The British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Data Service have recently updated their original working agreement. The agreement, confirmed in May 2004, means that the AHDS will continue to provide advice and support to British Academy applicants and grant-holders who are developing digital resources in the arts and humanities. When their projects come to completion, BA-funded resource creators continue to be obliged to offer a copy of their digital material to the AHDS.

The next deadline for the British Academy’s Larger and Small Research Grants is October 2004, and, as outlined in the Notes for Applicants, arts and humanities applicants are strongly advised to contact the AHDS at an early stage in planning their project and application.

The AHDS already hosts many collections funded by the British Academy, particularly in the fields of archaeology and history. Users can locate these collections (there are currently 62 in total) by visiting the AHDS cross-search catalogue (available via ) and entering “British Academy” as a search term. Amongst these collections are the European State Finance Database, deposited by, amongst others, Professor Richard Bonney of the University of Leicester. The database, or rather collection of databases, records data gathered from European fiscal history. Other noted collections include Professor Martin Millett’s Iron and Roman age fieldwork archive from survey work undertaken in the Ave Valley, Porto, Portugal. The John Foxe project, featured elsewhere in this newsletter, has also received funding from the British Academy.

In the final chapters of the popular thriller, the Da Vinci Code, hero and heroine pin their hopes of finding the Holy Grail on King's College London software sifting through a vast digital library of texts for just a few words. Fiction maybe, but such fine-tuned trawls of vast national archives are fast becoming fact as technology advances. Early English Books Online (EEBO) is one example of this.

The site holds digital page images of more than 125,000 books, pamphlets, treatises, sermons, plays and other works published between 1473 and 1700. The originals sit in three catalogues - Pollard and Redgrave, Thomason Tracts and Wing - all previously available on microfilm. Variations in typography, spelling and punctuation, however, make word searches difficult. To solve this, in 1999 the Text Creation Partnership was formed by the universities of Michigan, Oxford and microfilmers ProQuest. The target was to key in a fifth of the works as SGML/XML text.

Now JISC, as part of a deal struck earlier this year with ProQuest to make EEBO free to UK universities and colleges, is calling on UK academics and librarians to choose their favourite texts. A US-based advisory panel will review suggestions. Emma Beer is JISC coordinator of a special UK launch on October 25 at the British Library, which, together with the US Council on Library and Information Resources, is also steering the project. Professor Lisa Jardine will be introducing the day. Beer says: “This is a crucial chance for UK academics to have their say about titles they would like keyed in.”

The TCP has attracted US$6 million (£3.3 million) of which JISC has contributed £750,000 on behalf of all UK further and higher education. This compares with US and Canadian universities, which pay anything up to $50,000 (£28,000) each. ProQuest has matched 20 per cent of contributions. The target is $9 million (£5 million).

EEBO users in the UK are enthusiastic about opening the site to a wider, more diverse audience. Justin Champion, Reader in History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, has used EEBO for nearly six years. “Once you get a taste of what research can be like with EEBO you want more. It transforms how you work. I can work at 2am. I can scribble on my printouts. I’m not restricted by library opening times. I’ve cut my transport costs and time. It’s simply more efficient.”

Champion’s teaching has also changed. “When planning courses I used to take months identifying texts, locating libraries and trying to get the material photocopied. Now I just send students to the URL.”

Richard Sugg, an English lecturer, agrees. He discovered EEBO when he moved to Cardiff in 2001. “Cardiff was one of only a handful of universities that subscribed to EEBO,” he says.

Expense was the main reason. JISC, however, has bought a license in perpetuity. The only charge to institutions is a hosting fee of between £78 and £2,200 a year according to student numbers.

“EEBO’s made a colossal difference to research,” Sugg says. “Arnold Hunt recently wrote in Times Literary Supplement that internet resources such as EEBO have turned research ‘from a labour-intensive handicraft into a mechanised industry’. Before, when writing a book or article, you had to make notes of what you needed to check in primary sources in the British Library or wherever, now once you’ve got your password you just go to EEBO.”

In teaching, EEBO changes the nature of courses. “Students can’t buy or borrow so many texts. With this they can push the limits of their initiative, imagination and industry in a way that not even the most adventurous could have done before unless they lived near a famous library.”

