ResearchBuzz

Lots of research, lots of letters, and lots of people have culminated in the beta version of the Mark Twain Project Online, which is now available at www.marktwainproject.org . At the moment this site contains more than 2300 letters written between 1853 and 1880, but eventually will contain almost 10,000 letters and eventually the most complete catalog of Twain’s writings available.

But you’ve got to start somewhere. If you start at the front page here you’ll find there are several separate sections, including a user’s guide, a place to organize Twain-citation, and a writings section (which is currently under construction.) The big attraction at the moment is the letters, of course. You can browse by year, or search by keyword and topic. It looks like the letters available are about half annotated, but you can view all of them annotated or not.

I did a search for sugar. I got 24 results presented in a table that included date, writer, addressee, place of origin, and volume. You have the choice of looking at text or details. The details are notes about the letter and citation information. The text, as you might imagine, shows the text of the letter and sometimes annotation and notes written about the letter. The letters vary a lot as to their content — I noticed that a lot of the time, my search keyword was in the annotation and not in the letter itself.

The infrastructure for what WILL be here is so extensive it makes what IS here look a bit thin. But don’t be fooled — this makes for lot of good browsing. Worth a look.

Thanks to Quillblog I got to hear about Covering Photography, a site that indexes book covers with photographs (as opposed to abstract book covers or those with paintings, illustrations, etc.) It’s available at http://idesweb.bc.edu/baden/covering_photography.html . The site contains hundreds of book covers with photographs, browsable by date, photographer (Laurie Anderson??), publisher, author, or designer. You can also search. I found browsing by publication date to be the most fun. Book listings contain large versions of the cover, information on the design/author/publisher/etc. and often commentary. The cover for the 1976 publication of The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 was not a photograph per se but the commentary noted from which photograph elements on the cover had come, and where that photograph could be found. Very impressive.

I’m not a designer per se but I am continually fascinated by book design. The collection of covers here has sparked my brain.

In yet another attempt to make sure I never get anything else done in my life, Google Books has released some new features, including the ability to create a library of books, the ability to embed portions of public-domain books on your own Web site, and the ability to track popular passages in books.

Google Books, of course, is at http://books.google.com/ . You’ll need to have a Google Account to create a library, but you don’t need to have an account or log in to just search.

Strangely enough, you cannot make your library private. Any library you create will be viewable by other users. So remember that if you’re thinkin’ about getting weird. Anyway, you can add books to your library as you browse, or you can import a list of ISBNs.

I wanted to generate a quick list of ISBNs so I ran some random searches and came up with some ISBNs, which I stuffed into the import list (make sure the numbers don’t have any dashes — Google Books doesn’t like that.) Once you have a list, Google Books imports it and gives you a list of books (and reports on the ISBNs it couldn’t process.) You can add reviews and snippets to books in your library.

If you’re really proud of the books you have, you can share them. Google Books gives you an RSS feed that updates as you add new books to the library. You’ll also be able to search just books from your library or across all of Google Books.

If you’ve got some public domain books in your library, you can also embed parts of those books in your own Web site, blog, etc. For example, let’s take a longtime classic, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. (If you want to find a different public domain book, remember that Google Book’s advanced search allows you to search only for those books which give “full view” — which are usually public domain.)

Wander through the book and choose a clip and then use the new clip icon at the top of the viewer page (it has a little NEW! next to it.) you’ll get a crosshair which you can use to click-and-drag an area to quote. You can grab the part you’ve clipped as a graphic or as text, and send it to Blogger or Google Notebook. You can also embed it in a Web page as below.

Note that if your quote starts in the middle of a page, or runs over a couple of pages, you might have to do a little creative clipping. Also I noticed that clipping in Opera was much, much tougher than clipping in Firefox (I kept getting the wrong chunk of
text while clipping in Opera.)

While you’re looking at individual book pages, take a look at the new “popular passages” feature. Here you can see popular passages in books and the other books which have referred to them. Sometimes this is a bit odd (I found one item — apparently a publisher’s page — that apparently had several citations) but it was interesting to see what specific passages had been found particularly of interest out of an entire book.

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