To: Ronald W. Tobin, Associate Vice Chancellor Academic Programs
2150 Kerr Hall
Fr: Patricia Fumerton, Director, Early Modern Center
Re: Proposal for Instructional Improvement Grant, July 1, 2004-June 30, 2005
Abstract:
The English Department's Early Modern Center requests funds to expand
its digital archive in order to enhance its undergraduate specialization
in early modern studies. The Center has already established the basis
of a large, fully-searchable Picture Gallery, with Slideshow feature (mostly
through Instructional Improvement Grants for 2001-2002 and 2003-2004).
We also this year created a prototype for a new English Ballad Archive,
1500-1700. Beginning this summer, and during the requested grant period
for 2004-2005, we plan:
a) further work on the Picture Gallery: addition of more images together
with their full identification and keywording (not only from the slide
collections of English department faculty but also from the holdings of
other Humanities faculty in early modern studies, such a those of Anita
Guerrini in the History Department and Simon Williams in Dramatic Arts);
and quarterly instruction to all interested UC early modernists in the
use of the gallery database and slideshow feature.
b) groundwork for the English Ballad Archive, 1500-1700. Funds would be
used to gather together ballads from microfilm into a fully searchable
database. This is preparative to mounting three undergraduate classes
over a three-year period devoted to modernizing and editing the online
ballads, as well as to composing and mounting online introductory essays
that place the ballads in their full cultural context. The result would
be a ballads archive usable by early modern faculty in many courses, especially
the large English Department survey courses, 1500-1800.
Narrative:
The English Department's Early Modern Center, established in 2000, is
the first of the many such proclaimed "Centers" on the web to
create a space for collaboration between faculty, graduate students, and
undergraduates in the advancement of cultural studies of England, 1500-1800,
through state-of-the-art computing resources. I should emphasize that
the work of the Center (as of most of the English Department's faculty
these days) is to advance cultural studies, that is, studies of literature
in the context of cultural phenomena (painting, architecture, politics,
religion, and the like). Such cultural study characterizes the very cutting
edge of literary criticism today and is, by definition, involved in an
interdisciplinary enterprise that often involves other campus departments,
such as Art History, History, and Music. What makes our Center unique
is the sheer number of faculty in the English Department engaged in such
studies of the early modern period (no less than 9), our timely extension
of the term "early modern" to include Renaissance as well as
Eighteenth Century, and our placing the faculty and their students together
in a facility that puts at their disposal the most advanced electronic
equipment and databases available in the profession to date. But we do
not aim merely to provide a "lab" for computing and collaborative
work. We aim to provide (and have already laid the groundwork for) a large
and deep archive of electronic resources that will continue to grow and
be used by faculty and students for years to come. Our web page can be
found at http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/. Since parts of the site, such as
the Picture Gallery, are password protected, I have created a temporary
username and password for reviewers of this grant, so that you may view
the full site when you login. The username you may use is "senate"
and the password is "grant04." Since you may not have a computer
in front of you as you read this proposal, I have also printed out some
of the pages from the site that are especially relevant to this proposal.
These are included in Appendix A (printouts of the Picture Gallery search
page; sample products of a gallery search; the Slideshow Creation page;
a sample Slideshow Manager page; and a sample page of a slideshow viewing)
and in Appendix B (mock-up home page of our planned Ballad Archive; a
sample ballad entry in quick page view and in enlarged blackletter (gothic)
and in whiteletter (roman) font, as well as a sample of completed category
entries from the header links for the ballad, “Anne Wallens Lamentation”).
a) Picture Gallery:
In 2000 the EMC was awarded an Instructional Improvement Grant in order
to advance its 2001-02 theme of Early Modern Visual Culture (every year
the Center mounts courses and events around a chosen theme, which culminates
for undergraduates in a spring conference; at this conference undergraduates
deliver presentations arising out of the theme courses they took that
year). Part of the grant monies went toward mounting course syllabi, creating
online readers, and developing online resources for the students' use
on Visual Culture. All these materials remain in the EMC archive. But
more importantly, in advancing the Visual Culture theme, the majority
of the Instructional Improvement Grant went toward the creation of a searchable
database of images, 1500-1800. The idea behind the creation of this database
was to begin the process of housing, in easily searchable form, all images
used in courses and research by UCSB early modern faculty and graduate
students. The English department was and is in a unique position to do
this because we alone, among the Humanities departments, have our own
Server (Windows not Unix), which supports the sophisticated database program
SQL Server 2000. It should be noted that, while LSIT would house images
for a department or individual faculty member, it will not support and
maintain a database. Our Server is maintained by a full-time staff person,
Brian Reynolds, as well as by the faculty member Alan Liu and a small
group of technologically-advanced graduate students. So the English department
has the special means to answer the pressing call for a searchable database
of images. It should also be noted that the demand for such a database
for use in instruction is high. Our images cannot simply be accessed from
other sites on the web because they represent the corpus of images our
individual faculty and students use in their individual courses. My teaching
of literature and visual culture, for instance, draws in one week on about
50 of the sketches made by Inigo Jones for the court masques of seventeenth-century
England. Only a few of these images are available via other web sites
and, even if I were only to need those few images, skipping around from
one to another link would be cumbersome and time-consuming. Our goal,
first and foremost, was to build an archive of images that would be quickly
searchable and specifically suited to UCSB English Department courses.
