At the intersection of Chicana/o/x Studies, Digital Humanities and Library History, Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library chronicles the history of one of the first Chicana/o/x collections, the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bibliopolítica shares the stories of trailblazing library workers, students and community members who worked to preserve and make Chicana/o/x resources available. Featuring photographs, ephemera, archival documents, and oral histories, Bibliopolítica offers an original digital collection of primary sources and is the first audiovisual history of this special place that helped redefine what libraries could be.
Bibliopolítica takes its name from a book of the same title that Richard Chabrán and librarian colleague Francisco García-Ayvens published in 1984, BiblioPolítica: Chicano Perspectives on Library Service in the United States. In 2024, it remains one of the few titles dedicated to the discussion of Chicana/o/x librarianship. Bibliopolítica: a Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library adds to this important conversation, but it is only the beginning of a much needed longer and more detailed history of the Chicano Studies Library and the contributions of Chicana/o/x library workers.
Co-curated by Amanda Belantara – Assistant Curator at New York University Libraries, Lillian Castillo-Speed – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, now Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, and Richard Chabrán – former Chicano Studies Library Coordinator, Team Leader Latino Digital Archive Group.
Digitization of archival items by Chrissy Huhn and UC Berkeley Library IT and Oral history recordings at Berkeley by Pablo Gonzalez and Angelica Garcia. See additional credits.
It is with deep sadness that we share the news that Harvey Sharrer, our dear friend and colleague and co-director of the Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Galegos e Portugueses (BITAGAP) for more than thirty-five years, died unexpectedly last month.
Harvey, Professor Emeritus at the University of California Santa Barbara, passed away at his home in Santa Barbara on September 12, 2024. His life was dedicated to teaching, academic research, and world exploration.
Born in Oakland, California in 1940 to Ruth Morehouse and Harvey Sharrer, he spent his formative years in Oakland and Danville, California, graduating from San Ramon Valley High School in 1958. His passion for foreign languages was ignited by his high school Spanish teacher, who inspired him to pursue language studies in college. After graduating from high school, Harvey took a summer course at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies and spent Fall quarter at the University of San Francisco. He then took a gap year to work with his father’s remodeling business, saving money for a transformative month’s-long European trip with a high school friend—an experience that kindled his lifelong love for world travel.
Returning to the U.S., Harvey earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Spanish from UC Berkeley in 1963 and 1965, respectively, followed by a doctorate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature from UCLA in 1970, with a dissertation on “The Legendary History of Britain from its Founding by Brutus to the Death of King Arthur in Lope García de Salazar’s Libro de las bienandanzas e fortunas.” Even before finishing his dissertation he had published a Critical Bibliography of Hispanic Arthurian Material, I: Texts: The Prose Romance Cycles (London: Grant & Cutler, 1977) in Alan Deyermond’s fundamental series of Research Bibliographies & Checklists. He spent his entire academic career at UC Santa Barbara, starting in 1968 as an Acting Assistant Professor and progressing steadily through the canonical ranks to full professor in 1981. He served as chair of the UCSB Department of Spanish & Portuguese in 1978-1981 and then again 2002-2003.
Dr. Sharrer was universally admired for his scholarship and the impressive breadth of his knowledge of medieval literature and culture, encompassing Arthurian literature, the medieval Romance lyric, and, increasingly, the digital humanities—a field in which he was a pioneer. He made significant scholarly contributions to our knowledge of medieval and early modern Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, and Catalan literatures. His expertise in Catalan was honed by the two years (1984-1986) he spent as the director of the Barcelona Study Center (U. of California and U. of Illinois), where he enjoyed the friendship of Vicenç Beltran and Gemma Avenoza, who would become colleagues in PhiloBiblon as the directors of the Bibliografia de Textos Antics Catalans (BITECA).
