DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2024
Volume 18 Number 1
Volume 18 Number 1
Fingerprints of British Book History: A Feminist Labor History of EEBO
Abstract
In this essay, I give a labor history of the commonly used database Early English Books Online. EEBO began its life as a mirofilm archive produced beginning in 1940: a massive book-copying project was undertaken during World War II to protect rare books from German bombs. These reproductions were made largely by unnamed woman archivists and led by a team of woman photographers, academics, and secretaries. In this essay, I draw on existing theories and histories of EEBO while highlighting these women's work, which manifests in the photographs through the shadows of the fingertips they used to pin down the fragile books. This archive of reproductive labor exemplifies the artificial divide between auteur and stenographer, artist and secretary, that animated many of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde movements, including ones in which EEBO photographers were intimately involved. The fingers represent the custodial labor of women working across artistic and administrative modes during World War II and the decades that followed.
Upon its founding in 2002, Google Books promised its users the world [Hoffman and Bloom 2016]. “Imagine,” wrote then-CEO Eric Schmitt, “the
cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes
into one vast index, every wor)d
of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World
and Third, en toute langue — and all, of course, entirely for free”
[Schmidt 2005]. Nearly twenty years later, the service has indeed become a ubiquitous online
resource, one with a mixed reputation among digital humanists [Noble 2018], [Newman 2011], [Grimmelmann 2009]. Its errors — evidence of imperfect human mediation — are also commonplace. In
2011, artist and writer Krissy Wilson began collecting these errors on her blog
The Art of
Google Books. Wilson’s archive, which includes submissions from readers, catalogues the ephemeral
flaws
made before and during the copying process: a forgotten library slip with check-out
dates spanning thirty years; a
blurred page, photographed as it is turned; rips in the paper; ink stains. However,
the most common and most
eloquent error captured by The Art of Google Books concerns the trace of human labor
in the archive’s production. Google’s scanning cameras often capture the fingers
and hands of the low-wage workers
who hold open each book. They often wear pink or blue finger rubbers, minimizing
the wear and tear book-handling
exerts on the skin. The images largely depict Black and brown hands, suggesting
the demographics of this low-paid
work (Figure 1). The bad scans capture the process of unspectacular labor as it
occurs. In consequence, they are an artful and poignant visible record of the
work that digital humanists have
recently sought to recover [Klein 2020], [Nyhan 2020]
Figure 1.
This worker’s hand obscures the book plate and check-out slip for Edward Young’s
The
Complaint; or, Night-thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1750). The original is held by Oxford
University and was digitized by an anonymous worker on August 2, 2007.The Art of Google Books demonstrates the continuity between contemporary digitization
practices and a longer history of archival touch. Scholars have examined the
abuses of Google’s digital practices
and their implications for both archival labor and intellectual property [Noble 2018], [Hoffman and Bloom 2016], [Segev 2010]. In this essay, I extend this work to trace a cultural
history of the photographed finger. I do so through a focus on the labor history
embedded in one literary database:
Early English Books Online (EEBO). Several critics have catalogued the palimpsestic
nature of this digital archive,
which reveals the circumstances in which the database was produced, beginning
during the crucible of World War II,
in an international scramble to photograph every extant early modern book as
the threat of German occupation
increased [Schmitt 2003], [Peiss, K. 2019], [Mak 2014], [Kichuk 2007]. Less known are the experiences of the photographers and librarians who created
the
archive. Teams of women in the backrooms of universities and museums made thousands
of microfilm reels during the
war and continuing afterward. The evidence of their labor is anything but invisible.
The images they created
include stunning and mundane traces of their work, cluttering the lower margins
of manuscript pages, their
fingertips a silent motif that persists into the Google Books era (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
The first page of a 1595 copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie has
been photographed with the fingers of the photographer visible in the lower
corners of each page. © British
Library Board. STC 2nd edition 22535 reel 904:16. Images published with permission
of ProQuest. Further
reproduction is prohibited without permission. Images produced by ProQuest as
part of Early Modern Books. www.proquest.com.This essay centers EEBO’s photographed fingertips as interventions in the archive,
analyzing not only their
historical significance but also the conceptual import of their visual mark on
images of the English literary
canon. Reading EEBO’s fingers focalizes the digital object as distinct from print,
and acknowledges the feminized
labor needed to produce it. This reading practice also activates a centuries-long
material and conceptual history
of interaction between hand and page, one that spans a series of technological
evolutions. EEBO and its fingers
mark the transition from analog to digital, through the intimate technology of
the digit — the index finger. This
archive of reproductive labor exemplifies the artificial divide between auteur
and stenographer, artist and
secretary, that animated many of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde movements,
including ones in which EEBO,
then called Early English Books (EEB), photographers were intimately involved.
In what follows, I chronicle the
women who lived this divide, including secretary Margaret Harwick, librarian-spy
Adele Kibre, and Bauhaus
photographer Lucia Moholy, whose work in both microfilm and avant-garde photography
theorized “the invisible hand of the artist-as-reproducer” [Troeller 2020, 86]. The largely untold stories of these artists throw into relief the self-hagiography
of the archive’s
presumed architect, Eugene Power. Read in this context, the signature contribution
of the EEB images is that they
render reproductive labor literally visible, in the form of a fingernail imprinted
at the edge of a textual
artifact. The fingers represent the custodial labor of women working across artistic
and administrative modes
during World War II and the decades that followed. At the same time, they render
visible the text’s transition into
a new form of commodity, repackaged for new sites of purchase and distribution,
their specific visual arrangement
testifying to the text’s valuation and evaluation at a key moment in literary
history.
