The site isn’t live yet, but attendees were able to have a play with the beta version, and I found it very impressive. First thing I did was check for cases of monetary crime in the 17th and 18th centuries, and their distribution across the region. In a couple of minutes, I had formulated a query and got it displayed in front of me. St James Clerkenwell, St Giles in the Fields and St Martins in the Fields, all outside the City of London, came out top. It has been suggested that coining was a pursuit often practiced in slums; all three areas contained notorious rookeries.

This was a quick experiment and one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. The number of cases was quite low – just 9 in St Giles, if memory serves. Population density and geographical size of the parish need to be taken into account. But it does illustrate the possibilities, and the ease of use, of this site.

There were a few bugs and problems. The old difficulty of markers overlapping one another hasn’t been solved with this site. A toggleable, full-window view of the map would be useful, as zooming in on an area pushes its neighbours out of sight, diminishing context. The lack of unique URLs makes bookmarking and referencing very difficult.

I also felt that it was difficult to see landmarks and thus orient oneself: a number of the test cases claimed to show marked differences between the City proper and Westminster, but without this political geography being explicitly marked on the map it looked more like a contrast between an indistinct west and east. And if this boundary had been explicit, the picture may have been described in a different way. I have a hunch that there are very important divergences between the City of London within the Walls, and the extramural wards. This is not easy to see on the site as it stands.

A concluding discussion on digital history and GIS covered issues such as the lack of an academic GIS infrastructure, the lack of training available and the possibilities of importing and exporting data. The need for easy mapping software was only briefly raised, although the website dotspotting was recommended.

What struck me later was that Locating London’s Past wasn’t your standard GIS-based website but a real investigative tool, requiring a high level of engagement on the part of the user. With many map-centric websites one can do little more than take a virtual walk through an area, looking at a restricted range of points. With LLP, one has to formulate a question, translate it into a search query and then analyze the output, which may be suggestive in itself but by no means obvious. The difference is partly due to the enormous quantity of geo-referenced data LLP has, so much that it cannot all fit on a map. But there’s a qualitative aspect as well, that puts the stress not on cartography but on the database. Without a question, there is nothing to see.

Tim Hitchcock has said that London is the most digitized city in the world. More of its records have been made available online than anywhere else in the world. There’s more to do of course, most notably in relation to areas transpontine, but the focus now has to be on how we use this material. Locating London’s Past offers not just a visualization of data, but also a way of thinking about different uses of it.

TCP Releases Over 4,000 New EEBO-TCP Texts

What the Public Release of ECCO-TCP Texts Means for You, Now and in the Future

Unfortunately, they didn’t make the texts easily accessible. To obtain them one had to apply by email to be subscribed to a Dropbox folder. There is a database and search interface, but it requires registration, and is unclear as to who qualifies for an account. I think that the database holds the marked up, XML texts, which have not (yet) been publicly released.

So I have created a package via the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Data Hub. You can download the zip package and an index in csv format from ckan. Note the zip bundle is around 142 mb. Don’t try this on dial-up. Check the index first. When I have time, I’ll work on a web interface that allows easy searching and sorting of it. I hope also that these texts will be made available individually, but given the number of them that’s not a trivial task.

What to do with these texts will be discussed tomorrow, Saturday 13th August, at Textcamp (London); the twitter hashtag is #tcamp11.

Update: xml (.tei) and epub versions are available from tei-Oxford.

At the moment, there’s more heat than light in the commentary around this case. We don’t know what Swartz intended to do with the documents he downloaded, nor why he obtained them the way he did. He has a strong track record for opening up information and analysing it: witness his liberation of court records, and his analysis of funding academic writing. But this case led me to think about JSTOR, what it claims to do, and the way it acts as a gatekeeper of academic knowledge.

When you visit the JSTOR about page, you are greeted with the statement:

JSTOR is a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.

Sounds good! Who could possibly have anything against a not-for-profit helping spread knowledge? Well, if you don’t have an institutional affiliation, if you’re one of the general public, reading the journals is an expensive business. There is no option to subscribe to the archive as a whole, and the pricing of individual articles is astronomical.

(Academics and students generally have access to these archives through their institutions; for them it’s seemingly free, but the University is paying. How much I don’t know, although an indication can be had from JSTORs price calculator. According to AP, “Its annual subscription fees can cost a large research university as much as $50,000.”)

Take, for example, the journal 19th Century Music. A single issue from the publishers costs $18 for an individual, a subscription for 3 issues $50 (discounted to $28 for students and the retired). The latest issue has 6 full articles, as well as various supporting material. On JSTOR, each article is priced at $12. That’s $72 for the substantive content of just one issue. JSTOR are even charging $12 for the two page preface. This is by no means exceptional: another University of California publication The Public Historian – oh the irony – is $17 for a single issue direct, but $12 an article on JSTOR, again even for two page editorials. Or again, a standard individual subscription to Radical Teacher is $24 – $28; a single article is $18 at JSTOR, even just for the front matter. One more time: $14 for an article from the American Historical Review when joining the AHA starts from $40 and gets you the journal plus many other benefits.

