Description: ☛ Thoughts on the Eighteenth Century and Digital Humanities
Detail from the masthead of the orginal interface (2003-2020)
It suddenly struck me that Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is twenty years old this year. Comparatively, this isn’t very long ago at all, but I realise that in recent years I’ve begun to think of ECCO as ‘old.’
Certainly, from the point of view of its publisher, Gale, it is indeed an old product (even the company was different: it was Thompson-Gale in 2003). The commercial publishing industry views digital products as always on the cusp of being out of date. The ideology of technological progressivism and substitution in digital development, combined with the need to keep products marketable and competitive, means that companies are in a constant state of innovation. Indeed, ECCO has been subject to several major