A Note on Methodology: Piercing the Digital Veil
Studying the production history of EEBO places my work in conversation with a growing
tradition of feminist
digital humanists. Integrating feminist practices into the digital humanities
has required its practitioners to, as
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein write, “show [their] work.” Their book, Data Feminism 2020, argues that digital spaces depend on invisible labor forces. In fact, “invisible labor” has become a central formulation in digital studies. The
predicament is a feminist one, Klein writes elsewhere, because women have traditionally
been tasked
with myriad forms of uncredited work, from cleaning and child-rearing to editing,
typesetting, data entry, and
archive maintenance [Klein 2020]. An important example of this shift is recent scholarship on digital
humanities pioneers like Josephine Miles, who invented a form of quantitative
reading while teaching
at UC Berkeley in the 1950s [Heffernan and Sagner Buurma 2020], [Pasanek 2019]. Julianne
Nyhan has illuminated the work of the 65 keypunch operators, many of them woman,
who worked with
Roberto Busa, the so-called father of the digital humanities [Nyhan 2020]. Still more
scholars have traced extensive histories of digitized archives of newspapers
[Fyfe 2016], [Beals and Bell 2020], [Bingham 2010], [Fafinski 2022], [Hauswedell et al 2020]. We can also draw inspiration from the emerging field of production studies,
begun in film and media studies and now borrowed by many feminist digital humanists.
Production studies attends to
the quotidian and collective labor of making art. The field, Miranda Banks writes,
is profoundly
“anti-auterist,” deflating the cults of personality that often
define filmmaking in favor of cataloguing the many tasks that bring a film to
life. This is a feminist methodology
in large part because it “highlights production at the margins” [Banks 2018, 157]. The microfilmed EEBO archive provides an apt opportunity for a
production studies approach, its margins quite literally highlighted by the cluttered
residue of its
production.
Methodologically, production studies contends with the occlusions of reproductive
labor. Jordan
Troeller articulates the challenge this insight poses for studying artists such
as Lucia
Moholy, whose work in the Bauhaus school during the 1920s and
1930s was often overshadowed and outright stolen by her husband,
the more famous László Moholy-Nagy. Troeller writes, “Coded as
‘reproductive,’ in distinction to the ‘productive’ work of her male colleagues, Moholy’s
photography was not maliciously ignored so much as it was naturalized as a
labor of love on the part of a
devoted wife, whose status as an artist was never seriously considered” [Troeller 2020, 75]. Troeller describes a hierarchy of labor that separates the original from the
reproduced, and,
importantly, the artistic from the technical. While Moholy-Nagy shot the camera,
it was most often his wife who
actually produced his images in the darkroom. According to Moholy, her husband
viewed technical knowledge as
“derivative... in comparison to the more consequential work of the painter and
architect” [Troeller 2020, 82]. This divide, which characterized the artistic
philosophy of the Bauhaus more generally, mirrors the gendered hierarchies in
literary modernism between authors
and midwife-editors and in bibliographic societies between male museum and library
directors and female
secretaries, treasurers, and copyists, the so-called “handmaidens of history.” The first several decades of
the twentieth century, which saw women gain access to the professions in growing
numbers, not to mention the loss
of thousands of men from the workforce due to two world wars, are prime territory
for interrogating the
ever-flimsier divide between artistic and reproductive labor, as research in
art history and literary studies has
demonstrated [Troeller 2020], [Richards 2020], [Delsandro 2020], [Otto and Rössler 2019], [Micir 2019], [Wagner 1998], [Marek 1996].
Putting production studies in conversation with existing histories of EEBO leads to
new feminist insights into
theories of digitized archives and book history. Bonnie Mak, Ryan Cordell, Ian
Gadd, Stephen H. Gregg, and Diana
Kichuk have argued for emphasizing the particularity, even materiality of each
digital text, which becomes a new
object rather than a failed reproduction of another one. As Gregg writes, “Transform the
book into another medium (‘remediation’) and you change the meanings of the book” [Gregg 2020]. Cordell argues that “we must reckon with mass digitized
historical texts as new and discrete bibliographic objects, which is to say
as objects worthy of and available
for source criticism” [Cordell 2017, 190]. This is a difficult task, as readers
most often come to EEBO in search of early modern originals, albeit with an awareness
of those originals’
mediations. The insistent virtuality of an online database — which can, for instance,
block a viewer out of the
archive if her browser window has remained inactive too long — makes it even
more difficult to conceive of a
digital object as discrete and unique. The crux of this challenge, Cordell argues,
is that “of apprehending: of seeing the digital object as such, as an artifact with a distinct
materiality
and sociology” [Cordell 2017, 192]. Cordell articulates the need for a more
granular and attentive digital history, an expectation of the medium that mirrors
the enthusiasm many early
modernists express for book history. And yet these forms of history often work
at cross purposes. Kichuk, who gives
an extensive history and theory of the “remediations” of EEBO,
points out that most of the database’s users “[gaze] through [the] veil, seduced by the
transformations wrought by remediation, [and suspend] disbelief in order to
advance the study of the
text” [Kichuk 2007, 299]. In response, feminist production studies insists upon
the materiality of the veil.
This method articulates how digitized texts preserve multiple moments of history in
a palimpsestic form. This is
especially important for EEBO, which purports to represent the relatively distant
early modern past. Its
digitization catalogues the intermediary forces that have stewarded that past.
As Mak writes, “As a product of human labor, a digitization transmits clues in its very instantiation
about the
circumstances of its manufacture and dissemination” [Mak 2014, 1515]. Mak argues
that the best way to glimpse the materiality of a digitization is to know its
history: its legacies of labor and
touch. In this way, she contradicts the first early modernist responses to the
archive, like that of reviewer John
P. Schmitt, who wrote that using EEBO was “a little like waking up in the British Library
after closing time” [Schmitt 2003]. Informed by production studies, my reading of
EEBO redirects attention from the simulated experience of the reader to those
of the women who actually worked in
the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum during the 1940s.
