The University at Buffalo Libraries Propose a Center of Excellence in Visual & Literary Arts through Digital Technology
PROPOSAL
The University Libraries propose to create a UB Center of Excellence in Visual and Literary Arts through Digital Technology. The Center will be based in the Libraries’ Special Collections in Capen Hall and will draw on the wealth of unique materials found in the Poetry Collection, the University Archives, and the Rare Books Collection, all located there. Special Collections will serve as a laboratory and catalyst, attracting researchers and educators from a wide range of disciplines and prompting them to exploit computing and digital technologies to facilitate creative scholarship – fresh interpretations; digitally reformatted and enhancededitions of texts, archives, and images; and multimedia/multi-disciplinary Internet-based courseware. The proposed Center will prompt innovative instruction on two fronts: instruction and debate will examine the actual process of creating and editing in a digital environment and various art forms will be taught from within the rich contexts in which the works were originally generated. The Center will, therefore, encourage the exploration of poetry, literature, art, and music embracing potential innovations possible with digital technologies with the intent of generating provocative scholarship, opening the Collections to a broader Web audience, and stimulating the creation of exciting, cross-disciplinary courses and educational products/tools.
Specifically, this proposed UB Center of Excellence will have the following objectives:
- Using available and emerging digital technologies – scanning, hypertext, and Internet access – to provide scholars and students with expanded access to rare, unique materials in Special Collections; these materials span an incredible breadth of interests and perspectives from the esoteric James Joyce Ulysses manuscripts to the socially significant Love Canal Archives to the pop culture George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection;
- Studying the viability of using digital technology to preserve unique, aging media and investigating the copyright complexities associated with expanding access to digitally preserved objects. Center scholars will examine the legalities of reformatting one-of-a-kind and deteriorating paper documents, explore the implications of shaping/reshaping the meanings of selected texts through the process of visual digital display, and debate the appropriateness and legality of placing original and derivative materials on the Web or restricting their use to an in-house-only network.
- Pulling together a multidisciplinary spectrum of UB educators and scholars who will develop course assignments, hold seminars, and conduct full courses based on the primary materials found in Special Collections. By viewing these materials as artistic or popular manifestations of the culture and time in which they were created, scholars and students can transform Special Collections into the equivalent of an archeological dig from which precious, forgotten, or unexplored ranges of original artistic material can resurface and be examined in relation to their diverse and complex historical perspectives.
- Studying the paradigm shift in editorial theory inherent in the creation of new digital “editions” of manuscripts, a scholarly effort that is focused on process rather than product. The “definitive edition” concept is radically redefined by digital age scholarship to incorporate new and original interpretations, meaning, and content. The Center will be a place where scholars will both practice new types of editing as permitted by the digital environment and simultaneously theorize regarding the implications of the editorial process itself.
- Developing multimedia, cross-disciplinary, instructional presentations, and courseware – exportable/commercial products – using the materials gathered in Special Collections – literary manuscripts and notebooks, letters, photographs, textual notes, articles, cover art – and drawing on experts and scholars from all areas of the University – Education, Communications, Computer Science, Media Studies, Architecture and Design, History, English as well as from the Libraries and the Libraries’ Educational Technology Center (ETC) – to expand the availability of the UB treasure materials to teachers and students at UB and beyond who would otherwise not have access to them.
- Producing scholarly editions – electronic but, also, paper-based – of letters, photographs, and manuscripts with an emphasis on exploiting digital technology and the Internet to store, arrange, present, market, and disseminate the products generated.
- Prompting scholarly partnerships and multi-institutional grants based on extensions of the various Center goals to include external scholars and complementary, primary material collections from other libraries.