He collaborated on BITAGAP with his friends Arthur Askins and Martha Schaffer from its beginning in 1989 as one of PhiloBiblon‘s three constituent bibliographies, all three dedicated to uncovering and documenting the primary sources of the medieval Romance literatures of the Iberian Peninsula:
Martha Schaffer and Arthur Askins with Harvey Sharrer in Coimbra in 1999, on the occasion of the investiture of Askins as Doctor honoris causa of the Universidade de Coimbra.
The three colleagues were indefatigable ratones de bibliotecas, systematically quartering Portugal, from Bragança in the north to Lagos in the south, in search of new manuscripts of medieval Portuguese and Galician texts. They found the richest collections, however, in Lisbon: the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, the Ajuda library, and Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo. They and their Portuguese collaborators, especially Pedro Pinto and Filipe Alves Moreira, combed through those collections assiduously. Harvey’s most spectacular discovery, in 1990, was the eponymous Pergaminho Sharrer, a parchment fragment with seven lyric poems in Galician-Portuguese, with music, by King Dinis of Portugal (1278-1325) . It had been used as the cover of a bundle of 16th-c. documents in the Torre do Tombo, a not uncommon practice during the period.
Pergaminho Sharrer, with seven poems by King Dinis of Portugal, with music
Retirement came in 2011, but it did little to slow Harvey down. He continued to participate in conferences worldwide and, at UCSB, generously proofread articles for his former department. He remained a respected and admired scholar, mentor, and colleague throughout his life.
Harvey at the microphone
Harvey’s career was commemorated by a splendid volume of homage studies edited by Ricardo Pichel, “Tenh’eu que mi fez el i mui gran ben”. Estudos sobre cultura escrita medieval dedicados a Harvey L. Sharrer (Madrid: Silex, 2022):
Presentation of the homage volume in Santiago de Compostela: (from left): Xavier Varela Barreiro, Ricardo Pichel, Harvey Sharrer, Miguel García-Fernández
Harvey Sharrer will be deeply missed for his extraordinary scholarship, his remarkable mentorship of and generosity toward students and young scholars, and his courteous and congenial personality, um cavaleiro da escola antiga. His work will continue to influence future generations of students and scholars. In recognition of his scholarly career and lasting impact on the Santa Barbara campus, the campus flag was lowered to half-staff on Wednesday, October 2.
Harvey, who never married and considered his scholarly career to be his life’s work, is survived by a sister, Elizabeth Porter, in Upland, California, a brother, William Sharrer, in Louisville, Kentucky, and several cousins, nieces, and nephews who will miss him dearly.
Harvey did not wish to have a formal memorial service, but rather planned to create an endowment in his name at UC Santa Barbara, to be called the “Harvey L. Sharrer Dissertation Travel Grants.” Plans for this endowment are going forward actively, and we will announce them opportunely. It will support future scholars in their research endeavors, particularly in the field of Ibero-Romance languages, reflecting Harvey’s lifelong passion and areas of expertise.
William L. Sharrer Elide V. Oliver Charles B. Faulhaber
Celebrate Disability Awareness Month by exploring powerful stories and insights from disabled authors. Discover more diverse perspectives that inspire and educate on UCB Overdrive!
Last post, I promised to talk about using structured data with a dataset focused on 1950s Bay Area publishing. To get into that topic, I’m going to talk about 1) setting out with a research question as well as 2) data discovery, and 3) data organization, in order to do 4) initial mapping.
Background to my Research
When I moved to the Bay Area, I (your illustrious Literatures and Digital Humanities Librarian) started exploring UC Berkeley’s collections. I wandered through the Doe Library’s circulating collections and started talking to our Bancroft staff about the special library and archive’s foci. As expected, one of UC Berkeley’s collecting areas is California publishing, with a special emphasis on poetry.
Mock-up of ad for books by Allen Ginsberg, City Lights Books Records, 1953-1970, Bancroft Library.
