My project and the problem with copyright
So, I thought I would use this blog to write about my project, and it just so happens that the problem I’m having with it relates directly to Ch 7 of Cohen and Rosenzweig’s book. It seems that completing a work of digital scholarship is difficult when most of your source material is still protected under copyright.
My idea for my second project is to do a digital historiography on one of my favorite artists; Caravaggio. I wrote briefly about this a few weeks ago, if you’d like to look at some of hisle, work his entire oeuvre is on caravaggio.com. I think tools like wordle, and other text-mining tools can be very helpful in literature reviews. For instance, writing about Caravaggio became a very en vogue thing to do in the 1980s because of an increased interest in gay rights in the late 70s and early 80s. One could text mine for words like “homosexuality,” etc and probably find an increased number of these words in writing on Caravaggio from the 80s in relation to writings before and after. (In fact, I presented a paper on Caravaggio last year and discovered at the podium that I’d perhaps overused the word)
The problem with doing work like this is that writing on Caravaggio really didn’t get going until the 1950s, so virtually all of the source material I would use is unavailable thanks to copyright. I suppose I could use articles, or I may just have to find another way of doing this project. It seems that practicing digital history often requires an increase in creativity on the historian’s part.
I plan on using some of the other tools we’ve talked about, mainly the Time magazine corpus. So far, I’ve been finding exactly what I expected. This is a good thing, as it means my instincts about the literature on Caravaggio were correct (my instincts often are 
). If this project works out well, it would mean that a literature review is possible without actually reading any of the literature…
Finding that most of your sources are off-limits is quite aggravating. I have had the same problem in the last couple of weeks.
I just took a quick peruse through the Open Library Project (I’m sure you did as well), and I only saw two that were accessible, and both were in Italian. I had the same problem with other ideas I was contemplating…very frustrating.
Ah, good thing I’m 100% fluent in Italian…well, maybe 40%
It is very (and sadly) true that copyright prevents a lot of text mining. The odd thing is that “non-consumptive use” (what text mining often does) should be allowed under the law.
I wonder if there’s a image mining tool you could use on Caravaggio’s work itself, rather than writing about this work. For instance, Lev Manovich now does distant reading of images: http://manovich.net/2010/11/18/how-did-culture-became-visual/.
Your idea for a project sounds very interesting. I am wondering if the problem with finding sources that are legally available is one that is encountered more in the field of art history than history, because I have not had much difficulty and I have not heard much about others having difficulty. In thinking about it, it does seem to me that problems with copyrights would be commonly encountered in writings about art.
I am thinking like a historian, and I don’t know how the objectives of art history differ from those of history, so this question may not be particularly relevant to your project. Do you plan to illustrate how writings about Caravaggio and references to homosexuality reflect trends in culture? Or, would the goal of your project be to illustrate trends in the writing itself?