Prototyping the SF Nexus: Collaborative Models for Digitizing and Curating Speculative Fiction Collections as Data

This paper overviews the SF Nexus prototype, the developmental stage of a research project to digitize and curate available works of Anglo-American speculative fiction. This resource enables access to texts in the public domain and under copyright, from magazines to mass-market novels. We overview challenges confronting scholars of SF book history, including restricted access to and the uncatalogued materials in special collections, copyright barriers to sharing digital texts, and the lack of comprehensive indices to SF texts and their publication records. The presentation will present models for multi-institutional, collaborative mass digitization efforts to ingest into HathiTrust, share across research centers and libraries, and curate on the web with user-friendly, embeddable tools for the cultural analytics of books as image and text data. We conclude by proposing our coalition as a collaborative model for similar digitization and curation projects requiring standardized policies, legal agreements, and data curation workflows.