A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature by Martha Brogan with assistance from DaphnÈe Rentfrow (Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Library Federation, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2005) is a deep report on the state digital resources for the study of American literature. It concludes that while there are some excellent resources, things are fragmented and there need to be better tools. The MLA is criticized as “missing in action” compared to other organizations, which is probably not fair, but indicates an a problem of perception. The MLA isn’t viewed as leading in this area.
From the Foreword by David Seaman,
Compared with students in many other humanistic disciplines, students specializing in American literature are well served with online primary works and related manuscripts or other contextual material ó from the earliest novels to licensed, copyrighted works from twentieth-century poets and dramatists. This richness, however, is scattered and fragmentary: Some material is publicly accessible, and some is subscription based; some is full of insights from scholars, and some is the work of hobbyists; some is accurately digitized, and some distractingly not so. And nowhere is all this material gathered and categorized, revealed, and reviewed.
Around this mass of material and its somewhat uncoordinated activity swirl all the fears and debates about the value of digital scholarship; the role and nature of peer review in this arena; the stifling effect of current copyright (especially in regard to so-called orphaned works, whose owners are impossible to find); the need for easier and more-powerful tools to capture, enrich, and analyze this material; and the excitement of new research and teaching possibilities.
On the subject of tools,
Leading theoreticians such as Unsworth and McGann, who traverse the boundaries of humanities computing and literary scholarship, believe that a real breakthrough in digital scholarship hinges on building open, modular, extensible, and reusable tools. [15] These tools must be readily accessible and relatively easy to use and, above all, enable important work, such as literary analysis and interpretation.
Sounds like TAPoR to me.
The survey also nicely lays out the barriers to deployment of digital work in section 2.7,
- insufficient peer-review processes for digital scholarship
- absence of trusted mechanisms to sustain and preserve digital work
- thorny issues of copyright and permissions
- paucity of sustainable business models
- dearth of specialists