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    N I N E S

NINES

NINES is a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.

For more information about NINES, its development tools and its mission, please see this series of introductory videos, prepared by its Associate Director, Dr. Laura Mandell of Miami University.

Watch the video tutorial for NINES »»   Video screenshot

tools

NINES is powered by Collex, a free, open-source tool for Collecting and Exhibiting online resources. Collex was designed by Bethany Nowviskie for NINES, which promotes nineteenth-century studies, but Collex is a generalizable tool and can be applied to other areas of research.

Collex is one of a suite of scholarly tools (others include Juxta, a collation and visualization tool, and Ivanhoe, an online playspace for textual interpretation) developed by the ARP (Applied Research in 'Patacriticism) Group at the University of Virginia. For more information about these tools, please visit the "Tools & Interfaces" section of this site.

publishing model

NINES includes various kinds of content: traditional texts and documents — editions, bibliographic entries, and critical works of all kinds — as well as "born-digital" materials relating to all aspects of nineteenth-century culture. NINES is a model and working example for scholarship that takes advantage of digital resources and internet connectivity, while allowing scholars to integrate their contributions fully into their local IT environments. It provides scholars with access to a federated digital environment and a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools. A key goal of NINES is to go beyond presenting static images or transcriptions of manuscripts on-screen. Software tools that aid collation, comparative analysis, and enable pedagogical application of scholarly electronic resources expose the richness of the electronic medium.

Over the past ten years a growing body of digital scholarly work has appeared online, nearly all of it executed without peer review processes and none of it integrated except by hyperlinking. NINES is working to establish an integrated publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American. NINES was created as a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, published, and recognized by the discipline.

goals

NINES is not just a committee of concerned scholars who mean to discuss the problems and opportunities presented by digital technology. NINES has already accomplished a significant portion of its five-year plan with the following goals:

  • to gather a significant body of digital scholarship and criticism of every kind under the auspices of NINES, in order to test various approaches to the publication of aggregated and peer-reviewed content;
  • to set up the editorial (and technical) framework and resources for producing new and ongoing digital scholarship that meets the highest professional and technical standards;
  • to develop a suite of easily-accessible and usable digital tools that will help scholars and students produce their work in digital form;
  • and to run a series of summer fellowships for scholars who are working on digital projects. Successful fellowship applicants are funded for a week-long workshop where they can develop their projects, assisted by other scholars doing similar work and in a technical support environment of the highest caliber.

mission

The chief function of NINES is to protect, sustain, and enhance digital scholarship and criticism in "the long 19th century." Developing an aggregated body of peer-reviewed scholarly and educational tools and materials will have a significant impact in several important areas of our work:

  • it will create a robust framework to support the authority of digital scholarship and its relevance in tenure and other scholarly assessment procedures;
  • it will help to establish a real, practical publishing alternative to the paper-based academic publishing system, which is in an accelerating state of crisis;
  • it will address in a coordinated and practical way the question of how to sustain scholarly and educational projects that have been built in digital forms;
  • and it will establish a base for promoting new modes of criticism and scholarship promised by digital tools.