Review of the Periódicos e literatura Collection

Joshua Gabriel Ortiz Baco bio photo By Joshua Gabriel Ortiz Baco

“Periódicos e literatura: publicações efêmeras, memória permanente.” Edited by Irineu E. Jones Corrêa et al., Periódicos e Literatura, Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Brasil, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional de Brasil, 2006, bndigital.bn.gov.br/dossies/periodicos-literatura/. Accessed 1 October 2018.

Reviewed by Joshua G. Ortiz Baco, University of Texas at Austin

2020 update: The Digital Library of Brazil has a new webste!

The project “Periódicos e literatura: publicações efêmeras, memória permanente” is a curated collection of materials digitized by the National Digital Library of Brazil (NDLB) with originals housed in the National Library of Brazil Foundation (Foundation). Coordination of the objects, researchers, staff, and content is done by Irineu E. Jones Corrêa, Maria Ione Caser da Costa and Maria do Sameiro Fangueiro. The dossiê, as the collection type is referred to, is focused on developing the NDLB’s larger collection of Brazilian and Portuguese periodicals by expanding, describing and showcasing materials across different physical collections that highlight the relationship between the evolution of the press industry, authors and literature. The legalization of the press in Imperial Brazil, at the beginning of the 19th century, had an almost immediate impact as a public space for discussions about literature which this project seeks to recover and put into context.

The selection of newspapers organize the collection, but the materials also include manuscripts, maps, photographs, drawings, and transcriptions of literary works. The sixty-six newspapers are organized alphabetically by title and span from the early 1800s to the beginning of the 1900s; each entry includes a brief monograph detailing: the form of the actual newspaper, the editorial aims, and significant writers that participated as collaborators. The authors have a separate section with a biographical sketch, a transcription of an excerpt of a text published in the newspaper, a link to the digital object of the physical book, if available, and where the text was published. The nine items in the manuscripts section are handwritten newspapers and typesetting sketches with their own descriptions for each. The sixteen publishing houses also have individual pages describing their historical location with its contemporary address, and include hyperlinks to the newspapers in which they were published as well as a historical map of the area. The last two sections list the affiliated projects, researchers, and publications that were informed by this project or that were used to generate the content for the descriptions.

In order to understand the collection, it’s important to understand the organizing principles of the larger news archive from which the materials have been selected. This is in part because the coordinators of the project are part of the staff of the NDLB. The Hemeroteca’s role is also important because the NDLB was conceived as an extension of the Foundation, differing only in that it is also responsible for uniting and completing collections housed in different institutions and facilitating digital collection development for partners. The constitutive goals of preserving national memory and activating its other collections are explicitly privileged as well in this project. However, the way digitization and digital objects are ambivalently framed in the introductory page is reflected throughout the site in issues discussed later.

The collection appears to consciously serve two communities: library staff and humanities researchers. The majority of the publications drawing on the collection have been technical and research papers in LIS journals. The Foundation is the biggest cultural heritage repository in the country and the NDLB shares this position as its digital parallel. All this to say that, the impact of the collection is significant considering its status as an example of digital project development in Brazil and the fact that it has the potential to link itself with almost 2 million documents across thousands of other collections housed in the archives. The site only links to a few publications that are affiliated with the collection, but the avenues for research include literary studies, history, media studies, journalism, and digital humanities, among others. All of the information that has been selected would have lived independently of each other and in different archives, even off site. Bringing them together means that a user could be interested in one item or person reflected in the collection and - owing to the metadata and narrativized pages being thorough - end up in an almost unrelated area within or beyond the collection. I mention metadata because, despite not being easily accessible, the work of librarians and archivists shows in the extensively layed out interrelatedness of the materials and information presented.

There is also a productive tension between library staff and humanities researchers that can be summarized as an issue of “essences”, as Ann Stoler proposes the term in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (4). Both groups work for the mission of preserving Brazilian memory and patrimony. This is what could be termed the essence of the country. Nevertheless, in the LIS articles there is a trend of historicizing and challenging the evolution of the Foundation and its digital counterpart. Meanwhile, the humanities publications listed on the website don’t focus on the digital objects being analyzed. This is also reflected in the monographs on the website, where extensive archival work was done and is only reflected in the material description of the items and the bibliographic reference. There is an implied stability and fixity of meaning in this last method since the tangible objects are treated as stable things that aren’t affected by their digital counterpart. In contrast, in the work by the librarians, the materials are evolving and shifting the national imaginary and the very conditions in which it was created precisely because there is also a recognition of the process of creating, managing and accessing this new material. This last approach is more in line with current interpretations of the “unique space” of intersecting traditions afforded by the analog and the digital, to which Bonnie Mak calls attention to in “Archaeology of a Digitization” (1516).

Proof of the generative intersection of the two approaches can be found in the NDLB official stance, which already recognizes the potential effects of digitized materials even when it limits itself to a restrictive definition of digital initiatives. As mentioned before, there is a conflict in the way that the digital is presented in the narratives about the NDLB. The introduction page considers that digitization exposes the crises of cultural structures related to the book and reading, and then goes into a lengthy discussion of the pitfalls of amassing cultural objects and the techno-market. This appears to affect usability in significant ways such as absence of a search feature; sorting mechanisms or easily identifiable metadata; and performing a reiteration of “needing to know what you are looking for” even when there is a different thematic organization of the materials than what is commonly found in the Foundation. The website also becomes inaccessible for hours. I believe this is partially due to budget constraints, but also to the framing of the objects as digital copies as opposed to truly valuable physical materials. For example, digitization is used as a justification for limiting access to the physical materials to prevent their deterioration.

Notwithstanding, the content of the collection can be considered limited primarily because of its vastness. Caser da Costa lists the figure of four hundred potential texts that may be eventually included. The amount of material is sufficient to meet the goals of the project and facilitate research in an area that is gaining traction in digital humanities and literary studies. The positive effect of the collection is also felt in the field of LIS, starting with the example of Caser da Costa, who transitioned from a master’s student that researched the collection and now is one of the coordinators. This has continued through a number of events and workshops led by coordinators of the digital components of the collection in recent years. This last impact was not contemplated in the original conception of the project and may produce improvements to the overall project and the people involved. It also serves as a demonstration of how conceiving of the collection as a digital project can help to ameliorate some of the platform’s limitations in the future and open up the materials to other approaches and methodologies.