In what follows, I begin by tracing the trajectory of EEBO’s construction, focusing
on the women who gathered its
holdings, managed correspondence and translation, and photographed each page.
First, I sketch a history of the EEBO
archive, including details of its creation, daily operations, and equipment;
I also give a thick description of the
fingered images themselves. Second, I describe the women who served as administrators
and secretaries for the
copying project, analyzing both their appearances in and absences from important
historical records. I pay special
attention to the writing and photography of Lucia Moholy, whose art photography
provides artistic referents for a
visual analysis of the microfilmed fingers. The presence of these digits in the
margins reflects a set of
interlocking historical developments: the dawn of [digit]ization, the role of
reproductive labor in both
avant-garde art and archive-keeping, and the increasing power of American corporations
to maintain and control
data. Contextualizing these developments leads to a new theorization of the finger
as a shifting transhistorical
signal of embodied reading, from the early modern manicule to the digital cursor.
Finally, I argue that the fingers
in these images point toward a labor tradition that has permeated late capitalism
into the present: the human
mediation — often labor performed by underpaid women in the Global South — required
to prop up all forms of
automated work that benefit mega-corporations.
The British Museum at War: Eugene B. Power’s Modern Renaissance Archive
The history of EEBO is a war history; it begins not with the Second World War but
with the first. Archivists from
the Bibliographical Society at the British Museum compiled a volume entitled
The Short Title Catalogue of Books
Printed in English, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad
(STC) beginning in 1918 as a response
to “the potential for air raids during World War I and [their] fear that future wars
might
jeopardize the collections within Britain” [Martin 2007, 160]. This volume
attempted to list every extant book published between 1471 and 1640, found largely
at the British Museum, the
Bodleian Library, and the Huntington Library. Archivists A. W. Pollard and G.
R. Redgrave published the STC in
1926. As anticipation of another war intensified, the curation of this body changed
hands, and its preservation
became an industry unto itself. The vast conservation mission undertaken to protect
English books and manuscripts
marks only part of a frenzy of collection at work in the years immediately preceding
the war. Kathy Peiss’s Information Hunters
2019 catalogues this international scramble by “librarians, soldiers, and spies” to protect archives, often with cinematic flair. She
argues that books came to represent the bastions of European culture and anti-Nazi
principles that must be
preserved during the German onslaught. “Even more important,” she
writes, “wartime mobilization [of archive technologies] encouraged new aspirations among
major libraries to achieve national leadership and international prominence
through the development of foreign
holdings” [Peiss, K. 2019, 8]. The most obvious of these aspirations originated in
the United States, whose acquisition of myriad European archives mirrors its
ascension to unqualified global
superpower in the post-war years.
According to Pamela Spence Richards, after attending the first World Congress of Documentation,
organized by the
League of Nations Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris in March 1937,
H.G. Wells called microfilm
“a preserver of the brain of mankind, the race brain” [Richards 1988, 302]. At the same Congress, it became clear to many attendees that American
microfilm technology was the most advanced in the world. By 1938, an American
scholarly journal, The Journal of
Documentary Reproduction, and corporation, University Microfilms International
(UMI), had been created to sustain
that reputation. In that year, UMI’s founder, entrepreneur Eugene B. Power, offered
the services of his newly
created company to make microfilm copies of every book listed in The Short Title
Catalogue (Figure 3), a photography archive known as Early English Books (EEB). As preserved on EEBO
today, this
collection is known as STC I to distinguish it from the microfilm collection
of works published 1641-1700 by
bibliographer Donald Wing. A second edition with additions and corrections was
published in three volumes in 1976,
1986, and 1991. The STC images included in this essay were part of Power’s original
collection, which we can
discern by their early reel numbers and their canonical status in the Short Title
Catalogue published in 1927.
Power consistently describes his work as an emergency preservation project. “The Nazis,” he writes with signature mildness, “had the
reputation of being book burners” [Power 1990, 117]. Considering libraries on
the besieged continent a lost cause, Power focused his attention on England.
As suggested by the title of his
autobiography Edition of One, Power takes the vast majority of the credit for the
preservation of EEB. In this account of himself as a singular innovator, Power
resembles Roberto Busa, who has been
depicted, Noëlle Schon claims, “as a lone scholar whose work marked a sharp break with the
past” [Schon 2020]. We might think of Power as a Busa-like figure in the history of
digitized early modern archives. However, Power goes beyond Busa by making brief
reference to the staff of women
working in numerous archives to make microfilm copies of rare books. Nearly 900,000
pages of EEB were photographed
in 1940-41 alone. This work was performed largely by women, as Power alludes,
because so many young and junior male
workers, including bus drivers and drill press operators, were at war. Of his
hastily trained staff Power writes,
“Too much cannot be said in praise of those who have done so well despite the
handicaps of unfamiliar equipment and a strange technique” [Power 1944, 28].
Ironically, given his performed deference, Power mentions their leaders only
briefly, and the team members not at
all, requiring us to examine the literal and metaphorical perimeters of the archive
to discern their
contributions.
The literal perimeters were shaped by the technology available to Power’s teams. The
imaging process begun in 1940
predates cradle technology, a more advanced copying method that protects old
books’ delicate spines while producing
a complete photograph. The microfilm camera used during this period, the Kodak
Recordak Microfile Model D, featured
an adjustable camera that faced down on the document, which rested on a flat
plate. As a result, the book had to be
pinned flat against the plate in order to prevent page curvature and a black
galley down the binding (Figure 3 and Figure 4).
