The sixteen volumes of handmade scrapbooks of ephemera by Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), held at the University of Glasgow, contain over 3600 pages and tens of thousands of individual clippings. As resonant a resource as they are for researchers interested in, for example, twentieth-century Scottish literature and culture or queer archives of ephemera, they are also a prime example of a collection that emblematises the challenges facing libraries and archives wishing to make their materials available online. As Deazley et al. remark on the Digitising the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks project website, ‘when decisions about the digitisation of heritage collections are influenced by the copyright status of the material itself, this skews the digital cultural record.’ Despite their socio-cultural value, the Morgan scrapbooks raise significant material and financial barriers to online publication, including issues of due diligence clearing for the use of facsimiles, which are added to the fact that even when photographed, much material information for the scrapbooks is lost. Grappling with the material and legal challenges opens a range of questions about what is made possible by digital media while also continuing Morgan’s own desire to circulate the scrapbooks publicly (Morgan himself tried unsuccessfully to have the scrapbooks published twice).

The Working from Scraps project seeks to confront these challenges by constructing, and theorising, a digital prototype which represents aspects of the Morgan scrapbooks in ways that go beyond a straightforward photographic representation of the page. It employs information visualisation principles in order to find ways of grasping the thematic and semantic content of the scrapbooks while evading breaches of copyright and investing in a database aesthetic that is inspired by, yet remains distinct from, the scrapbooks themselves. The project aims to create a digital artefact that brings out several elements of the Morgan scrapbooks, including their networked qualities, the manifold resonances between their collected images and scraps of texts, and the semantic relationships and thematic preoccupations that emerge across the scrapbooks as a whole.

This website also provides access to other prototypes developed in projects adjacent to the Working from Scraps collaboration, including the Colour Collage prototype and the Constellation prototype. This network of associated prototypes collectively demonstrates the myriad potentials in the Morgan scrapbook data and the range of interpretive approaches to data visualization that they can inspire.

See sample pages from the Edwin Morgan scrapbooks on Flickr.