Pohlandt-McCormick, “I Saw a Nightmare...”: Doing Violence to Memory, new on HEB

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick

“I Saw a Nightmare...”: Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. HEB 2010.

The Soweto uprising was both a tragic and heroic event in the history of South Africa. Tragic, because of the violence associated with it; heroic, because of the way it grew out of the oppression of the past and marked a decisive step towards a democratic future. This electronic book has two identities. On the one hand it provides a comprehensive, though by no means complete, account of the uprising. On the other, it is an attempt to come to terms with the interrelationship between violence and memory in South Africa.

This born-digital work is envisioned as two buildings, interconnected, perhaps even standing under the same roof. The buildings have many floors, large and small rooms, alcoves, basements and common rooms. They are interconnected by a series of passageways, staircases, larger and smaller doors. Thus, this book does not offer merely another alternative interpretation of the story of Soweto, no single narrative of the past or single interpretation, but rather the multiple stories that were told and the contested meanings that were attributed to the events of Soweto. It seeks to describe and establish relationships among these multiple narratives as well as the processes of societal and individual remembering and forgetting, looking at the many levels, layers, spaces, and times in which they took place.

The electronic medium, with its ability to create multiple linkages at many levels and to surpass the simple linearity of a book, attempts to replicate the many layers of meaning associated with the uprising. Some of them have changed through time, some complement each other, others conflict.

This e-book provides extensive supplementary materials, accessible via pop-up windows (including thousands of photographs, with the option of browsing for these by keyword or type); official documents; essays; and interviews. It takes advantage of extensive interactive cross-referencing within the text to promote non-linear navigation, including “red thread” sections showing a list of all related sections throughout the e-book. It also provides a wealth of related historical documents in the form of PDFs, and a glossary.

A Gutenberg-e title.

Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

Gengenbach, Binding Memories, now on HEB

Heidi Gengenbach

Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. HEB 2010.

Building on the insights of feminist scholars who had used personal narratives to explore women’s constructions of the past, this book argues that during the last two centuries women in the rural communities of southern Mozambique had not suffered as silent, helpless, or, at best, coping victims of Gaza Nguni conquest, Portuguese colonialism, South African mining capital, and patriarchal clan rule.

How did women experience and explain the sometimes colliding, sometimes colluding forces of ostensibly masculine power that had transformed the region, so often destructively, since the early nineteenth century? Were imperialism and capitalism, guns and gold, tradition and patriarchy really as omnipotent in determining the exterior and interior landscapes of women’s lives as scholars had claimed? Would the dynamics of precolonial or colonial political power, proletarianization, mission Christianity, agriculture, or African marriage and family look the same if one examines them from the point of view of rural women?

Do some people remember differently—not in the sense that the details of their memories differ, but in terms of the tools of their memory, the forms their remembering takes? What, for instance, if some people choose not to put experience solely into story, or not to articulate their memories through language at all? The work of remembering, like the work of history, involves sorting through and making sense of the jumble of what happened. We take what we know, we arrange it, we come up with an explanation, and we store that explanation somehow—because we created it for a purpose, and for an audience of some kind. After all, we do the work of remembering in company, as members of a community, never in a social vacuum and never entirely on our own. But who is to say that these explanations, these records of interpreted experience, must be organized and presented as narrative, in discourse rather than some other form? Is narrative our only medium of access to the past, the only meaningful shape remembrance—or history—can assume?

How does a Western academic historian present in writing historical knowledge that comes in the shape of a clay pot or a line in the soil and that obeys imperatives different from her own? While sections of this book on women’s life-storytelling do rely on existing Africanist scholarship for models of historical narrative, none of these models perfectly fit the culture of female storytelling. Collectively they raise a crucial question: To what extent can or should academic historians subordinate their subjects’ conventions of historical narrative to the formal conventions of their discipline?

Includes image maps to facilitate non-linear navigation, audio clip interviews, and a Flash animated map. Dozens of supplementary materials are accessible via pop-up windows, including the author’s field notes, interview transcriptions, and newspaper clippings. Includes a glossary and over 500 color and black and white images.

A Gutenberg-e title.

Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

HEB Offers Libraries Free, Two-Month Trials

ACLS Humanities E-Book is offering institutions a free, two-month trial of the collection during May and June in anticipation of the Summer/Fall acquisition season.

If you would like to request a trial, please email your name, email address and institutional affiliation to subscriptions@hebook.org. Once your response is processed you will receive a username and password to access the collection online.

