Greg Crane

Interview date: February 8, 2010

Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado

Summary: Crane’s primary focus is open content. One of the biggest changes he has noticed is the shift  of using multiple digital resources in modern work.

An innumerable amount of different resources are available for access. Crane sees a need for people to be able to analyze and transform the sources so it can be annotated and published in a database. Crane, too, sees a need for people who may be editing texts, semi-automatically, and creating name identification systems (like Crane did with London). Dealing with databases that are hidden behind subscription walls becomes crippling to scholarship because they cannot be downloaded reused.

There is a real shift in the paradigm of how resources are used and created today and how they were used years ago. Crane sees society at an incunabular phase. The first generation of digital work, with its new tools, is doing the same things that they have done before. There is access now, because of the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the humanities. Crane sees a need for people to help do what machines can automatically do: at the simplest level, correcting optical character recognition (OCR) or at a more complex level, taking the output of text mining and classification to try and create order and analyze the results. With Google Books on the horizon (that is, if they follow the settlement and the legality passes and it becomes accessible), everyone is going to access. And it will be a completely new world.