Figure 3.
Aemelia Lanyer’s
Salue Dues Rex Iudæorum (1611) features the shadows of steadying features on every
page. © British Library Board. STC 2nd 15227.5 reel 803:11. Images published
with permission of ProQuest. Further
reproduction is prohibited without permission. Images produced by ProQuest as
part of Early Modern Books. www.proquest.com.Many of the books that feature these marks have them on every page, suggesting that
the way a book is bound and
the person who photographed a particular book play a role in the circumstances
of its reproduction. In photographs
made in later decades, during Donald Wing’s tenure as chief bibliographer, the
finger markings
significantly decrease and photo quality increases. On the original microfilm
reels, which in most cases feature
between ten and twenty books, sometimes several consecutive books feature consistent
finger markings, but just as
often these are interrupted by unmarred images, suggesting that entire reels
were not photographed successively or
simultaneously. Despite the fact that a long roll of film gives the impression
of linearity, each reel is a
collage, patching together texts that do not share author, publication date,
or even library of origin.
At the start, Power planned for the reels to be produced and organized chronologically
and alphabetically by
author, and indeed the first 100 reels or so focus exclusively on late medieval
manuscripts, including printings of
Chaucer made in the late fifteenth century. But shortly afterward, access to
different libraries and the urgency of the
bombings made the organization of the reels grow more haphazard, with Shakespeare’s
plays included on reel 353,
675, 783, 904, 2403, and many more. The best explanation for this haphazardness
is the decentered and overlapping
groups doing preservation work during the war, especially given the varied locations
of rare books, which were
sometimes shipped to London or to the United States, and sometimes remained in
place. According to Lucia Moholy, a
committee under the direction of Dr. H. A. Kellar of the American Historical
Association made inquiries and
ultimate decisions about which books to document first. Copying projects under
Kellar’s authority were carried out
in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Wales [Moholy 1942, 9].
These wartime efforts have had a long afterlife in both analog and digital archives,
and thus remain relevant to
contemporary users of online databases. Zachary Lesser has chronicled the 1950s
and 60s initiative at the
University of Pennsylvania to make Xerox reproductions of EEB microfilm texts,
despite the fact that the university
already owned the microfilm collection [Lesser 2010, 12]. According to Lesser, internal records
show that Penn librarians viewed a Xerox archive of printed, codex books — unlike
the technical struggle of
microfilm — would establish the university’s holdings as a major force in early
modern archives. A few decades
later, when archivists began Early English Books Online in 1998, Proquest staff
digitzed these microfilms rather
than re-photographing the fragile books. These digitizations, like the Xeroxes,
reverse the unending scroll of the
microfilm reel in favor of mimicking the codex. However, these updated forms,
which contribute their own original
errors, depend on the microfilm as the original source of the material. As a
result, the fingers of the
photographers, alongside many other imperfections, remain preserved in the widely
accessed online database. That
database is fundamentally shaped by the wartime context of its creation — in
effect, the first and last time all of
these books would be together in order to be copied.
These images, poignant on their own, are made even more striking by a knowledge of
their production. But Power
elides some of the most valuable information about this process in his autobiography,
not least the central
contributions of his staff and the wide array of bibliographic societies contributing
to the photography effort.
Although most of the photography was performed by unnamed laborers, several women
working in administrative roles
have left impressions on the microfilm’s history.
Secretaries, Photographers, and Spies: Microfilm’s Women Architects
Power originally hired his eventual right-hand woman and CFO Margaret Harwick, whose
corporate headshot is printed
in Power’s book, as a secretary; she had recently lost her job at the Michigan
Crippled Children’s Society. “I will never forget the look on Margaret’s face — she had been on the job all
of one week — when I told her I was going to England on an important microfilming
project and said, ‘You
will be in charge,’” he writes [Power 1990, 37]. Power represents her as
guileless and femininely competent, a tool for his genius, writing, “If I were compiling a
book of lessons for entrepreneurs based on my experience, a major point would
be; Find someone like Margaret
Harwick to be your right hand, and hire her as soon as you can” [Power 1990, 38]. He frames Harwick’s capacity to run the entire corporation and oversee a great
deal of microfilm
photography when Power was abroad as a testament to his own sensibilities, but
he also suggests the importance of
her administrative labor in reproducing a vast intellectual archive.
Another woman central to establishing UMI’s international reach was the American scholar
and photographer Adele
Kibre. Before the war, she traveled across Europe and made a living photographing
rare manuscripts for scholars at
the University of Chicago, where she had earned her PhD in medieval studies in
1930 [Peiss, K. 2019, 121]. At the Vatican, she discovered microphotography and first met Eugene Power,
who hired her to do
freelance translation and photography work. Power described her as “a real Mata Hari
type” [Power 1990, 138], referencing her expatriate lifestyle and proficiency in
several languages. Her relationship with the American government is shadowy;
Peiss reports that her personnel file
at the National Archives comprises one page. Once the United States entered the
war, Kibre became an agent for the
American Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications
(IDC). She made the clandestine
trip to Stockholm under the cover of bad weather, and remained stationed in Sweden,
a neutral nation that could
receive German periodicals embargoed in Britain and the United States, until
the end of the war [Peiss, K. 2019, 132]. While there, she collaborated with the British Ministry of Information to
ship
192 reels of microfilm to London. Richards writes that Kibre, among other IDC
agents, ordered subscriptions to the
periodicals through cooperative or made-up Swedish citizen subscribers, and Peiss
suggests that Kibre may have
cultivated a friendship with Nazi party member Rolf Hoffman in order to receive
his private mailings [Peiss, K. 2019, 133].
