What's new at LiteraryHistory.com

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January 2009. We got a nice surprise when we checked our Google statistics. LiteraryHistory.com is now at the top of the Google list when anyone searches for "nineteenth century literature." We are number two for "twentieth century literature" and rank in the top five for "postcolonial literature." Thank you, readers, for linking to LiteraryHistory. We must have some high status readers, because Google rates sites by the numbers of links to it, and gives preference to links from high-knowledge users. Someday we hope our individual author pages will appear higher on the Google lists, at least above the crowd of plagiarist sites that always seem to turn up on top for the classic authors. But most of our fans link to main pages on our site, like the nineteenth century literature page, not individually to each of our 250-plus author pages.

December 2008. We began this year linking to both current books of literary criticism and public domain books available at Google Books. At first we were hesitant to link to the copyrighted material, though it was clearly a boon to serious literary research on the internet. We remain concerned about the actions and intentions of Google Books, even though Google has now apparently resolved the problem of their copyright violation with the copyright holders. Since the resolution involves charging for access to the books at Google Books and using part of that income to reimburse the copyright holders, we expect that the copyrighted books (and perhaps all the books at Google Books) will soon be removed from public viewing, and thus our links to such material will probably soon be dead. We are revising our nineteenth century first editions pages to make them link to texts from the Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that posts only public domain works, since we are more confident that Internet Archive texts will remain freely available online.

Other news from this year: I was at last able to reach a human at the company that provides the search engine for this site (no easy feat), and requested, could I please, please pay for the indexing rather than having their embarrassingly off-the-mark ads inserted in your search results. They agreed. The cost for keeping the ads off was less than $100 a year and well worth it. Now we have ad-free search.

11/18/06. Over the past year I've been reformatting all the bibliographies and I'm not finished yet. It's a time-consuming process that can't be accomplished with a macro, because thanks to the magic of cut and paste I've copied many different formats into this, and now have to move words and punctuation around to make them consistent. The difference in the reformatted pages is that they are now alphabetical by critic, which is the way readers expect to see a bibliography. In the early days of creating these pages there weren't enough signed articles online to make this worth doing, but things are different now. Also in the early days the url for each link was visible, because I had the idea that making a web address invisible kept information from the reader. But that made the pages ugly and technical-looking. After much experimenting I've concluded that a presentation in alphabetical order by critics, with clickable information rather than visible web addresses, is the easiest to read and use.

1/24/06. LiteraryHistory is pleased to welcome our new editor for Filipino American literature, Jean Vengua Gier. Ms. Gier is especially tuned in to new developments in Filipino American writing and is already expanding the list of Filipino American authors in innovative ways. Jean Vengua Gier is co-editor with Mark Young of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, published jointly by Meritage Press (U.S.) and xPress(ed) (Finland), Fall 2005. Her work has been published in various poetry journals including Proliferation, Interlope, and Moria, and the anthologies, Babaylan, Returning a Borrowed Tongue, and Going Home to a Landscape. She is also a writer and researcher in Filipino American studies; her essays have been published in scholarly journals including Jouvert: a Journal of Postcolonial Studies (N. Carolina State U.), Geopolitics of the Visual: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures (Ateneo University, Philippines), Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism (U. of California), and the anthology, New Immigrant Literatures of the United States (Greenwood Press). Jean is an instructor at U.C. Berkeley, and lives in Santa Cruz, CA.

1/11/06. We have entered links to several articles from the most recent edition of American Literary Scholarship, published by Duke University Press and available from e-Duke. Duke journals are online on a free trial basis until March 2006 through HighWire Press. We hope not to be abusing this privilege, but it seemed like an opportunity to make users aware that this excellent resource is online. (For a short time it was possible to check out the year's work in several American authors, summarized in American Literary Scholarship.)