During the grant period, we came a long way to doing just that. A graduate
student computer programmer worked in SQL Server to create a robust database
for holding and searching images, and other students worked on scanning
in slides and book illustrations, which they stored on our Server. Over
1,000 images were mounted in 3 different sizes (thumbnail for quick viewing,
medium for more detail, and large for up-close viewing). Every image was
identified by artist, title, date, location, media, and keywords, and
is searchable by these categories individually and in combination. Products
of a search produce thumbnail images which include an ID number. If clicked
on, the thumbnail presents a medium-sized image with full information
about the picture, and if that image is clicked on the large-sized image
appears. Though we began to run out of time and money by the end of the
funding period, the programmer managed to put together a rudimentary interface
by which slideshows could be created from the resulting Picture Gallery.
In the course of 2002-2003, with about $2,500 in funding from the English
Department and the College of Letters and Science, the EMC was able to
create most of a new slideshow feature, which includes within it a search
engine that draws on the gallery database. This is an extraordinarily
sophisticated interface, which allows instructors to create digital slideshows
in a matter of minutes.
In 2003-2004, with another Instructional Development Grant, the EMC completed
the slideshow feature. Users can now not only search the Picture Gallery
from the Slideshow feature, but can also edit information about the images
without going to a separate area of the site. We also increased security
of the ste. Our intent was to restrict full access to the gallery and
slideshow to UC faculty and students who are using the database primarily
for instructional purposes (with occasional permission extended to faculty
outside the UC system on a temporary teaching basis). We created three
tiers of access: level 1, for administration of the site; level 2, for
faculty and graduate students; and level 3, for undergraduates (this lowest
level allows viewing access to all areas of the site for the period of
one academic year). Fortunately, one of the graduate students in our department
who is expert in SQL server is also specializing in early modern studies,
and she was both able and willing to complete work on the gallery's slideshow.
Once the slideshow feature was complete and secure, we continued to build
the gallery, adding more images digitized from the slide and book collections
of English Department faculty and graduate students. In the spirit of
the EMC’s goal to share its resources with all UC faculty, we then
began our process of incorporating images of interested early modern faculty
across the humanities, beginning with the large digitized collection of
Sears McGee in the History Department. We have now scanned Professor McGee’s
images into our database in 3 sizes and added complete information and
keywords for each image. This took considerable time, since in many cases
Professor McGee’s images were minimally identified (as is natural
in a personal collection). We have now completed this task, and the EMC
Picture Gallery has increased its holdings from about 1,000 to some 4,000
images.
With funding for 2004-2005, we wish to continue to build the Picture Gallery
by adding more images of interested faculty, such as the holdings of Anita
Guerrini in the History Department and the large collection of Simon Williams
in Dramatic Arts. As time and funding allow, we will reach out to other
affiliated faculty as well. We will also continue our practice of offering
regular demonstrations of the gallery and slideshow database to interested
early modernists across the humanities disciplines.
As I hope is evident, the EMC gallery and slideshow feature have the potential
to reach and affect in significant ways the instruction of thousands of
undergraduates at UCSB. In terms of the early modern courses affected
within the English department alone, they include the 5 large lecture
courses (of 200 students each)--English 15: Introduction to Shakespeare;
English 101: English Literature from Medieval Period to 1650; English
102: English and American Literature from 1650 to 1789; English 105A:
Early Shakespeare; and English 105B: Later Shakespeare–as well as
the many courses of 35 students and the senior seminars of 15. This year,
for instance, early modernists will have fielded four English 197s of
15 students each and eight courses of 35 students each: English 128: Satire;
English, 151JA: Jane Austin; English, 151SP: Swift and Pope; English 157:
English Renaissance Drama; English 160: Milton; English 165VA: Literature
and the Visual Arts; and English 172: Studies in Enlightenment. As the
pioneer of the new Slideshow feature, I myself by the end of this year
will have used the database to teach English 105A (200 students), English
197 (15 students), English 231 (15 students), English 165FD (35 students),
and English 165VA (35 students). As Professor McGee’s email indicates,
he envisages that the Gallery (and our allied next project, the Ballad
Archive, discussed below) will provide material for use in his large lecture
classes History 4B, Western Civilization, 1050-1715 (over 300 students)
and in History 140A, Tudor Britain, and History 140B, Stuart Britain (from
50-70 students each)–courses he regularly repeats. Without exaggeration,
the impact of the EMC Picture Gallery and Slideshow on undergraduate teaching
is enormous and growing.