In appropriate Mata Hari style, few photos of Kibre exist. While she “was supposed to be
terrific… at translating ancient inscriptions,” she was also, according to Power, “all thumbs mechanically. She simply could not operate the camera” [Power 1990, 139]. Power’s account of Kibre’s skill, which unwittingly parodies the thumbs in
the images
themselves, contradicts Peiss’s research; she documents many recipients praising
Kibre’s skill, although perhaps it
developed over time. Kibre was certainly famous for her scrupulous recordkeeping,
which could verge on the
fanatical. As many microfilming missions “scrambled,” according to
Peiss, to film everything in sight with somewhat haphazard methods, Kibre kept
detailed lists of everything she
photographed, including relatively insignificant periodicals and newspapers [Peiss, K. 2019, 45]. In
Power’s and Peiss’s renderings, Kibre is a marginal historical figure but nevertheless
an ideal innovator for
archive studies. As a librarian hero, her wartime bravery was outstripped only
by her attention to detail.
While Kibre made secret inroads in Stockholm, and Harwick managed daily operations
in Ann Arbor, the
book-photographing mission was conducted primarily in Britain, with Power making
frequent visits. The urgency of
photographing rare manuscripts and printed books increased as the war progressed,
with Power acknowledging that the
Blitz played a central part in the project’s decision to focus on the British
Museum and other British holdings
[Power 1944, 28]. At the outset, the British Museum did not warmly receive the intervention of
this newly formed American corporation. According to Power, Sir John Forsdyke,
the museum’s director, replied
“frostily” to their offer: “Thank you
very much, but the British Museum can take care of their own holdings” [Power 1990, 123]. Early in the war, documentation efforts were decentralized, with government
entities like the United
States Office of Special Services, the German Society of Documentation, the British
Association of Special
Libraries and Information Bureaux (styled Aslib or ASLIB), and individual interests
like UMI, the British Museum,
and many public and university libraries, all pursuing their own archival projects.
As bombing continued and
libraries lost hundreds of thousands of volumes, these efforts were centralized
under Power’s and Aslib’s
administration. A great number of women worked as administrators and secretaries
for Aslib, including treasurer
Irene Shrigley and archivist and writer Edith M. R. Ditmas. In addition, Eleanor
Cavanaugh and Ruth S. Leonard,
employees of the American Special Library Association, visited London to give
talks at Aslib’s annual conference.
These women’s names almost exclusively appear in the archived Report of Proceedings
for Aslib’s Annual Conference,
held at the British Library. The most prominent Aslib employee was the director
of its microfilm division: Lucia
Moholy. During her tenure, Moholy oversaw Aslib’s photography efforts in Britain,
which included not only many
early modern books but hundreds of thousands of German scientific publications
and classified government
information.
Moholy had first moved to London in 1933, after many years spent as part of the Bauhaus
school in Dessau, Germany.
She was never formally a student or instructor at the school, but a frequent
collaborator with her husband on
photography and writing projects for which she was rarely credited [Schuldenfrei 2013, 185].
After her exile to England and divorce from Moholy-Nagy, Moholy published a book,
A Hundred
Years of Photography, 1839-1939, in 1939. Her contributions to the modernist and sachlich (objective)
photography movements have been partially recovered in art historical scholarship
on photography, including work by
Rolfe Sassche, Mercedes Valdivieso, Ulrike Müller, Robin Schuldenfrei, and Jordan
Troeller, but a great deal of
this criticism, as well as Moholy’s own writing, remains available only in German.
Moholy’s underappreciated
contributions to the history of photography run in illustrative parallel to the
development of the EEB
microfilm.
In 1943, the Aslib Microfilm Service (AMS) moved from the Science Museum Library to
the flat of the superintendent
of the nearby Victoria and Albert Museum for more space [Richards 1989, 283]. Once there, Moholy
oversaw a set of five Kodak Recordak Microfile Model D cameras manufactured in
Rochester, New York, the highest
quality available at the time. According to Moholy’s report on Aslib’s work during
the war, published in the
Journal of Documentation in 1946, the cameras were movable up and down their
stands, and “fitted with voltmeter, exposure meter, film footage counter, exposure counter, framing
light, focusing device,
a release for operation by hand or by foot, and an indicator showing the reduction
which can be varied from 8
to 30 diameters” [Moholy 1946a, 150]. The unit also made use of a Recordak
Microfile Reader, Model C, and a Depue Printer, which transferred photo negatives
to positives. Once a document was
delivered to AMS headquarters, Moholy’s team of camera operators, largely women,
had 24 hours to photograph and
develop them [Peiss, K. 2019, 46]. AMS’s total output during the war amounted to 5.5 million pages,
and they indexed microfilms from other centers to the extent of 7 million more.
Because Moholy had an existing
relationship with the American Council of Learned Societies, where she had photographed
“valuable manuscripts and early printed books,” AMS continued to oversee the
photography of rare book material in addition to scientific publishing and classified
government documents [Moholy 1946a, 158]. It is unclear how much of this photography overlapped or corresponded with
the
archive Power claimed as his own, although they had a lengthy collaboration.
Neither in Moholy’s own account of her
activities, nor in scholarly retellings, are the camera operators enumerated
or named.
