A sister-organization for NINES, 18thConnect gathers together a community of scholars that shapes the world of digital resources. Our main concerns are:
- Access via plain-text searching for all scholars to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO, even if their institutions are unable to afford those resources;
- Peer-review of the growing number of digital resources and archives for which 18thConnect offers an online finding aid;
- Reflection on Best Practices with scholars who are negotiating new modes of publication and scholarly production.
18thConnect has adopted all the NINES tools and infrastructure developed specifically by grants from the Mellon Foundation and sustained by the University of Virginia. We utilize the same software application that drives the NINES site, Collex, but with a new style to reflect 18thConnect’s own unique interests. When searching 18thConnect one may also benefit from a large shared index of resources, including material in NINES.
We extended NINES back into the eighteenth-century and started this new organization, modeled onNINES, because of the impact of NINES on the field of nineteenth-century digital scholarship.NINES has successfully pursued “three primary goals,” as they are stated on the NINES site:
- To serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American.
Out of the first 105 websites included in the MLA Bibliography, 22 of them had been peer-reviewed by NINES, meaning that digital archives in the field of nineteenth-century studies were disproportionately represented in the Bibliography that covers all fields of study in literatures and languages. Being peer-reviewed by NINES and 18thConnect shows that a digital archive is thoughtfully constructed and permanent, as evinced by its being catalogued by MLA. Also, peer review allows a digital scholarly resource to “count” toward tenure and promotion (see Profession 2011). NINES and 18thConnect have hosted two workshops on creating organizations that offer peer review of digital resources, and NINES received an NEH grant to host two summer institutes on the topic of evaluating digital work for promotion and tenure. - To support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials.
In 2005 and again every summer between 2006 and 2009, NINES held summer workshops teaching those who are creating digital archives how to design, code, and sustain them. Currently, NINES and 18thConnect offer scholarships for people to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. Please check the sites for more information during the Fall of each year. - To develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.
NINES has developed Juxta, Ivanhoe, and COLLEX. The latter, as the basis for the tool known as Blacklight that has been taken up by libraries, has been tremendously successful open-source software. Currently, 18thConnect is developing a crowd-sourced correction tool called Typewright, which will allow scholars to confront and rework texts rapidly (and sometimes poorly) digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
Like NINES, 18thConnect is an online finding aid and scholarly community in the field of eighteenth-century literary and historical studies. Also like NINES, we will be peer-reviewing digital resources and then catalog them in ways that make them interoperable with all peer-reviewed scholarly materials that have been digitized within our field, offering a kind of table of contents to the best Internet resources in eighteenth-century studies.
Director Laura Mandell describes how 18thConnect plans to accomplish its mission in this short video.
We are always working to make the 18thConnect site better. Please contact us at $$$$ with your feedback.