As far as I can tell, these prices are around the average but some are much higher. Rogers’ article on the Black Act, published in the Historical Journal in 1974, is $34, which is $4 more than even Cambridge U.P.’s own inflated price.

Some articles are being sold even though they have been legitimately released for free. For example, A Descriptive and Phylogenetic Analysis of Plumulaceous Feather Characters in Charadriiformes is available from JSTOR for $15 but can be obtained for free at the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive. Other material, like Law and History Review, doesn’t seem to be accessible at all to the public, yet there is no indication that the volumes for 1999 to 2009 are archived for free at the History Co-operative. This is not aiding the discovery and use of scholarly content.

(And while we’re talking about L&HR, Cambridge UP are flogging off articles at $30 / £20, again even those legitimately available for free at the History Co-operative.)

Then there is the murky area of those materials that are out of copyright. The William and Mary Quarterly from 1899? $9 an article. Likewise, it’s $14 for a single article from the Journal of Political Economy for 1892. This may be the fault of the publishers rather than JSTOR, but it points to a relationship between the two that excludes academic and public interests. This also raises the question of publicly-funded research being mined for profit by private institutions, as pointed out by Glyn Moody.

It is not just a case that JSTOR is charging too high a price, whether in relation to other vendors, with comparable products or the pockets of those who would like to read this material. In economic terms, they could increase sales and revenue by lowering the price to hit that sweet spot where they maximise returns. My feeling is that they are deliberately trying to put the public off, restricting access through their pricing mechanism.

I also have the feeling that charging these prices is directly contradictory to their status as a non-profit. I have found nothing on their website explaining how they price materials, or how they work with publishers. I find it extremely unlikely that they have absolutely no say in the prices they charge individuals for individual articles. Nor is there any information on how much revenue goes to the publishers. (It’s well-known that the authors don’t get paid through the current academic journal system.) Furthermore, I have found no financial information as to JSTORs revenues or outgoings, or whether it has, as a non-profit, tax-exempt status; nor have I found any information for Ithaka, with which JSTOR merged in 2009. Accountancy is not one of my skills, but I feel such information should be easily accessible on the website of a non-profit. This lack of transparency and openness I find disturbing.

JSTOR is not living up to its declaration. It is obstructing the dissemination of scholarly, publicly-funded and public domain writing. It clearly has a commercial aspect, yet is shy of stating this. I can’t even be sure it is a not-for-profit in any meaningful, legal sense. It is a contributor to, not a solution for, the crisis in academic publishing.

You can support Aaron Swartz via DemandProgress.org.

UPDATE: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society freed from JSTOR and the Royal Society, bittorrent at Pirate Bay!

Errands meant I only heard the first of those talks, given by Flanders on TEI documentation. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, but it proved to be a very important paper. Although it was focused on the needs and capabilities of TEI, the fundamental idea – that people need different forms of documentation, but basically the same information – has far wider application. From this Flanders identified nine (!) different types of document, and ways ‘bricks’ of information could be re-used. This is moving ‘help’ from being a bundle of text files to being a proper software application. I think the TEI ODD (‘One Document Does it All’) system has some similarities with Perl’s POD (Plain Old Documentation) mark up, though not knowing a great deal about either means I may be (very) wide of the mark.

In the afternoon I attended the Archives session. First up was Dirk Roorda talking about “The ecology of longevity“, using evolutionary theory to think about the preservation of data. Normally, such biological metaphors have me reaching for my proverbial revolver, but here they were used with some subtlety and care. Unfortunately, a great leap was suddenly made into some thoroughly specious economics, which the audience rightfully picked on in the questions. How,  after discussing the complexity and chaos of biology, could the speaker throw up platitudes dating from a century before Darwin?

Schlosser and Ulman’s talk on preserving digital projects had an interesting dialectic going on between the academic and the archivist, and – very important to me – recognized that not all digital projects are ambitious, heavily funded, grand collaborations, but also ‘fragile vessels’, projects that are on the margin, not mission critical. Buchanan then spoke on building Digital Libraries of Scholarly Editions. The problem here is aggregating individual projects into a library: each edition has its own aims, quirks and standards, and a library has to create some uniformity. Buchanan spoke of the difficulties in building such libraries; it occurred to me later that perhaps the problem has to be solved by the makers of the editions, and portability is their responsibility.

Late afternoon was spent looking round the poster displays, noting especially the cartography projects. Google maps was used, though some were chaffing against its limitations. There is a real need for an easily deployed, standalone mapping CMS using free data. (And it’s on my to-do list).