In fact, some of Bancroft’s oft-used materials are the City Light Books collections (link to finding aids in the Online Archive of California) that include some of Allen Ginsberg’s pre-publication drafts of “Howl” and original copies of Howl and Other Poems. You may already know about that poem because you like poetry, or because you watch everything with Daniel Radcliffe in it (IMDB on the 2013 Kill your Darlings). This is, after all, the very poem that led to the seminal trial that influenced U.S. free speech and obscenity laws (often called The Howl Obscenity Trial) . The Bancroft collections have quite a bit about that trial as well as some of Ginsberg’s correspondence with Lawrence Ferlinghetti (poet, bookstore owner, and publisher) during the harrowing legal case. (You can a 2001 discussion with Ferlinghetti on the subject here.)
Research Question
Interested in learning more about Bay Area publishing in general and the period in which Ginsberg’s book was written in particular, I decided to look into the Bay Area publishing environment during the 1950s and now (2020s), starting with the early period. I wanted a better sense of the environment in general as well as public access to books, pamphlets, and other printed material. In particular, I wanted to start with the number of publishers and where they were.
Data Discovery
For a non-digital, late 19th and 20th century era, one of the easiest places to start getting a sense of mainstream businesses is to look in city directories. There was a sweet spot in an era of mass printing and industrialization in which city directories were one of the most reliable sources of this kind of information, as the directory companies were dedicated to finding as much information as possible about what was in different urban areas and where men and businesses were located. The directories, as a guide to finding business, people, and places, were organized in a clear, columned text, highly standardized and structured in order to promote usability.
Raised in an era during which city directories were still a normal thing to have at home, I already knew these fat books existed. Correspondingly, I set forth to find copies of the directories from the 1950s when “Howl” first appeared. If I hadn’t already known, I might have reached out to my librarian to get suggestions (for you, that might be me).
I knew that some of the best places to find material like city directories were usually either a city library or a historical society. I could have gone straight to the San Francisco Public Library’s website to see if they had the directories, but I decided to go to Google (i.e., a giant web index) and search for (historic san francisco city directories). That search took me straight to the SFPL’s San Francisco City Directories Online (link here).
On the site, I selected the volumes I was interested in, starting with Polk’s Directory for 1955-56. The SFPL pages shot me over to the Internet Archive and I downloaded the volumes I wanted from there.
Once the directory was on my computer, I opened it and took a look through the “yellow pages” (i.e., pages with information sorted by business type) for “publishers.”
Note the dense columns of text almost overlap. From R.L. Polk & Co, Polk’s San Francisco City Directory, vol. 1955–1956 (San Francisco, Calif. : R.L. Polk & Co., 1955), Internet Archive. | Public Domain.
Glancing through the listings, I noted that the records for “publishers” did not list City Light Books. Flipped back to “book sellers,” I found it. That meant that other booksellers could be publishers as well. And, regardless, those booksellers were spaces where an audience could acquire books (shocker!) and therefore relevant. Considering the issue, I also looked at the list for “printers,” in part to capture some of the self-publishing spaces.
I now had three structured lists from one directory with dozens of names. Yet, the distances within the book and inability to reorganize made them difficult to consider together. Furthermore, I couldn’t map them with the structure available in the directory. In order to do what I wanted with them (i.e., meet my research goals), I needed to transform them into a machine readable data set.
Creating a Data Set
Machine Readable
I started by doing a one-to-one copy. I took the three lists published in the directory and ran OCR across them in Adobe Acrobat Professional (UC Berkeley has a subscription; for OA access I recommend Transkribus or Tesseract), and then copied the relevant columns into a Word document.
Data Cleaning
The OCR copy of the list was a horrifying mess with misspellings, cut-off words, Ss understood as 8s, and more. Because this was a relatively small amount of data, I took the time to clean the text manually. Specifically, I corrected typos and then set up the text to work with in Excel (Google Sheets would have also worked) by:
creating line breaks between entries,
putting tabs between the name of each institution and corresponding address
Once I’d cleaned the data, I copied the text into Excel. The line breaks functioned to tell Excel where to break rows and the tabs where to understand columns. Meaning:
Each institution had its own row.
The names of the institutions and their addresses were in different columns.
Having that information in different spaces would allow me to sort the material either by address or back to its original organization by company name.