As your library plans for the expansion of its digital collection, we hope you'll consider ACLS Humanities E-Book. For a complete list of titles available, please visit http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

HEB Handheld Reading Device Survey: Summary of Results

HEB recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPhone. (For details, please visit the HEB website.)

We offered participants a choice of three sample titles to download, all taken from our online collection and reformatted for portable e-book readers, with each available in two different formats, ePub and prc/MOBI. The survey was completed by 142 respondents, 86 of whom (i.e., more than 60%) described themselves as librarians. Independent scholars, instructors, students, writers, and technology consultants were among the remaining participants.

Full details of the survey results and handheld conversion process will be featured in a forthcoming white paper, but here are some of the more important findings.

Respondents were asked to rate their experiences with both content and functionality. Most indicated that they were quite satisfied with straight-forward reading and navigation, in spite of formatting limitations resulting from converting to ePub and prc. In terms of e-reader functionality, responses reflected a certain amount of frustration with interactive features, such as compiling and working with annotations, and options for reference and citation.

Overall, survey participants reacted more or less favorably to HEB’s sample titles, and about 75% expressed an interest in downloading additional monographs. (Forty-six percent answered they would definitely be interested in this, and an additional 29% expressed interest if the titles were free or priced below $10.)

HEB also surveyed participants regarding their general reading preferences, and current use of handheld readers for research purposes appeared to be relatively low. When asked to compare the two formats, 69% of participants who also had access to HEB’s online collection seemed to prefer this for research and scholarly use. This does not come as a surprise, since a number of features considered important to digital scholarship by survey participants (e.g., access to external resources, searching across titles, and color images) were either restricted or unavailable altogether on then-current handheld devices. However, among the same subgroup, for casual/general reading, those preferring the handheld edition outnumbered those preferring the online edition three to one.

After closing the survey, HEB conducted a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to Apple, Sony, or Amazon, and the winners have been notified. Thanks again to all our participants.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2010

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 15th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection.

Worth noting is that Islam and the Middle East (consistently on the list since 2003) has fallen off the top ten. Hodgson’s Venture of Islam, a constant in the top ten in the past, is now at 13th place. Meanwhile, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather maintains its strong performance. This period it has been joined by several other titles in colonial, race, and gender studies (a trend continued among the next ten on the list). At the same time, other disciplines or methodologies — especially sociology and media studies — have emerged as leaders. Apropos is the appearance here of two presses new to the top ten: NYU and Verso.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso)
2. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press)
3. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press)
4. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press)
5. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
6. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon)
7. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press)
8. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia)
9. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press)
10. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

New MARC Records

As previously reported, ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 576 books to its collection, bringing the total to 2790 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas. All current subscribers now have access to all of the new books added to the collection.

Cataloging records are available to HEB subscribers for download, and instructions for obtaining these records are included below. As you know, it is very important to load the MARC records into your catalog as soon as possible, because most users become familiar with, and begin to access, the site from the library catalog.

New records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available via your browser at:

http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683

• If you are a new subscriber or if you have not recently updated your MARC records, in order to download all ACLS Humanities E-Book records to date you need to download acls1-7.zip.

• If you only need to add the new titles, and your records are up-to-date with the last download in Winter 2009, you simply need to download acls7.zip

Downloads contain three files:

a. The records in USMARC communications format

b. The same records in ASCII format

c. readme.txt - in ASCII format (explains what is contained in each of the above).

There is a discrepancy between the number of records and the number of books in the collection due to the fact that multi-volume works have a single record. A complete set will include 2651 records for 2790 books.

HEB Round 7 Titles Released

We are happy to announce the launch of the latest round of titles on HEB: 576 new works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including important new series from the American Sociological Association, Cambridge University Press, the English Institute, and the Society of Biblical Literature.

With the addition of these new works HEB's list now stands at 2790 titles, with over 1 million pages and over 45,000 images. It offers titles in over two dozen disciplinary or area studies, many new to this round, including many titles in performance studies (theater, music, dance, performance), film and media studies, literary criticism, sociology, bibliographical studies, history of the book, and biblical studies. We continue to add titles in all areas of history, women's studies, Jewish studies, and many other fields. HEB now includes monographs, critical studies, primary sources, reference works and volumes of essays. The entire collection is full-text and completely cross-searchable. It is also browsable and searchable by series.

HEB continues to offer peer-reviewed titles of the highest quality from nearly 100 scholarly publishers. These titles have been chosen by our partners among twenty participating ACLS learned societies for their continued value in teaching and research. Selection and digitization for the next round of HEB titles is already underway.