Published every two weeks, Sept. 26th, 2001

Early English Books Project Meets at Northwestern

The 21st century is in the process of repaying the debt it owes to the philosophers, mathematicians, and dreamers of 16th and 17th. When finished, Early English Books Online, or EEBO for short, will bring almost every work published between 1475 and 1700 in England—125,000 in all—to the computer monitor in your home or office, not only as browsable reproductions of printed pages, to be read like a book on the screen, but also as electronic text, in which every occurrence of a requested word or phrase can be located and collated with every other occurrence of that same word or phrase elsewhere in a vast electronic library of Renaissance and Restoration England.

As of June 2001, 52 universities in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere in the world, Northwestern among them, were contributing members of the EEBO’s Text Creation Partnership, or TCP, working under the leadership of the University of Michigan, Oxford University, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and together with ProQuest Information and Learning (the name of the firm that was once University Microfilms). The initial goal of the TCP is to create searchable SGML-tagged text versions of 25,000 EEBO titles over a five-year period, concentrating on the first editions listed in a standard compilation, the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL).

This past July, representatives of seven TCP member institutions in the Midwest met at Northwestern University Library for a two-day “summer camp” to help create the all-important “interface” that will stand between users of these texts and (literally) millions of pages of electronic text. Imagine this interface as a kind of dashboard on your computer, with adjustable controls a driver will need to navigate through this virtual Renaissance library. It is, of course, very important that the drivers get the controls that they will need to get safely and quickly to their destination.

Among the participants of EEBO Summer Camp were students and faculty members of English and history departments at the universities of Notre Dame, Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Northwestern. Librarians, especially subject specialists in English and history, were paired with their respective faculty, and computing specialists—some also with Ph.D.s in humanities disciplines—noted carefully what the future users of the full-text database said they would need.

Staff from the main TCP office in Ann Arbor returned home with thick quires of notes and suggestions. Though sorting through it all will take a long time and careful analysis, the team charged with creating the interface got what it hoped for. They will now set to work creating a powerful “Renaissance computer” such as the one the likes of John Donne and Thomas Hobbes dreamed of 400 years ago.

Display of encoded, searchable text from a work by John Knox (1505-1572), The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women. 56 leaves. [Printed By J. Poullain and A. Rebul], [Geneva]: 1558. Image above courtesy EEBO/EEBO-TCP.

For a longer version of this report, visit the author's website. Click here to use EEBO at Northwestern (currently showing page images only). To see what the future (and the past!) have in store for Northwestern humanists and historians, try out the EEBO-TCP’s demonstration site. For general information on the EEBO Text Creation Partnership (including a detailed technical report of the Northwestern “summer camp”), visit the project site at the University of Michigan.