Adding Additional Information
I had, however, three different types of institutions—Booksellers, Printers, and Publishers—that I wanted to be able to keep separate. With that in mind, I added a column for EntryType (written as one word because many programs have issues with understanding column headers with spaces) and put the original directory headings into the relevant rows.
Knowing that I also wanted to map the data, I also added a column for “City” and another for “State” as the GIS (i.e., mapping) programs I planned to use wouldn’t automatically know which urban areas I meant. For these, I wrote the name of the city (i.e., “San Francisco”) and then the state (i.e., “California”) in their respective columns and autofilled the information.
Next, for record keeping purposes, I added columns for where I got the information, the page I got it from, and the URL for where I downloaded it. That information simultaneously served for me as a reminder but also as a pointer for anyone else who might want to look at the data and see the source directly.
I put in a column for Org/ID for later, comparative use (I’ll talk more about this one in a further post,) and then added columns for Latitude and Longitude for eventual use.
The column headers here are: Years; Section; Company; Address; City; State; PhoneNumber; Latitude; Longitude; Org; Title; PageNumber; Repository; URL. Click on the chart to see the file.
Finally, I saved my data with a filename that I could easily use to find the data again. In this case, I named it “BayAreaPublishers1955.” I made sure to save the data as an Excel file (i.e., .xmlx) and Comma Separated Value file (i.e., .csv) for use and preservation respectively. I also uploaded the file into Google Drive as a Google Sheet so you could look at it.
Initial Mapping of the Data
With that clean dataset, I headed over to Google’s My Maps (mymaps.google.com) to see if my dataset looked good and didn’t show locations in Los Angeles or other spaces. I chose Google Maps for my test because it is one of the easiest GIS programs to use
because many people are already used to the Google interface
the program will look up latitude and longitude based on address
it’s one of the most restrictive, meaning users don’t get overwhelmed with options.
Heading to the My Maps program, I created a “new” map by clicking the “Create a new map” icon in the upper, left hand corner of the interface.
From there, I uploaded my CSV file as a layer. Take a look at the resulting map:
Click on the map for an interactive version. Note that I’ve set the pins to differ in column by “type.”
The visualization highlights the centrality of the 1955 San Francisco publishing world, with its concentration of publishing companies and bookstores around Mission Street. Buying books also necessitated going downtown, but once there, there was a world of information at one’s fingertips.
Add in information gleaned from scholarship and other sources about book imports, custom houses, and post offices, and one can start to think about international book trades and how San Francisco was hooked into it.
I’ll talk more about how to use Google’s My Maps in the next post in two weeks!
This is the first of a multi-part series exploring the idea and use of data in the Arts & Humanities. For more information, check out the UC Berkeley Library’s Data and Digital Scholarship page.
Arts & Humanities researchers work with data constantly. But, what is it?
Part of the trick in talking about “data” in regards to the humanities is that we are already working with it. The books and letters (including the one below) one reads are data, as are the pictures we look at and the videos we watch. In short, arts and humanities researchers are already analyzing data for the essays, articles, and books that they write. Furthermore, the resulting scholarship is data.
For example, the letter below from Bancroft Library’s 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection on Calisphere is data.
George Cooper Pardee, “Aid for San Francisco: Letter from the Mayor in Oregon,”
April 24, 1906, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library on Calisphere.
One ends up with the question “what isn’t data?”
The broad nature of what “data” is means that instead of asking if something is data, it can be more useful to think about what kind of data one is working with. After all, scholars work with geographic information; metadata (e.g., data about data); publishing statistics; and photographs differently.
Another helpful question is to consider how structured it is. In particular, you should pay attention to whether the data is:
unstructured
semi-structured
structured
The level of structure informs us how to treat the data before we analyze it. If, for example, you have hundreds of of images, you want to work with, it’s likely you’ll have to do significant amount of work before you can analyze your data because most photographs are unstructured.
