Timothy Cole (UIUC), James Chartrand (Russell Archive, McMaster University) and Martin Mueller (Northwestern University)
1001 Novels: A user-contributor approach to creating good enough digital editions from OCR for scholarly and pedagogical work

Timothy Cole is the Mathematics Librarian at UIUC and the Interim Head of Digital Services and Development.

James Chartrand has been the lead designer in the development of a digital environment for editing the correspondence of Bertrand Russell on a distributed basis. See his poster session for more detail.

Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern.

1001 Novels is an embryonic project with the ambition to create a large and public domain collection of "good enough" digital editions of fiction in English from Robinson Crusoe to Ulysses, from the Rise of the Novel in the early eighteenth century to the current copyright cut-off date. The concept of "good enough" is borrowed from D. W. Winnicott's "good enough mother." A good enough edition will meet 80% or more of scholarly and pedagogical needs.

There is a growing recognition that automated procedures, powerful and amazing as they are, will not quite take you to the "good enough." The big question is whether digitally supported collaborative environments, whether in pedagogical or volunteer settings, can provide the pool of competent and dedicated human labor that it will take to turn an automatically prepared digital text into something that is good enough for most scholarly and pedagogical purposes.

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