CONTEXT
The University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection was founded in 1937 under the direction of Charles D. Abbott with a policy to collect first editions of poetry published in English and in the 20th century. Abbott also collected manuscripts, little magazines, and critical studies about poetry. He proposed – a revolutionary idea at the time – to investigate the growth of a poem from the first holograph versions, to edited typescripts, to magazine introduction, and, finally, to book publication, a creative continuum he illustrated in his collection of essays entitled Poets at Work (1948). With the acquisition of large manuscript collections of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Graves, The Jargon Society, Robert Kelley, Basil Bunting, John Montague, Helen Adam, and Robert Duncan; the acquisition of 5,000 runs of little magazines – the largest collection of its kind in the country; and the steady purchase of books that flesh out and explicate the artistic and historical context in which 20th century English poetry was written, The Poetry Collection has grown and matured into a major research library. It is uniquely developed to exploit digital technologies to document the creative process of these icons of contemporary poetry.
Literary history usually focuses on well-known poets and defined movements, a focus that frequently passes over the secondary, and often more vital and energetic poets and movements of a given era. However, the Poetry Collection’s policy of collecting without prejudice has produced a comprehensive literary archive in which underground punk and zine poets are represented on par with canonized poets and established literary movements. The collecting policy introduced by Abbott and adhered to by his predecessors has generated an archive at UB that can support the study of a wide range of materials – private and small presses, little magazines with their different worlds of reviewing and recognition, films, audio and video tapes of poetry readings, letters, photographs, and art – from within the context of the literary and artistic cultures in which they were created. It can easily support a wealth of in-depth, original scholarship regarding 20th-century American poetry, literature, music, and art with a focus on less recognized movements and forgotten participants in these disciplines. This eclectic collection is also uniquely suited to digital/hypertext interpretation. The proposed Center, therefore, would encourage scholars to “dig” into the Collections, prompt them to research and bring to light that which may have been overlooked, buried, and forgotten; it would support/encourage examination of that which has been under-researched or unexplored.
Some scholarly movements, the New Historicists, for example, argue that images and narratives do important cultural work, that they function as a workshop/playroom where societal problems, hopes, and obsessions are either addressed or avoided. It can be argued that an effective framework for interpreting American poetry, literature, music, and art is to place it in its historical context where it can be considered in relation to the contemporaneous issues, anxieties, and struggles that it either reflects, refracts, or tries to work through. The Center will provide an environment in which this type of examination can take place; the Collections facilitate this sort of historical, contextual analysis. The recent gift of 40,000 original volumes of pulp fiction (The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection) enhances the potential for examination of literature and art in its cultural context, and as a reflection of cultural trends and undercurrents. The Frank Lloyd Wright/Darwin Martin letters, held by the University Archives, also present the unique opportunity to study the creative process from concept through negotiation, to realization and cultural influence. Superimposed on this creative possibility is the whole new dimension introduced by the process of generating digital texts, of selecting/cropping images, of choosing hypertext linkages, of shaping meaning, therefore, through decisions regarding placement and display. Digital texts produced by the Center will not only call attention to the contingencies of the original historical circumstances of the primary material’s production, but they will also prompt examination of their digital transformation/resurrection/ reconstruction in the present.
This proposal to create a Center of Excellence based in Special Collections builds on Abbott’s vision by using digital technology – especially, the multimedia linking capabilities that empower the Internet – to enhance multidisciplinary scholarship, expand scholarly access to materials that have until now been hidden from many investigating the new creative process of editing texts and objects in a digital environment, and generating educational products that will enable teachers to develop courses based on the Collection’s holdings. It is this product creation that will eventually sustain the Center:
- It will attract grants from agencies interested in sponsoring the development of innovative instructional strategies.
- Access to Web-mounted products will generate subscription fees.
- Workshops to demonstrate the product generation methodologies to an audience beyond UB will raise money to support on-going work.
- The established product development team can eventually work for other institutions that wish to create similar efforts using Center facilities; our teams can mine other collections for hire.