Tim Hitchcock, Professor of 18th-century History at the University of Hertfordshire, has been using EEBO on and off for a couple of years for his research and website on Old Bailey trials. Hitchcock believes that EEBO lends itself to the development of what he calls 'historical forensic linguistics'. “Because the text exists as searchable XML, there is an index of every word that appears. I’d like to see tools for querying these indexes, say, through word proximity statistics. This would revolutionise our understanding of the origins of texts, of the linguistic links between them, and of the influences and copying. This cannot be done on paper, but it could allow us to redraw the intellectual map of early modern Britain.”

Such searches are reliant on accurate text input. The TCP has outsourced keyboarding to three companies in India. Two keyboarders simultaneously transcribe texts and add tagging to capture the structure of the work, such as chapters, paragraphs, etc. A third person checks both transcriptions before sending them off to Michigan and Oxford for sample reviewing. If more than one mistake per 20,000 characters is found, texts are sent back. The current mistake rate is one per 100,000 characters.

Judith Siefring, who works at Oxford Digital Library on the project, says that some 6,500 texts are already available online. Over 250 texts are reviewed each month. “We check and edit the tagging of each text and after that assign types and generally bring the texts up to standard. We have to make editorial changes that take account of the variety of texts, e.g. poetry, prose literature, plays, sermons, almanacs, dictionaries, mathematical treatises, etc.”

Siefring welcomes the extra contact with UK academics JISC involvement is bringing. Across the Atlantic, Shawn Martin, TCP outreach librarian at Michigan University, has found US academics’ requests for texts has varied. “They range from canonical works used in undergraduate classes (Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare) to obscure titles used only in specific graduate seminars or research projects (treatises on windmills, sermons on specific psalms, works on lexicography)."

Martin’s continues. “We try to get as much academic collaboration as possible not only in text selection, but by helping academics with syllabi, scholarly projects, or other initiatives. We have more than 100 libraries internationally supporting this.”

But for Royal Holloway’s Justin Champion there are still “battles to be fought with academics who like to head off to the research library, bury their head in books, have a coffee break and at some point write up their notes. They say IT’s not for them, but if you don’t use the web nowadays it’s like walking around in shackles.” Perhaps they just don’t believe they’ll find their Holy Grail.

An Investigation into Free e-Books, commissioned by the JISC eBooks Working Group, was publicly released in March of this year. The report aimed to investigate two areas – the availability of e-books and the user needs of teaching and learning with e-Books in UK FE & HE. The HE survey (carried out through email lists, archives, internet & literature surveys and through distance and continuing education institutions) found very few examples of actual current use of free e-books in teaching and learning.

Though there is a vast range of e-Books available for exploitation, there are no overarching quality-control practices that might encourage uptake. Surveying indicated that e-Books created within academic departments are of the best quality, but there is no single trusted repository for these e-books. The fact that e-books have developed in a variety of formats has also provided a barrier to coordination of such a repository. The lack of a standardised mark-up structure prevents them being incorporated into collections, searched at a meaningful level or being reformatted for different devices. One solution to this would be to mark up e-books using the tagging schemes set out by the Text Encoding Initiative, so that they could be readily reformatted, aggregated and searched. They could also be easily incorporated into presentations, and Virtual Learning Environments.

Other barriers to the uptake of e-Books in the academic environment include – lack of availability of a complete range of titles for any given course; lack in confidence in the long-term availability of resources; poor design; and the poor ergonomics of reading on screen. Moreover, the costs involved in cataloguing, archiving, and management of resources and in user support, have inhibited uptake.

The report indicated that there were plenty of potential opportunities for promoting e-Books. VLEs might represent an opportunity for delivering e-Books to students. Free e-books tend to come in open formats free of IPR restrictions, which means that they can be more easily repurposed. Free e-books may also be more useful for the humanities disciplines, because there is more use of ‘old’ texts. Whereas many other disciplines require up-to-the-minute editions of publications, there is an inherent interest in first edition and out of print texts within the humanities.

The report recommended that JISC’s e-Book collections were developed with these issues in mind. Specifically, the report recommended that the JISC offer a more comprehensive range of titles in specific areas, support efforts to migrate existing collections to common formats, institute a system of quality assurance, ensure the permanence of collections and support the professional, standardised cataloguing of electronic resources. They also suggested that basic ICT support should be offered to users in use of e-books and for integrating them into VLEs.

