cannot be duplicated apart from the library and the books that are at home there. Perhaps what we’re hearing today is an urgent call for humanists to give greater public voice to our vital role in the production of literacy and to what the disciplines in humanities contribute overall to education and ultimately to the preservation of libraries.
HELEN B. BROOKS, PhD ’80, is a senior lecturer, emerita, in English and interdisciplinary studies in humanities.