PROOF OF CONCEPT
The basic idea for the Center and its proof of concept flows from a series of projects sponsored by the Poetry Collection and undertaken over the past decade by the Libraries’ Charles D. Abbott Scholar, Dr. Robert J. Bertholf:
- To advance the reputation of the Collection in the fields of Textual Study and Digital Technology, Dr. Bertholf set up an international research team composed of Professor Daniel Ferrer of l’Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes du CNRS in Paris; Professor Geert Lernout of The Joyce Centre at The University of Antwerp; Vincent Deane, an independent scholar in Dublin who has gathered a massive amount of information about Joyce; and Sam Slote in Buffalo, an accomplished textual scholar. This team has prepared and published nine volumes of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks: The Buffalo Edition. The edition follows the principles of genetic criticism established by Charles D. Abbott. It presents high-definition, digitally scanned images of manuscript pages along with transcriptions, textual notes, and sources. The edition tracks the evolution of the creation of passages from the manuscripts to the printed text. Also, it demonstrates that the materials housed in Special Collections are of international interest and sufficient depth/breadth to support this proposed “mining” effort.
- The Poetry Collection began experimenting with multimedia authoring tools as early as 1997, building the CD-ROM Here: Fifty Years of Poetry in Buffalo, a hypertext history of the Collection.
- In 2002, Dr. Bertholf envisioned, negotiated, and led the development of another literary CD-ROM project, Huckleberry Finn: The Complete Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Manuscript, Teaching, and Research Digital Edition, in cooperation with the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. The Huckleberry Finn CD presented the complete scanned manuscripts of the novel, transcriptions, textual notes, and more than 400 articles about the novel and about teaching it. The CD demonstrated the feasibility of ordering vast amounts of text and images in a hypertext format.
- Also, in 2002, The Poetry Collection received a Mellon Foundation grant – the first such award to come to UB – to devise an effective digital, Internet-based solution for presenting texts and the Collection’s manuscripts of James Joyce Ulysses. An XML architecture was designed to index, store, and present digital images of the manuscripts on the Internet, thereby, making it possible to study the textual variants of this complex novel with speed and accuracy.
In each of these digitally enabled presentations, Dr. Bertholf advanced the technology used and also advanced the presentation of the information being studied. Each project illustrated the feasibility of using digital technology to enhance teaching; each demonstrated the importance of using manuscripts to understand the creative process and the final meaning of published works. Most of the projects used hypertext linkages to explicate textual passages, to link manuscript pages to edited typescripts and then to variant editions and, thereby, demonstrated the creative process of bringing a literary work to life. Some projects used appropriate art, music, letters, and related ephemera to place the studied works in historical context. Other projects showed the viability of partnering with scholars and institutions outside of UB to enrich the base of resources utilized and to diversify intellectual viewpoints and skill sets. Poets, scholars, designers, and computer programmers worked cooperatively and effectively.
Large collections of literary manuscripts are now very expensive. Two 20th century poets of note, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, recently received a million dollars each for their archives. The University Libraries in the future will be able to purchase smaller collections, but it will not have the resources to purchase large collections or items on the scale of the Joyce manuscripts. However, operating as a Center of Excellence, the Libraries’ Special Collections has the opportunity to establish itself as a leader in the technology and design of pedagogical presentations of literary manuscripts and in the investigation of digital archiving, presentation, and editing theory. The Poetry Collection, the University Archives, and the Rare Books Collection hold masses of unique, interwoven materials from which assembled teams of UB scholars can mold innovative, expansive syllabi, all playing off the basic intellectual concepts that prompted Mr. Abbott to start his collection experiment back in the 1930s.
OPPORTUNITIES
The development of a UB Center of Excellence in Visual and Literary Arts through Digital Technology in the Libraries’ Special Collections would provide the following opportunities:
1. To create a multidisciplinary Center team to generate ideas, advance explorations, set priorities, and manage Center-related activities:
One exciting aspect of this proposed Center is the realistic opportunity it poses for bringing together scholars from such a wide range of technical, humanities, and social sciences disciplines. Library science and Communications participants are to be expected; literature scholars interested either in the content or the process of digital editing would be natural partners; education experts – including staff from the ETC – interested in new modes of teaching using technology could play a core role; art and design specialists would be necessary players. The possibilities for cross-disciplinary cooperation and fertilization are exciting to contemplate. The Center would welcome the diverse perspectives of scholars interested in American Studies, popular culture, film studies, music, politics, art, urban studies, feminist studies, and queer studies as they relate to American literature and culture.