The collaboration between Duke publications and HighWire, launched in July 2005, may make it possible for individuals (not just libraries) to subscribe to the online version of their preferred Duke-published journals, and the prices look very reasonable. HighWire press from Stanford University Libraries is also an admirable venture that scholarly publishers should be aware of (they offer many journals free to developing economies, for example). E-Duke journals of interest to literary scholars including American Literary Scholarship, American Literature, American Speech, boundary 2, Camera Obscura, Common Knowledge, differences, Eighteenth-Century Life, French Historical Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Poetics Today, and Theater are currently viewable on a free trial basis at Duke Journals (now taken offline).

May 2005. Beginning this month we are shifting to an emphasis on recognized critical authorities in the newest web pages and updates. It is a new luxury to be able to do this, but it's often possible now to find something by a leading scholar of the author published on the free internet: if not an article, at any rate a review of his or her book, or the publisher's blurb at a web site, something. We're trying to make sure that some of the best known authorities are represented by a link somewhere in this webliography. The extent to which we can link to critics is limited, however, by the limited offerings of reliable literary criticism on the internet. In the early days of creating these bibliographies we were often happy to find internet articles that were not marred by spelling and grammar errors. There was little one could recommend, especially for less popular authors. But I'm happy to report that situation has changed markedly, as the articles indexed here, now, demonstrate.

March 2005. Persuasions On-Line, the Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, has incorporated LiteraryHistory's Jane Austen page into its journal site to give its readers access to an index of the Persuasion articles. The journal published its first full-text online edition, Vol. 20, in Summer 1999, and now has all issues through 2004 freely available online, as a public service. All the articles are individually indexed at LiteraryHistory. The web site for Persuasions On-Line is http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/

December 2004-May 2005. Because of a request from a user, LiteraryHistory added a search engine last November, a step that has given me a much better picture of our readers and their needs. The search engine leaves a record of every search (privacy disclosure: nothing can be known about searchers other than the search term they type in). We are now getting an average 200 typed in searches a day, representing about 150 unique phrases, up from about 80 searches a day and 50 unique phrases in the first months of the engine. The most frequently searched terms in April were Shakespeare, Poe, Twain, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, William Golding, James Joyce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Kate Chopin, Robert Frost, John Keats, Arthur Miller, Mary Shelley, and Maya Angelou. Except for a surge of interest in Arthur Miller since his recent death, these names have been consistently in the top 20 for the six months we've been following them. In the top ten every month are Poe, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Twain, Langston Hughes. Other names that show up near the top month after month are T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Hemingway, Jane Austen.

In response to user search patterns, LiteraryHistory has begun covering selected nineteenth century American authors and eighteenth century British novelists.

November 2004. Installing the search engine last November revealed how well this site was originally designed. It shows that it is better to have a search engine apply itself to a summary-type document like a catalogue, rather than to search the full-text of the articles themselves. It's not a question of slowness; the technology exists to search full-text documents quickly. But the problem one encounters in those kinds of searches is, and probably many of you have seen this, you get results that are trivial. If a name is mentioned once in an article for example, the search engine will find it, even if the reference was in no way central to the subject. As a result, you may get many irrelevant articles returned in the list of results. Although there are elaborate efforts to design artificial intelligence to overcome this, this is when the technology gets expensive, and the solutions never seem to work very well. At LiteraryHistory.com the search engine addresses itself to a list of articles annotated with correct keywords or including abstracts incorporating the keywords. This creates a document that is both machine readable and human readable. This search engine is remarkably sensitive, and there are some interesting topics that appear in article titles and abstracts. Try searching on unexpected terms and you might be surprised by what turns up. There are about 6,000 unique and mostly high-quality citations here now.

6/22/04. A Google Universe? An open letter to the NY Times.

4/9/03. LiteraryHistory is selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best reference works of the year. On April 25 I attended a ceremony at the Donnell Library in New York honoring the winners, which included such impressive other reference works as findlaw.com and publications from Gale, Oxford University Press, New York University Press, H.W. Wilson, Macmillan Press, Routledge, and Charles Scribner.

5/30/00. LiteraryHistory is recognized by the Scout Report

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