Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
on the English Short Title Catalogue, is large, comprising more than 136,000 unique
titles, 155,000 volumes, and 26 million pages of text, backed up by an accessible analog
microfilm collection from which it was generated and by well-catalogued topics. A later
supplement, ECCO II, raises the totals to 182,000, 205,000, and 32 million, respec-
tively. Additionally, ECCO is well defined and much more stable than Google Books,
which is changing all the time. ECCO's sources are well chosen, well known, and acces-
sible. Its out-of-the-box search functions are more flexible. And at this point in time,
the metadata is much better.
In fact, there is so much that is good about ECCO that a decade ago one might
have thought ECCO would have had the kind of revolutionary effect on scholarship
that Google and the culturomics advocates claim Google Books will have today. ECCO
has opened new research avenues, but it hasn't made that kind of impact. In 2002,
ECCO's publisher promoted it as a “research revolution.” A breathless review called
it a “resource that scholars will die for.”
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My graduate school friends called it “the
dissertation machine. ”
The first thing that limited ECCO's effect, of course, is that it was not made openly
available like Google Books. Additionally, though ECCO is a full-text database, it does
not allow users to cut and paste text. And while users can search for words under the
page images, they cannot reveal what the computer sees; they cannot see the characters
that the computer recognizes in the page image. Ironically, over time ECCO's publisher
has loosened its rules on downloading page images. So, for database subscribers, it has
become easy and quick to download page images of full books from ECCO.Yet regular
users cannot even download a single page of text as interpreted by ECCO's optical
character recognition (OCR) software, which suggests that over time Gale determined
there is no percentage in books, not even in digitized images of books, unless the topics
are already packaged as data.
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The future is in data.
Using ECCO, I began trying to understand the sense of “data” in Priestley. Happily,
my first searches turned out to be promising. On the one hand, the ECCO results are
consistent with those of Google. Speaking from a strictly quantitative point of view, the
big “data” takeoff is unquestionably a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. On the other
hand, ECCO shows clear trends in usage in the eighteenth century that laid the founda-
tions for all later developments, which are difficult to perceive in Google's projections.
The eighteenth century produced important new ways of thinking data, and Priestley
was situated, felicitously, just exactly where those new ways of thinking happened.
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