For example, with this picture of a ceramic hedgehog, the adorable animal, the photograph, and the metadata for the photograph are all different kinds of data. Image: Zde, Ceramic Rhyton in the Form of a Hedgehog, 14. to 13. century BCE, Photograph, March 15, 2014, Wikimedia Commons. | Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
In contrast, the letter toward the top of this post is semi-structured. It is laid out in a typical, physical letter style with information about who, where, when, and what was involved. Each piece of information, in turn, is placed in standardized locations for easy consumption and analysis. Still, to work with the letter and its fellows online, one would likely want to create a structured counterpart.
Finally, structured data is usually highly organized and, when online, often in machine-readable chart form. Here, for example, are two pages from the Polk San Francisco City Directory from 1955-1956 with a screenshot of the machine-readable chart from a CSV (comma separated value) file below it. This data is clearly structured in both forms. One could argue that they must be as the entire point of a directory is for easy of information access and reading. The latter, however, is the one that we can use in different programs on our computers.
R.L. Polk & Co, Polk’s San Francisco City Directory, vol. 1955–1956 (San Francisco, Calif. : R.L. Polk & Co., 1955), Internet Archive. | Public Domain.
This post has provided a quick look at what data is for the Arts&Humanities.
The next will be looking at what we can do with machine-readable, structured data sets like the publisher’s information. Stay tuned! The post should be up in two weeks.
“Our objective is to bring what we think are great stories and literature to the English-speaking world and let the readers decide for themselves.” – Douglas Suttle
Fum d’Estampa Press was founded in 2020 by translator Douglas Suttle to bring exciting, different Catalan language literature to an English speaking audience. Though small, the press quickly established itself as an ambitious publisher of high quality titles. Since then, they have been long- and short-listed for some of the most important literary prizes in the UK and abroad, and have recently started to publish fantastic literature in translation from languages other than Catalan.
Catalan authors include Montserrat Roig, Joan Fuster, Guillem Viladot, Jordi Cussà, Bel Olid, Joaquim Ruyra, Jacint Verdaguer, Laura Alcoba, Maica Rafecas, Jordi Larios, Almudena Sánchez, Adrià Pujol, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà, Raül Garrigasait, Oriol Quintana, Joan Maragall, Jordi Llavina, Marina Porras, Jordi Graupera, Llorenç Villalonga, Jaume Subirana, Ferran Soldevila, Narcís Oller, and Rosa Maria Arquimbau.
Among the translators are Alan Yates, Ronald Puppo, Louise Johnson and Peter Bush, Tiago Miller, and Mara Faye Lethem.
While its editorial offices are based in Vilafranca del Penedès, south of Barcelona, it prints its books in the south of England, and stores its physical books in Scotland. Ebooks are also available.
Here are a few of their books held by the UC Berkeley Library:
Beginning September 15th, Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off, a time to honor and celebrate the remarkable contributions and achievements of the Hispanic community. Explore a selection of inspiring recommendations by Hispanic authors below, and discover additional titles in the UC Berkeley Library’s Overdrive collection.
You are welcome to attend one of the upcoming library orientation sessions for the Art History/Classics Library (308 Doe). The sessions are capped at 20 students, so be sure to reserve your spot via the rsvp form. Sessions are offered on the following dates/times:
To my delight, I get to announce that Prof. Grace Lavery has a new book titled Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom (cover figured here).
At UC Berkeley, Lavery teaches courses (course catalog) on topics such as “Literature and Popular Culture” as well as special topics courses and research seminars examining representations of sex, sexuality, and gender.
Lavery’s new book is a phenomenal study looking at the idea of heterosexuality in the U.S. American sitcom. More specifically, the book “reconsiders the seven-decade history of the American sitcom to show how its reliance on crisis and resolution in each episode creates doubts and ambivalence that depicts heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse and reconstitution.”
You can access and download the book online through the UC Library Search.
This year’s short list for the Caine Prize for African Writing is rather phenomenal. Here’s the list with access to most of the stories full text:
To my delight, I get to announce that Prof. Grace Lavery has a new book titled Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom (cover figured here).