b) English Ballad Archive, 1500-1700:
Blackletter broadside ballads represented the largest percentage of published
works in the early modern period. Printed on quickly degradable, cheap
paper, decorated with worn woodcuts (so that they were pasted up on the
cottage or alehouse walls as the poor man's oil painting), and sung to
popular tunes, these ballads were sold on the streets in quantity along
with other perishable items, such as fruit. Because of their cheapness
and fragility, most such ballads have been lost. But there are still some
7,000-8,000 extant blacketter ballads. These are the most important of
the early modern ballads for those interested in interdisciplinary studies
because after 1700 the ornate blackletter print disappears in favor of
plain roman type, and the number of woodcuts and other ornaments significantly
decline (as does the size of the ballads, which often become little more
than slips of paper). Despite their importance, however, blackletter ballads
are scattered about in different collections and difficult–in some
cases impossible--to access in their original format. About a third of
the extant English ballads, 1500-1700, can be found in the Early English
Books Online database (EEBO; to which UCSB subscribes). A large portion
(from the Pepys collection) have been published in near-unreadable facsimiles,
and another large portion (most importantly, the Roxburghe collection)
are available in modern editions, which do not reproduce the original
ornament of the ballad. The rest of the ballads can only be found on microfilm.
The first stage of our project, then–the period for which we are
requesting funding--is to make these scattered and only partially accessible
ballads fully available to undergraduates by locating all of the ballads
in a single online searchable database in their original format, with
the ability to enlarge the text and ornament for easier viewing and reading.
We will begin with the two largest collection of blackletter ballads,
the Pepys collection of 1,175 ballads (which reside at Magdalene College,
Cambridge) and the Roxburghe collection of some 3,000 ballads (at the
British Library, London). Using my own research monies, I have purchased
the complete microfilm set of both of these ballad collections. Drawing
on the same funds, I plan to have the microfilm converted into high quality
TIFF images by the company Softfile, in Sacramento. During the period
for which we are requesting funding, graduate student assistants will
then render the digitized images in 3 sizes and mount them into the Ballad
Archive as well as provide for each ballad basic citation (to title, author,
printer, date, tune, etc.) as well as keywords.
Once we have the Pepys and Roxburghe ballads in the database in this rudimentary
form, we can then begin the next phase of our project. In this phase,
undergraduates will be trained, through a series of courses taught by
myself, to transcribe the often difficult-to-read blackletter (or gothic)
print into easily readable modern roman type. The latter will not replace
the former, however. Rather, viewers will be able to toggle back and forth
between the blackletter and roman letter ballad, without losing any of
the original ornament. In addition, undergraduates, together with graduate
students, will be involved in recovering the tunes to about a dozen of
these ballads, which we play online. Finally, the students will write
essays that culturally place the ballads, annotations that explain difficult
terms, and links between ballads that illustrate the circulation of ballad
tunes, woodcuts, texts, and the like. We have created a prototype of what
the final Ballad Archive Project site would look like. You may visit the
site at: http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/ (hardcopy printouts
of some of the pages have been appended to this proposal in Appendix B).
The series of undergraduate ballad courses will teach valuable skills
to undergraduates: editing, webwork, and critical analysis. The number
of students that will be directly affected by the courses will not be
huge: three such ballad courses might total some 100 students. But the
product of these courses will be a ballad archive that could be used in
teaching the English Departments two introductory early modern lectures
courses (of 200 students each), English 101 and 102, our many Shakespeare
lecture courses (since Shakespeare frequently cites ballads in his plays),
as well as other early modern classes interested in popular or lower-order
culture. Indeed, teachers at all levels of education will find much use
of the Ballad Archive. For the first time teachers will be able to search
easily the extant pre-1700 English ballads for curriculum materials on
the early modern period as well as a wide range of subject matters. Because
the ballads will be transcribed into modern roman print as well as fully
annotated, they will be available as individual artifacts or as historical
documents in courses of various kinds and at all levels. The relatively
simple and direct language of the ballads makes it possible for even high
school students to appreciate. To enhance their usefulness as curriculum
materials, ballad images in the archive will be printable in readable
form, with full ornament, on 8 ½ x 11 paper (an option unavailable
to date on any online site).
I should add that our end goal is free access of our archive to all. The
Pepys Library, which has withheld permission to reproduce its ballads
from the Early English Books Online (EEBO), has granted such permission
to the EMC, for the reasonable fee of 500 pounds sterling, which I have
paid from my person research funds. With this important permission success,
we hope more easily to obtain reproduction permissions from the British
Library and other holders of early modern ballads as well, so that our
Ballad Archive can be made freely available in the fullest sense. (Until
we have such permission, we shall password protect the ballads as we currently
do all the images in the EMC’s Picture Gallery.) The end product
will thus provide scholars and teachers with, in the truest sense of the
word, access: access in a single location to an as yet often unreachable
resource, both textually, visually, aurally, and culturally. We will in
the process open up new avenues for scholarship and teaching hitherto
unavailable in early modern and modern studies.
I have included letters of enthusiasm for our planned Ballad Archive (Appendix
C) from Professor Sears McGee and Anita Guerrini in the History Department,
UCSB; Professor Ann Jensen Adams in Art History, UCSB; Tim Cooley in the
Music Department, UCSB; Professor Deborah Harkness in the History Department,
UC-Davis; Don Wayne in the Department of Literature, UC-San Diego; and
Shawn Martin, Project Librarian for the Early English Books Online at
the University of Michigan.S