In her contributions to Aslib’s Annual Conference and in published essays after the
war, Moholy made clear that
she considered evangelism about microfilm a large part of her role. Because Britain
lagged behind the United States
in manufacturing both cameras and readers, the technology had been less completely
embraced, and her photography
could be used by fewer customers. She was eager to expand this industry, which
could respond to book shortages by
serving “the intellectual needs of people in liberated countries”,
where micro-copies could supplement printed books that were not always available
[Moholy 1946a, 159]. But Moholy was also invested in more innovative uses of the technology. In
1946, she introduced to
Aslib the possibility of a microfilm reader designed for disabled people, especially
wounded soldiers, using
hospital beds. The mechanism would reflect the magnified image of the page onto
the ceiling, so patients lying on
their backs could read without moving in bed. Moholy mentioned that adaptions
were in the works for patients who
could not use their hands, or whose hands were in plaster casts [Moholy 1946b, 82]. This product
was already under construction in the United States and not an invention of Moholy’s,
but her presentation at
Aslib’s annual conference demonstrates her holistic approach to the microfilm
medium, which allowed for the
preservation of enemy periodicals and rare English books, supplementing book
shortages for hobby readers, and
accommodation of disabled readers.
In Power’s account, Moholy’s credentials are primarily technical. He writes that his
project was “advanced considerably when I discovered Lucia Moholy in London…. She was well versed
in the
techniques of microfilming. I hired her, and she recruited a crew of women
to help her. At that time, of
course, one saw women doing all kinds of work in England, from driving buses
to running drill
presses” [Power 1990, 135–136]. Power describes Moholy as a capable technician,
a shift leader who worked in the trenches of wartime preservation in the absence
of more esteemed male colleagues.
In this depiction, Power, perhaps unwittingly, reproduces the hierarchy of artistry
that characterized the Bauhaus
school. In a short statement entitled “Production-Reproduction,” Moholy’s husband
Moholy-Nagy makes a strict division between creation and reproduction, writing,
“reproduction (reiteration of already existing relations) can be regarded for the
most part as mere
virtuosity” [Moholy 1922, 289]. Power’s praise of Moholy alights upon her
“mere virtuousity” as the force that will make her a good
employee. He had no need for a creative artist, although the ultimate result
of her work was more layered than he
expected.
A productive continuity emerges between Moholy’s art photography and her work with
Aslib, considering Moholy’s
personal photography of disembodied hands (Figure 4). As Troeller writes, “Moholy fragmented the body, identifying it with its parts and then again with its
various forms
of domestic (i.e., reproductive) labor — labor that was, like her own act of
taking the image, maligned as
artistically unmeaningful, ‘merely’ reproductive” [Troeller 2020, 102].
Moholy’s photography work takes on the character of the domestic work it depicts;
both are unspectacular, “idle,” and repetitive. Moholy chooses the hands as the bodily
fragment responsible for reproductive labor: precision tools that can depress
the shutter release button on a
camera as well as wring out wet laundry. The photography project she would oversee
on an entirely different scale
at the Victoria and Albert Museum also depicted hands at work. Like Moholy’s
work in the darkroom for her husband,
and like her own objective photography, the fingered EEB microfilms trouble the
boundary between productive and
reproductive, artistic and technical.
Figure 4.
Lucia Moholy, Hands Pinning Cloth. 1930.Despite working as an arm of Power’s corporation and the British government, the archive
under Moholy’s
supervision disrupts the legacy of early modern great masters that it claims
to preserve. Its reproductive history
is sutured to the “original” text. Considering the shared preoccupation with the hands
and fingers between these two bodies, representing Moholy’s work during the 1920s
and 1940s, it is possible to
understand the EEB microfilm as an art historical archive, and her personal art
photography as a digital humanist
one. Both insist upon the importance of mundane human touch in the creation —
and more importantly recreation — of
art.
From Digit to Digitization: Tracking the Technology of the Index Finger
Parsing the visual significance of EEBO’s photographed fingers necessitates attention
not only to art history but
to its intersections with book history. Visual representations of fingers appeared
in the margins of rare books
long before they were being photographed. Beginning as early as the Domesday Book in
1086, authors, scribes, and readers included drawings of hands with pointing
index fingers to emphasize specific
passages [Houston 2013, 167]. Much later, these hands would recur in a digital remnant: the
point and click mouse. At first glance EEBO’s fingers and the hands recorded
in The Art of Google Books appear
functionally opposed to these pointing images; after all, they appear randomly
within the texts that they frame,
rather than highlighting specific passages. However, like the manicule, they
inflect the text with a new layer of
meaning, marking its encounter with specific bodies, institutions, and readerships.
The spatial arrangement of the
fingers recorded on the page visually represents the precise nature of this encounter,
its mediation through the
hands of women workers and the emergent technology of the camera. While the photographer’s
marks make meaning in a
fashion distinct from the pointing finger, to read these images back into the
visual tradition of the manicule
recognizes EEBO’s anonymous photographers as co-producers of textual meaning
and physical agents of a pivotal
transition in literary history.
Until recently, no codified name for bibliographic finger markers existed, and book
historian William Sherman
turned up more than 10 alternate names, including pointer, digit, index, indicator,
and fist [Sherman 2008, 25]. He follows manuscript experts in his choice of the currently used term,
manicule, from the Latin maniculum, or little hand.
Manicules were used both by printers and in handwritten manuscripts, meaning
that they bridge the gap between the
literal work of a text created by hand and that of emergent print technology. Manicule use peaked
during the Renaissance, when readers continued to insert them into already printed
books. Although they are most
associated with this period, the image of the gesturing hand has continued to
populate literary history. In the
eighteenth century, printed versions joined the handwritten ones, and the device
appeared in letter-writing manuals
and printed novels by Samuel Richardson and Lawrence Sterne [Williams 2013]. In Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Christopher Flint writes, the appearance of the printed manicule
demonstrates “the degree to which the fiction is enmeshed in its mode of
production” [Flint 2011, 650]. A century later, Walt Whitman would use a
pointing finger, topped with a butterfly, as his icon for the first printings
of Leaves of
Grass (1855) and use handwritten manicules in his manuscripts and notes.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the indexing finger also became associated
with advertising. Readers
of Whitman’s work would have recognized the pointing hand, Eric Conrad writes,
from its use in countless
newspapers, periodicals, and hand-bills [Conrad 2019, 64], [McPharlin 1942, 61]. These fingers express contradictory implications; on one hand, they imply an
embodied reading practice,
intimate, focused, and particular. Sherman writes that manuscript manicules in
particular are often “intentionally made to look as though they extend inwards from a now-invisible reader’s
body off
the edge of the margin” [Sherman 2008, 32] (Figure
5). On the other hand, their mass production created ever-more distant facsimiles of
readerly intimacy.
