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American Library Association Talk: NINES, RaVoN and the Future of Academic Publishing

Dino Franco Felluga

Purdue University, West Lafayette

Screenshot of NINES Projects
Screenshot of NINES Projects
Our decentralized, open-source, open-access, and non-profit approach to scholarly publication has allowed us to be as flexible as possible.  We have already aggregated some of the best existing online archives, thus allowing users to make supremely precise searches across these previously unconnected resources.

New “free culture objects” will continue to be added to the site as they go through the traditional process of peer review by our editorial board (minimum of two reports by outside scholars).  NINES therefore provides born-digital Web resources with a peer-reviewed publication venue, counteracting the previous situation where sites existed as lone wolves in the World Wild Web, but we do this in a way that takes away no autonomy from site creators. 
Victorian Board of NINES
Victorian Board of NINES
Screenshot of NINES Search
Screenshot of NINES Search
Byron Constraint
The flexibility of our decentralized approach allows us also to enter into agreements with commercial entities like ProQuest since it is in the best interest of these entities to have the maximum number of nineteenth-century scholars directed to their sites.  This has also led to watershed agreements between NINES and both JSTOR and Project Muse.

This means that, right now, one can make searches across these journals and databases from within NINES, including full-text searching for all material aggregated from JSTOR, Project Muse, and ProQuest.  This is made possible by a NINES-tailored version of the SOLR search server.  Thanks to our use of faceted classification, one can constrain one’s searches in any way one wishes.  For example, if I enter “Byron” in my constraints, this list of journals immediately reflects the new constraint, showing how many articles in each journal make reference to Byron (see the screenshot on the left).  If I further constrain to “Byron” and “Eliot,” the list shows those journals in which the two terms are mentioned together either in a title, as faceted terms, or in the body of the text (compare the screen shot on the right).

And, of course, one can then see one’s search results, including snippets of relevant text. Folksonomy tagging allows the aggregated objects in NINES to be dynamic and largely user-driven.  That is, we are creating a social network that allows interpretation to re-enter the system as a social act.  Indeed, the most exciting new feature of COLLEX is the ability not only to COLLect but also to EXhibit (and thus repurpose) the objects in one’s “My NINES” collection, an ability that you are seeing in action right here.
Screenshot of NINES Search
Screenshot of NINES Search
Byron and Eliot Constraint
Blacklight and Virgo Beta at UVA
Virgo Beta at UVA Libraries
Blacklight Open-Source Software
So, how does all this impact university libraries?  For one, NINES represents a model for how libraries and scholars can work together to preserve our cultural and scholarly archives.  U of Virginia libraries and NINES are closely linked in a number of ways:
  • the library provides NINES with space within its buildings; indeed, by providing space to various digital units (NINES, IATH, SpecLab, ARP, and the Electronic Text Center) , the libraries at UVA have become an important player in digital initiatives of various kinds.  
  • UVA libraries also provide NINES with a cluster of six servers, thus providing us with the virtual machine behind COLLEX. 
  • NINES has had a direct influence on university libraries: 1) COLLEX (with its use of SOLR and Ruby on Rails for faceted browsing) has helped to inspire and direct the creation of Blacklight, what UVA Libraries dubs in its "Virgo beta" form "a next generation search interface."  Stanford University Libraries have joined UVA Libraries in implementing the use of this open-source software as an interface for their collections; 2) Our former Project Manager, Bethany Nowviskie, is now Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at UVA libraries. 3) Andrew Stauffer, the director of NINES, is both on the university library committee and a member of UVA's SHANTI (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives).
In seeking to offer users a glimpse of the emergent possibilities in the realm of electronic editing and in our effort to eschew the skeuomorphic structures of other approaches to Web publication, NINES offers a number of challenges—to users, to contributors, to scholars at large, and to our scholarly institutions, especially university libraries.
  • we challenge users to think about alternative ways to approach the act of interpretation and editing, taking inspiration from social-networking sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and facebook; commercial sites like amazon, iTunes, and Netflix that use the “more like this” or “users also purchased” function to direct users to new objects; even the gaming world so familiar to the “cool” sensibilities of our students.
  • we challenge contributors (and the future generation of scholars) to learn how one goes about properly creating Websites in the era of Web 2.0, including World Wide Web Consortium standards for DDT and the use of XML rather than static HTML for the creation of digital sites, not to mention the adoption of the XML standards for humanities publication already established by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).  
  • we challenge scholars at large to embrace this new form of publication and research in a way that allows us to control our own means of production and that resists the corporate logic of gate-keeping and profit margins. 
  • we challenge our scholarly institutions to provide funds to support this sort of open-source, open-content, non-profit work since it’s in their best interest to do so. 

Further Reading

Felluga, Dino Franco. “Addressed to the NINES:  The Victorian Archive and the Disappearance of the Book.” Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 305-19.

Hayles, N. Katherine.  How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 

Mandell, Laura.  “What Is the Matter?  What Literary Theory Neither Hears Nor Sees.”   New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 755-76.

McGann, Jerome.  “Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to be Done?” New Literary History 36 (2005): 71-82.

---.  Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web.  New York: Palgrave, 2001.

McGann, Jerome and Bethany Nowviskie. “NINES white paper.” http://www.nines.org/about/9swhitepaper.pdf

Nowviskie, Bethany.  “A Scholar’s Guide to Research, Collaboration, and Publication in NINES.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 47 (2007). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2007/v/n47/016707ar.html