The 2020+ Project: Using WordPress to Organize, Evaluate, & Discuss the College of the Future

The provost of Providence College asked the Library+Commons to compile scholarly materials on the future of higher education in order for the Academic Affairs Committee to prepare for the college of 2020. The committee needed an easily accessible, annotated bibliography that would allow for commenting and more. The research and education librarians focused on topics like teaching and learning, accountability, and student and faculty characteristics. The research end was challenging, and the librarians continue to explore avenues to find appropriate resources online. They experimented with many platforms before choosing WordPress as the best open-source vehicle to organize and present the multimodal scholarship

Growing Rosarium: Creating a Repository of Popular and Scientific Writing on Roses using the Text Encoding Initiative

Rosarium will be a web-accessible, value-added collection of books and articles on roses published in English before 1923. The overarching purpose of Rosarium is to make available the wondrous variety of non-fiction writings on roses to the general public to use and enjoy. But I hope that it will also become a go-to resource for scholars who study popular culture, horticulture and the history of science as well as an example for others to model.The project faces many challenges, many revolving around the availability of the corpus of writings as materials have been published on several continents over several centuries and the materials are becoming fragile and rare. Each document is first transcribed—a painstaking and time-consuming practice. The transcriptions are then encoded in XML files using the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium’s P5 guidelines (TEI)—a whole new adventure in the research process. Uncovering and linking to outside resources that help illuminate the texts is fascinating and limit-less. Ultimately, the XML files will be the basis for the Rosarium website which will allow for full-text faceted searching of the documents I have collected. I hope to show through the example of Rosarium that creating specialized collections of primary resources can be fun, interesting and important work. Text encoding is a new and different way to engage with primary resources and the way of the future in cultural studies

Who are the rosarians? Identifying the members of the rose growing culture through early twentieth century popular writing curated in the Rosarium Project.

The Rosarium Project is a collection of popular writing on roses, rose gardeners and rose gardening written in English. The materials are transcribed and then text-encoded following the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium’s guidelines. Information on roses, rosarians and rose-related topics is linked to the texts to provide context and clarity. The files created are combined into a database that is fully keyword-searchable. Researchers can also search by subject and color or consult the Project’s extensive glossary. Analysis of the initial 163 articles added to the database uncovers the wide-interest in rose-growing during the early twentieth century. These articles came from magazines and journals of the period that were popular, widely circulated, and routinely collected by libraries. The subject matter of these journals and magazines was quite diverse and included fashion, science, gardening, home making and architectural design. Authors drew their readers into the world of rose gardening through their personal experiences and shared their knowledge of the popular hobby so that all and sundry could join the rosarian club. They gave hints and instruction so the readers too could be proficient rosarians. They provided lists of roses to grow that insured that new members to the fold had similar, and properly designed gardens. Editors of these magazines understood their readership and provided them with the kinds of articles that spoke to their interests and concerns. The types of articles included richly-detailed travelogues, scientific treatises, announcements of new developments, recipes for rose-flavored delicacies and instructions for rose-scented crafts. A picture of the people who took part in the rosarian culture becomes clear through the close reading of the articles. They came from all walks of life: from middle-class housewives to intellectuals and artists

Growing Pains-from standard bibliography to dynamic web-accessible resource, creating a repository of popular and scientific writing on roses using TEI.

Twenty years ago, I started a project that I envisioned would culminate in a printed bibliography of writings on the Rose in English that would be as complete as possible—both books and articles. A bibliography on roses had been published in 1973 which focused on books and in 1984 there was a self-published title from the U.K. citing books and“significant” journal articles but which did not include the voluminous amount of articles in popular journals and newspapers. My goal was to update and expand upon what had been compiled by the earlier bibliographers. Two decades later, I have returned to that project but with a new focus—that of providing not merely bibliographic citations but the rose writings in full-text. And not merely bald transcriptions but full-text enriched by links to additional content which will provide context and clarity, using modern technology and digital humanities tools.The new revamped project is called Rosarium. The overarching purpose of Rosarium is to make available the wondrous variety of writings on roses to the general public for practical use. But I can see that it could also be of use to scholars such as those who study popular culture, horticulture and the history of science.The scope of the project has had to be restricted to materials published prior to 1923 for obvious copyright considerations. But it has been widened by shifting the focus from citations to full-text. There are many challenges to be faced, many revolving around the availability of the corpus of writings. Materials have been published on several continents and the materials are becoming rare and fragile. Transcription is painstaking and time-consuming. Text-encoding is a whole new adventure in the research process. Uncovering and linking to outside resources that help illuminate the texts is fascinating and limit-less.As Rosarium is still very much in its embryonic stage, my presentation will cover my strategy for identifying candidates for the project, the TEI learning curve, expenses incurred, and early observations on the content I am discovering

The Rosarium Project: Building a digital collection on the genus Rosa using oXygen and the TEI