Even when disseminated by the growing print industry in the eighteenth century,
the presence of the hand or finger
points to the suturing of mechanized and human technology. Their adoption by
corporate advertising quite literally
illustrates the ongoing analog labor required in capitalism-driven mass-printed
archives, from the advertising
flyer to the microfilm reel. The work of individual hands is required to mass
produce print and digital
ephemera.
Figure 5.
This manicule, which can be found in a book by fifteenth century Archbishop William
Scheves, features an
extended index finger and a sleeved arm disappearing off the edge of the page.
Courtesy of the University of St
Andrews Libraries and Museums.The fingers captured at the margins of EEB, and now digitally preserved on EEBO, represent
a pivotal moment in the
history of the pointing finger. Like the manicule that advertises a product,
EEB’s fingers indicate the creation of
a consumer good: the Early English Books Microfilm Collection, which Eugene Power’s
UMI would sell to university
libraries across the United States. They represent the moment of intimate touch
between embodied reading and mass
production. These images capture the manicule’s detachment from the content of
individual passages and from its
historical role as the record of a reading. Instead, EEBO’s scans manifest a
different mode of literary valuation,
which selected a corpus of texts for reproduction according to twin standards
of English national heritage and
American literary taste. And this, too, by the happy coincidence of technological
error: EEB records the custodial
touch, neither authorial nor readerly but belonging to the worker, enlisted in
a vast institutional project of
reshaping the practice of reading. Like Richardson’s manicules, EEB’s digital
afterlife is indeed “enmeshed in its mode of production,” and richer for it [Flint 2011, 650].
The visual flaws left by the fingers evoke the immediacy and tactility of a very particular
moment in a document’s
history — a single now of touch and collective readership that bears a durable
poignancy. In so doing, these
fingers also offer a preliminary method for the digital humanities’ quest to
articulate the materiality of distinct
digital artifacts. This materiality, especially in the form of the finger, has
gendered and even erotic
implications. In her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth
Freeman draws attention to the cheeky finger metaphors present throughout Virginia
Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando,
including an allusion to a hole in a manuscript “big enough to put your finger through”
[Woolf 1973, 119]. In a sense, Freeman suggests, Woolf invites us to “finger history,” indicating that, “History is a hole to
penetrate, but not with the usual instruments”
[Freeman 2010, 109]. As read by Freeman, Woolf imagines a historiography that makes itself
available to the playful, erotic prodding of a queer historian. The finger is
“not the usual instrumen[t]” for penetrating history; it is not a phallic tool for
domination. Instead, its investigation is gentle, sensual, and curious; it explores
the “holes” in history that make the archive inscrutable. Freeman figures this
exploration as both deconstructive and reparative. The queer finger, she writes,
“pokes
and caresses the holes in the archival text even as it sutures them” [Freeman 2010, 110]. Orlando instantiates a symbolics of the finger that is indebted to the indexical
history of the
manicule but adds a defiant emphasis on sex in all senses. The finger is the
nonphallic amateur’s tool for reaching
toward the archive. Despite Power’s corporate credentials, his archive is covered
with the inappropriate touches of
femininity — those made by Moholy, Kibre, and Harwick, as well as the staff they
directed. As Moholy’s art
photography shows, modernist-era avant-gardes understood the intimate touch of
the finger as the point where
mechanized labor and high art intersected.
Exploitation in the Margins: Touching Texts in Late Capitalism
The women fingering EEBO's archive belong to a labor history of digitization that
stretches forward to include
contemporary projects such as Google Books. To recognize the agency of these
women workers as participants in the
creation of meaningful visual texts is not to negate their status as workers,
operating on the lower rungs of a
vast institutional collaboration. The labor of digitization still consistently
falls to anonymous workers. The Art of Google Books, the blog of copying errors curated by Krissy Wilson, belongs to a
growing body of work that illuminates hidden and undervalued labor in digital
archive production, particularly
Google Books. Artist Andrew Norman Wilson worked for a time on the Google campus
and noted that the vast majority
of the workers in the ScanOps division were people of color, working ten-hour days at low wages. He
later made a work of video art entitled “Workers Leaving the Googleplex” [Goldsmith 2013]. The imperfect Google scans demonstrate how the totalizing information
technology available to large corporations requires constant and underpaid labor
that depends on intimacies of
touch. Lilly Irani calls these workers “data janitors,” a massive
invisible labor force that props up corporate power while reaping none of the
benefits. She writes, “These moderators and scan workers never showed up in the lavish, celebrated spaces
where Googlers
drank, ate, and brainstormed…. In fact, Google’s abundantly productive, nonhierarchical,
and playful workplace
seemed to rely on hidden layers of human data work” [Irani 2015]. I take Krissy
Wilson’s blog as an especially eloquent instance of the hierarchal system Norman
Wilson and Irani describe.
