Digitizing Science Fiction

This Omeka exhibit represents a selection of mid-twentieth century science fiction book covers, organized by sub-genre, and originally digitized from Temple University Libraries' Paskow Science Fiction Collection. This website overviews materials from the Special Collections Research Center's Paskow Science Fiction Collection and the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio's ongoing project to digitize mass-market "New Wave" science fiction books for preservation purposes and to support teaching and research in digital literary study and cultural analytics.

For more information on the Paskow Science Fiction collection, see the Special Collection Research Center's website. The Paskow collection contains primarily materials from post-WWII, especially mass-market works of the New Wave era (often dated to 1964-1980). The digitized texts have also been ingested into HathiTrust's repository for preservation and data curation; they are now viewable on HathiTrust's Temple page for non-consumptive research. Each individual item listed on this Omeka website also contains a link to its corresponding HathiTrust page.

For more information on the project to digitize and curate a corpus of "New Wave" science fiction, see Alex Wermer-Colan's post on the Scholars Studio blog, "Building a New Wave Science Fiction Corpus." To learn more, see related posts on the blog, including James Kopaczewski's "Digitizing Alternate History Narratives," Jeff Antsen's "Disagreggating Copyrighted Corpora,"  and Alex Wermer-Colan's "Modeling the New Wave." Temple News also wrote up the project in an article titled "Byte-Size Books."

This effort has culminated in the development of the sfnexus.io website, where the SF corpus's extracted features and related data analysis projets can be viewed, including ready-made Jupyter Notebooks for users to conduct further analysis on extracted features sets. In addition, related scholarship and presentations born out of the SF nexus project can be viewed on sfnexus.io. 

Exhibit Structure

Each subpage is organized by a genre, often defined in a broad sense by combining multiple subgenres identified by Library of Congress subject headings (all these items are also listed as "Fiction" and "Science Fiction" by LOC). For instance, "time travel" includes alternate history narratives that do not necessarily feature explicit acts of traveling through time. This open interpretation of genres serves to showcase connections between disparate works.

For each genre page, images and metadata available on this site are chronologically ordered in each section to provide a sense of how the "New Wave" developed over time. The "Description" field provides a blurb on the text's plot - in the cases where descriptions weren't already available in the catalog, we've transcribed the marketing blurbs from the books' back covers.

Credits

This website was built by the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio staff, including Matt Shoemaker, Alex Wermer-Colan, Jasmine Clark, Katie Westbrook, David Ross, Jordan Hample. Further assistance was provided by Temple Libraries' staff, including Gabriel Galson and the Director of Special Collections, Margery Sly. Graduate students have contributed to its development, including James Kopaczewski, Elysia Petras, Synatra Smith, Marilla Cubberly, Eugene Kushnikov, and Kyle Schwab.

Take Down Notice

This site only exhibits book covers for copyrighted fiction; no copyrighted work is being made available for consumption. These digitized images are made accessible for purposes of education and research. Temple University Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible. If you hold the rights to materials in our digitized collections that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.

If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by writing to digitalscholarship@temple.edu.