2. To renovate Special Collections to facilitate use in a digital environment:
This will entail physical renovation of the entire area – the sectioning off of the existing reading room to create high tech seminar rooms, effective exhibition space, and private carrels for visiting scholars – as well as a concerted effort to update reader space and equipment. The security of the reading room is an issue that would be addressed. This would be an opportunity to bring in another potential partner, the School of Architecture and Planning, to turn a dated room presently devoted to the use of paper products into a modern laboratory to experiment with, create, and use digital products.
3. To complete the cataloging of Special Collections, placing collection-level records in OCLC’s WorldCat and detailed, item-specific finding tools on the Collections’ website, and by creating databases to enhance scholarly inquiry:
Attracting users to the materials in the Cllections necessitates making those materials accessible. While the physical environment is being prepared for its new role, the description of the materials on which the Center will focus must be completed. Then, scholars and center staff can create extensive databases to further enhance the research and teaching potential of the collections and generated products.
4. To scan selected archives from the Collections to serve as examples of the concept:
The renovated Special Collections area is envisioned as a workroom where students and scholars will be able to view and study materials. One Center goal is to study the process of preserving and reformatting fragile documents as digital objects/collections and then to establish how copyright law permits the presentation of that material. The scanned Ulysses manuscripts, for example, cannot be published, but they could be used in place of the fragile paper originals at workstations in Special Collections. Part of the work of setting up the Center will be developing impressive presentations of digital products such as the Ulysses scans to demonstrate the possibilities of the technology and inspire spin-off creations. Groupings ripe for such demonstrations include:
- Love Canal documents,
- Correspondence of Frank Lloyd Wright and Darwin D. Martin,
- Little magazine collection,
- George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection (both the text and the cover images)
5. To enlist UB instructors to base classes and courses on materials in the Collections:
Once the Center is constituted, the opportunity arises to begin offering innovative, high-tech courses based on the content. Topics in poetry and literature can and should be expanded to music, art/art history, media, and cultural studies. Suggested examples are listed for consideration:
- American Surrealism and the 1940s and/or during WWII
- The literature, art, music and context of the Beat Generation and/or during the 1950s
- Poetry of the 1960s and the Vietnam Era
- The underground literary press including the 1960s radical culture; feminist, gay, and monitories movements; zine and punk culture
- Feminist cultural studies since WWII
- American popular culture as expressed in and/or influenced by the ubiquitous paperback novel
- Comics and American culture
- Visual poetry since 1955
6. To attract innovative students and scholars to UB:
The Center will provide scholarship opportunities on a wide variety of fronts to attract students to UB. Graduate assistantships covering a range of applications from the procedures of textual scholarship, to applied computer design, to popular culture studies, to new teaching pedagogies will be established. The Center can offer short-term fellowships to make the variety and depth of the collections better known. Visiting Ph.D. candidates and professors from international universities could be recruited for summer reading/study grants.
7. To create marketable, digital products based on the content in Special Collections:
The Collections contain rich and often unique materials, which can be used to make innovative, marketable products. Such projects will teach students about the creative process and/or to show how literature and information resources derive their meaning from its their historical and cultural contexts:
- Products related to Beat Literature, the San Francisco Renaissance, women and minority poets since 1950, comics, paperback cover art, and fringe artistic movements – concrete and visual poetry, mail art, performance poetry – could be created.
- Modeled on the Huckleberry Finn CD, self contained or Web-based presentations could be made of Wyndham Lewis’s process of writing and revision, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Anne Waldman’s poetry, and paperback fiction in its cultural context.