The ability to manipulate moving images was nothing new to Roy Wolfe’s second year history students taking his ‘Pathé Newsreel as Historical Evidence’ module at the University of Reading. But Pathé did provide the means to excite his students’ imagination.

Digitised moving images made available both in the commercial sector and through high-quality government-funded initiatives are paving the way for much more sophisticated means of exploring film as a resource in a myriad of disciplines. Critically analysing moving images, in conjunction with other primary and secondary sources, raises important pedagogical questions for both teachers and learners and provides a way of tackling the multi-media skills set requirements.

If John Foxe had published his huge Book of Martyrs for the first time in London in 2004, instead of 1563, the event would probably still have hit the headlines of our daily newspapers. ‘Foxe justifies Terrorists’; ‘Foxe gives Martyrs a Halo’, they might read. If it had been El-Quaida’s underground network that he had been trying to justify in 2004, he would not have found a publisher. And the fact that Foxe, recently returned from several years in exile in the protestant ‘underground’ on the Continent, persuaded his London printer, John Day, to take on the work in the first place says a great deal about the relationship of this intensely polemical work to the newly established and somewhat fragile regime of the Protestant Deborah, Queen Elizabeth I.

The English government had, by the whims of dynasty, fallen into the hands of the terrorists themselves—or, at any rate that is how Elizabeth and her protestant counsellors were often viewed by catholics on the Continent. Foxe’s huge work was, and remained, controversial throughout his lifetime. He spent the next quarter of a century defending it against its critics and rewriting it to refine its polemical impact as the Elizabeth regime consolidated itself. In three successive editions—1570, 1576 and 1583—the work was radically changed. Like a chameleon, it adapted its colours to suit its immediate environment. By the time of Foxe’s death it was a massive work, over two million words long.

There have, of course, been printed editions of John Foxe’s work in the past. The ones most cited are the four successively different unabridged editions published in mid-Victorian England. But their intrusive bowdlerisation of the text did not satisfy the editorial standards of a generation later, let alone those of our own day. They sought to create a composite version of Foxe’s text that would make it satisfy the criteria of a ‘book’ in the sense of an ‘ultimate’ text towards which Foxe had been aiming. They were interested in its apotheosis, not its genesis or gestation. They reprinted, albeit with various amendments, the 1583 edition of the Acts and Monuments (the final one published during Foxe’s own lifetime). They then filleted in additional materials from the 1563 edition—and with some difficulty, since it was by no means clear where the most appropriate places to locate them were. In the process, they omitted additional elements printed in the second and third editions of 1570 and 1576 and ignored the extensive reordering of the text and the reorientation and refinement of the accompanying glosses. It is almost impossible, as a result, to reconstruct Foxe’s text in any of the editions from their pages. Publishing in the context of their own Tractarian battles, they sought to defend the pure truth of evangelical protestantism through Foxe’s work—an aim interesting for its own historical context but useless in a modern edition.

The project has been inspired by the techniques and insight of textual genetics. Our new ‘variorum’ edition retains the original in all its layout, punctuation and typography — not simply because this is what modern editorial practice demands, but because our understanding of Foxe’s purposes, and the difficulties that he encountered in executing his mammoth undertaking, will be impaired if we do not. No one edition is preferred over another. Each edition has been transcribed, along with its glosses. An elaborate online environment has then been created for one edition to be compared with another, and searched independently.

The construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) has provided a unique opportunity to investigate thousands of years of change and development across the landscape. The archaeological programme of works associated with the CTRL is probably the largest ever undertaken in the UK and investigations in advance of and during construction have revealed an impressively rich array of information. This has generated a vast archive of archaeological data and key discoveries have included the first Neolithic long-house to be found in Kent, a Romano-British villa and two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries.

In total, this phase has produced 122 new research archives, including 31 full scale excavations, 14 geophysical and standing building surveys and 77 other interventions. The sizes of the archives vary but include interim reports, data tables, site plans and the like. The fieldwork along the route of the rail link brought together five different field units and numerous specialists and researchers.