Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 553.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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[1] From: Ken Friedman <kenfriedman0@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.549: extensive downloading & scholarship (104)
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: extensive downloading & scholarship (24)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-04-16 06:29:58+00:00
From: Ken Friedman <kenfriedman0@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.549: extensive downloading & scholarship
Dear Willard and All,
When we moved from a large townhouse in Melbourne, Australia, to a small house
on a medieval street in the Old Town of Kalmar, Sweden, we had to shrink our
bookshelf usage by more than 80%. I sent most of my library to a scanning
service and keep it now in .pdf form. When I buy books, I often purchase on
Amazon and send them direct to the scanner.
They are easier to search. Scanning programs have improved over the past decade
so that new scans are much better. Copying and pasting is sometimes good, but
not always for earlier scans. And I find that I still use old-fashioned note-
taking on my computer for quotes and citations.
My library got so huge that I had to buy a computer with a large memory to store
it (8 TB). I also have smaller topical libraries for subjects that I draw on
frequently. These are duplicate copies of the books from the big library. I
regularly back up to a large external hard drive to keep the library safe, and I
have a second hard drive at a different location just for added safety.
On the whole, I am happy with this arrangement. It also makes collaboration
easier when I share a copy of a title with a colleague. But I miss being able to
wander up and down the halls to look at the books and fiddle with them. Ever
since I was a youngster, I loved having books. There is something about having a
physical library that evokes a rich range of emotions in a way that the much
larger digital library in my computer does not. At the same time, there is
something more fluid in the juxtaposition of ideas and thoughts that seems
possible with the digital collection.
Oh that my words were now written!
Oh that they were printed in a book!
That they were graven with an iron pen
and lead in rock forever.
— Job 19:23-24
Ken Friedman
> On 16 Apr 2024, at 07:39, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
> Date: 2024-04-15 22:16:09+00:00
> From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.545: extensive downloading & scholarship
>
> hi,
>
> from my point of view (and a digital library of nearly 5000 different
> sources), for managing annotations in the PDFs, extraction of 'worked'
> passages et alia similar, plus the formal management of citation styles
> when writing, Zotero (opensource, multiplatform) would never be
> sufficiently praised
>
> Maurizio
>> Date: 2024-04-12 21:37:02+00:00
>> From: James Rovira<jamesrovira@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.544: extensive downloading & scholarship?
>>
>> I do that too, but the books I get in print I scan to .pdf, make text
>> searchable, and put them with everything else in one Dropbox folder.
>> Actually, my teenage daughter Grace has been doing my scanning in exchange
>> for favors or money for about five years now. She just scanned
>> Adorno's Aesthetic Theory for me in exchange for driving her to deliver
>> a slushy to her boyfriend at work. Then I read the material using the
>> iAnnotate app on my iPad. I can annotate on that app exactly the same way
>> I might a printed book ("dog ear" pages, underline, highlight, write notes in
>> the margins or above text), and on top of that, email my annotations to
> myself.
>> I put myemailed annotations in a Google mail folder -- allows me to text
> search
>> all my annotations on any given key word and find the books or articles they
>> were annotated in. The email includes the book title and page numbers of my
>> annotations with related text.
>>
>> I don't think nearly enough about differences among foreign sources.
>> Disciplinary differences I tend to see as being fairly transparent within
>> the books and articles themselves.
>>
>> I'm not sure how to answer your other very good questions. I don't know
>> that it's changed things so much as sped them up. I'm less likely to lose
>> track of something I bookmarked in a printed book, and word searches are
>> easier and more reliable than book indexes.
>>
>> Jim R
>> On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 2:41 AM Humanist<humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>>
>>> As standard practice I search for, usually find and download an
>>> extensive range and amount of articles and books, take what I need from
>>> them, buy this or that book that I actually need to read through or
>>> otherwise consult repeatedly and file the material away according to a
>>> scheme I've worked out. I assume this is more or less what most of us do.
>>>
>>> My question is this: how has the practice I've just described affected
>>> your scholarship? To what extent has it changed your disciplinary reach?
>>> How has it affected your conception of the discipline in which you are
>>> working? Do you poach or make a strong attempt to understand foreign
>>> disciplinary contexts, their standards and ways of working?
>>>
>>> Comments eagerly awaited.
>>>
>>> Yours,
>>> WM
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-04-17 05:09:04+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: extensive downloading & scholarship
As my question may have led you to suspect, I've been pondering it for
some time. Rather than burden Humanist with what I've written elsewhere,
let me simply give the references for anyone interested in going further:
(1) "Making and studying notes: Towards a cognitive ecology of
annotation", in Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen, eds. Annotating
Scholarly Editions and Research: Functions, Differentiation,
Systematization. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110689112-013. This is open access.
(2) "Pursuing a combinatorial habit of mind and machine". In Julianne
Nyhan, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stéfan Sinclair and Alexandra Ortolja Baird,
eds. On Making in the Digital Humanities: The scholarship of digital
humanities development in honour of John Bradley. London: UCL Press,
2023. https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781800084209.
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62237.
All best,
Willard
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
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