8. To study the creation/editing process with regard to moving information from paper-based to digital formats:
Scholars will be involved not only in digitizing materials in order to allow for wider dissemination, but they will explore and engage in current controversies/issues regarding editorial theory. The Center is envisioned as a place where poetics scholars and scholars of textual theory can meet in an environment that encourages the exploration of the relationships between contemporary textual and literary theory.
9. To revitalize the Electronic Poetry Center:
The Electronic Poetry Center, which began in the University Libraries and is now floundering away from its bibliographic sources, could be returned to the Center, and brought up to date so that it too projects the excellence of UB’s holdings and the excellence of its digital technology.
10. To cast a net beyond UB, partnering with external scholars and institutions and mining external collections:
Some of the projects enabled by the existence of an established, vital Center could encourage partnerships with other institutions and with scholars from other universities. The Finnegans Wake Notebooks: The Buffalo Edition project described earlier demonstrates the ability of an innovative effort to pull in a distributed team of experts on a particular topic. A recent publication of Dr. Bertholf’s, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, demonstrates a project for which half the letters and one editor came from Stanford to complement letters and the second editor located here at UB.
- The Robert Graves Trust, located at St. John’s College, Oxford, and is now starting a small, web-based project which UB could join and contribute its huge collection of Graves manuscripts.
- The National Library of Ireland, to which UB loaned James Joyce manuscripts for this summer’s celebration of the 100th Bloomsday Anniversary, has inquired about our willingness to exchange digital images of the Ulysses manuscripts that UB owns in exchange for images of the pages owned by the NLI.
- Libraries such as Bowling Green University and UC Riverside have expressed interest in joint grants for digitizing pulp fiction text and art, and the creation of research databases that would enable intense scholarship on the content and cultural impact of this literature.
- The University of Michigan Libraries are interested in a partnership to develop digital products related to comic book content and art.
As the Center generates products, it is likely that the expertise of the assembled scholars, designers, and technicians will be in demand: other institutions with unique primary materials will pay the Center to transform/reformat their treasures.
11. To attract donations and grants:
The Libraries Special Collections have always been a focus of generous donations. Issues related to the acquisition, preservation, cataloging, and reformatting of these treasures has inspired the interest and generosity of local benefactors and alumni. The creation of a visible, active Center focused on Special Collections is likely to stimulate giving. At the same time, the timely issues on the Center’s agenda will make it possible for associated scholars to secure a variety of grants.
FUNDING
The renovation of Special Collections can be funded with a combination of State capital dollars and donations. The existing area is now 25 years old and in need of an upgrade. This would be a one-time infusion for start-up equipment and furniture costs and for general physical rehab expenses. Approximately $250K would be needed.
An infusion of one-time money will be needed to fund the start-up, demonstration projects. The digital Ulysses project proved the attractiveness of this type of venture that would be granted additional stature by the creation of the Center and the full backing of the University. $1M would fund a variety of impressive digital reformatting efforts, several for in-house use and several to test the marketability of instructional product sets. Half of this sum could be raised through grants if the University matched that sum.
The creation of digitally enabled course syllabi based on the content in Special Collections could be funded through several years of special competitive grants overseen by the Educational Technology Center (ETC) and funded by the CIO’s operation and the Technology Fee.
Ongoing costs of the established Center would be covered by the creation and sale of marketable digital teaching products and digitally formatted editions and databases of images and manuscripts.
Libraries Contacts:
Stephen Roberts, Assistant VP for Libraries
John Edens, Assistant Director for Technical Services
Michael Basinski, Curator of the Poetry Collection
Judith Adams-Volpe, Director of the Arts & Sciences Libraries
Austin Booth, Director of the Arts & Sciences Libraries
Carole Ann Fabian, Director of the Educational Technology Center
Mark Ludwig, Manager of Library Systems
Created: 7 April, 2005