This paper aims to describe the Rosarium Project, a digital humanities project being undertaken at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The project focuses on a collection of English language non-fiction writings about the genus Rosa. The collection will comprise books, pamphlets, catalogs and articles from popular magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers written on the rose published before 1923. The source material is being encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium’s P5 guidelines and the extensible markup language (XML) editor software

Growing Pains: from standard bibliography to the dynamic web

Twenty years ago, I started a project that I envisioned would culminate in a printed bibliography of writings on the Rose in English that would be as complete as possible—both books and articles. A bibliography on roses had been published in 1973 which focused on books and in 1984 there was a self-published title from the U.K. citing books and“significant” journal articles but which did not include the voluminous amount of articles in popular journals and newspapers. My goal was to update and expand upon what had been compiled by the earlier bibliographers. Two decades later, I have returned to that project but with a new focus—that of providing not merely bibliographic citations but the rose writings in full-text. And not merely bald transcriptions but full-text enriched by links to additional content which will provide context and clarity, using modern technology and digital humanities tools. The new revamped project is called Rosarium. The overarching purpose of Rosarium is to make available the wondrous variety of writings on roses to the general public for practical use. But I can see that it could also be of use to scholars such as those who study popular culture, horticulture and the history of science. The scope of the project has had to be restricted to materials published prior to 1923 for obvious copyright considerations. But it has been widened by shifting the focus from citations to full-text. There are many challenges to be faced, many revolving around the availability of the corpus of writings. Materials have been published on several continents and the materials are becoming rare and fragile. Transcription is painstaking and time-consuming. Text-encoding is a whole new adventure in the research process. Uncovering and linking to outside resources that help illuminate the texts is fascinating and limit-less. As Rosarium is still very much in its embryonic stage, my presentation will cover my strategy for identifying candidates for the project, the TEI learning curve, expenses incurred, and early observations on the content I am discovering

Digging up the past: using articles in early 20th-century magazines archived in the Rosarium Project to uncover daily life through the lens of growing roses

The Rosarium Project is a text-encoding initiative focused on materials written about roses, rose gardening and rose gardeners being undertaken at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The texts which make up the Rosarium Project database will include articles from popular magazines, items in scholarly journals, pamphlets, catalogs and books written in English before 1923. The goal of the Rosarium Project is to make available popular and scientific writing on roses (which has been considered the queen of flowers for centuries) and the popular activity of growing roses so that researchers in such fields of study as horticulture, gardening history and popular culture can study historical methods and designs and the cultural attitudes and habits of bygone eras.The first texts encoded for the project were identified through the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, a well-respected index to periodicals that began publication at the beginning of the twentieth century. The periodicals it indexed came from popular journals that were widely-circulated and routinely held by libraries. Using the Reader’s Guide was an important first step in the project because it indexed materials that reached a wide audience through the variety of the journals indexed, but also because those materials, being popular, were archived by libraries and are still accessible to the researcher a hundred years later.163 articles on roses, published before 1923, were indexed by the Reader’s Guide. They appeared in 33 different publications that ranged from gardening magazines to literary reviews. Ten percent of those articles appeared in magazines whose target audience was middle and upper-middle class women. These sixteen articles were the first articles added to the Rosarium database because they formed a coherent group that would be of primary interest to those interested in women’s studies and studying suburban life.The articles were published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the Woman’s Home Companion and Harper’s Bazar. A quick examination of these articles brings to light the tasks pertaining to the popular hobby of having roses that were considered fit and proper for the lady of the day. The editors of these magazines chose topics that they considered of interest to their readers and those topics ran the gamut from recipes for rose petal candies to instructions for digging and preparing a rose garden. They paint a picture of women actively involved in all aspects of rose gardening, including the physical work of care for the garden, selection and purchase of plants and using the roses around the house

Not your usual content: the Rosarium Project. An online collection of materials on the Rose using the Text Encoding Initiative and oXygen.

Using the XML editor Oxygen, I am text encoding articles, books and other materials written in English before 1923 with a view to creating an online, searchable database for the genus Rosa. The project is called the Rosarium Project. First I transcribe the text of a work into a Pages document. Then I use to mark up the transcriptions using the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium\u27s P5 guidelines. Finally, I upload my XML files to the TAPAS Project where I can see how my encoding renders. Ultimately a website that will allow for searching and limiting will be created using these same XML files. Text encoding is actually easy and fun. It also permits adding value to the text through linked images and websites, notes, subject headings, a glossary and modernization/standardization of terms. This sort of initiative will I expect replace the old notion of the bibliography. Instead of collecting citations about a particular historical topic, librarians will be collecting texts, encoding them and curating them online. The session will cover the rationale behind the project, the steps taken to create the XML files, a discussion of the costs incurred--labor and monetary, and will end with a brief summary of the future of Rosarium