This system is also at work in the ongoing corporate interests that govern EEBO. The
EEBO Text Creation
Partnership (TCP) has sponsored transcriptions of the EEBO images, making them
searchable by keyword and thus
useful for many early modern quantitative projects, albeit not infallibly. The
digital era of the database
reproduces the labor circumstances of its earliest instantiations. The transcription
work was outsourced by
Proquest to third-party vendors, Apex CoVantage and SPi Global, whose workers,
anonymous coders in India, actually
created the inscriptions [Gavin 2017, 98n54]. Every technological era of EEBO is also an era of
labor practices, as the University Microfilms International, later Proquest,
corporation immerses itself in global
capitalism. The anonymity of the Indian coders is even more complete than that
of Power’s women photographers;
their presence, stripped back by the digital mode, is not represented by an errant
finger; they are what Mary L.
Gray and Siddarth Suri call “ghost workers,” representatives of a developing global
underclass that props up information and technology corporate wealth [Gray and Suri 2019]. Another
example that underlines the contours of racial capitalism is Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk”
platform, which relies on human workers to produce “artificial
artificial intelligence,” using a racialized referent to an automation hoax that dates back to the 18th
century. According to one study, only 4% of “Turkers” make above
minimum wage, and their numbers disproportionately include those for whom disability
or weak local economies make
gainful employment difficult to access. Their underpaid labor perpetuates the
hoax of artificial intelligence as a
truly autonomous technological marvel [Stephens 2023].
Placing the EEB microfilm in historical continuity with corporations like Google,
Amazon, and Proquest allows us
to recognize the longer history of this exploitative labor and its entanglement
with the American superpower that
World War II fostered. Gavin points out that Eugene Power “in many
ways…represents the ideal of twentieth-century masculine subjectivity,” observing that even his name seems
plucked from the work of Ayn Rand [Gavin 2017, 78]. Power made no apologies for his corporate
interests and their calibration to make the United States the universal custodian
of British and European rare
books. He wrote in one memo, “The collections listed are not complete. Only those portions
of particular interest to American scholars were microfilmed” [Power 1990, 385].
Power’s intervention represents a watershed moment in the intersection of book
history and capitalism. As war and
new technologies converged to create great opportunity, he seized it in order
to make an immense profit in the name
of book preservation. I have argued that the images of EEBO bear the marks of
this literary revolution, not in
Power’s own hand but through the hands of the women hired to conduct the physical
labor of the project. The images
they generated testify to his ambitions and those of the institutions with which
he collaborated, but they also
invoke contemporaneous women’s photography, such as the work of Lucia Moholy,
which celebrated the artistry of
reproductive labor and challenged its dismissal as derivative, unskilled, or
merely technical. Knowing the labor
history of this capitalist archive, which makes itself insistently known through
errorful fingers, should enjoin us
to observe the increased custodianship of corporate interests in our archives.
This custodianship is, and has
always been, built on the work of women. As readers of these digital sources,
we bear the responsibility to attend
to the ghostly presence of anonymous workers and to study their work in continuity
with the literary work they
preserved.
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DHQ Keyword Recommendations
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- Afro-Indigenous Women Healers in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas: A Decolonial Digital Humanities Project, 2022, Franny Gaede, University of Oregon; Ana-Maurine Lara, University of Oregon; Alaí Reyes-Santos, University of Oregon; Kate Thornhill, University of Oregon
- Community-Driven Linked Data Approaches in Builders and Defenders: Nashville's Historical Black Civil War Database, 2024, Angela Sutton, Vanderbilt University; Jessica Power, Vanderbilt University; Fisk University
- Debates in #BlackDH: Key Moments and Queer Directions in Black Studies Scholarship, 2024, Faithe J. Day
- Gender, Race, and Nationality in Black Drama, 1950-2006: Mining Differences in Language Use in Authors and their Characters, 2009, Shlomo Argamon, Linguistic Cognition Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Charles Cooney, ARTFL Project, University of Chicago; Russell Horton, Digital Library Development Center, University of Chicago; Mark Olsen, ARTFL Project, University of Chicago; Sterling Stein, Linguistic Cognition Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Robert Voyer, Powerset
- Exploring Combinatorial Methods to Produce Sonnets: An Overview of the Oupoco Project, 2024, Frédérique Mélanie-Becquet, LATTICE (CNRS & ENS/PSL & Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle); Clément Plancq, LATTICE (CNRS & ENS/PSL & Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle); Claude Grunspan, LATTICE (CNRS & ENS/PSL & Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle); Mylène Maignant, LATTICE (CNRS & ENS/PSL & Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle); Matthieu Raffard, Atelier Raffard-Roussel; Mathilde Roussel, Atelier Raffard-Roussel; Fiammetta Ghedini, RIVA Illustrations; Thierry Poibeau, LATTICE (CNRS & ENS/PSL & Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle)
TF-IDF Recommendations
Below are article recommendations generated by the TF-IDF Model:
- Stealing a Corpus: Appropriating Aesop’s Body in the Early Age of Print, 2018, Alex Mueller, University of Massachusetts Boston
- Sensitivity and Access: Unlocking the Colonial Visual Archive with Machine Learning, 2024, Jonathan Dentler, Catholic University of Paris; German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.; Lise Jaillant, Loughborough University, UK; Daniel Foliard, Université Paris Cité, LARCA (UMR 8225); Julien Schuh, Université Paris Nanterre; Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Mondes
- OCR of historical printings with an application to building diachronic corpora: A case study using the RIDGES herbal corpus, 2017, Uwe Springmann, LMU Munich & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- TypeWright: An Experiment in Participatory Curation, 2015, Alan Bilansky, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Project Quintessence: Examining Textual Dimensionality with a Dynamic Corpus Explorer, 2023, Samuel Pizelo, UC Davis; Arthur Koehl, UC Davis; Chandni Nagda, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Carl Stahmer, UC Davis
URL: https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/18/1/000718.html
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 - 2025
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 - 2025
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
