Tag Archives: digital humanities

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

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LadysMagazine‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ is a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant scheme.  The team of academics behind it is based at the University of Kent and is led by Jennie Batchelor, who works closely with the project’s two full-time Postdoctoral Researchers:  Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi.  Our aim is to shed new light on one of the first and longest running women’s magazines of all time.

In an 1840 letter to Hartley Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë wrote that she wished “with all [her] heart” that she “had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine,” a periodical that ran for 13 issues per annum from more than six decades and had an estimated circulation of 10,000 monthly copies at the height of its popularity.  170 years later the history and cultural and literary importance of a publication, the vast majority of the original content of which was produced by unknown and unpaid reader-contributors, remains undocumented.

Our project fills this significant gap through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of one of the first recognizably modern magazines for women from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818.  In its two-pronged book history/literary critical approach, this project sets out to answer three key research questions:

  • What made the Lady’s Magazine one of the most popular and enduring titles of its day?
  • What effects might an understanding of the magazine’s content, production, and circulation have upon our conceptions of Romantic-era print culture?
  • What role did the Lady’s Magazine play in the long-term development of the women’s magazine and the history of women’s writing?

In response to these questions, we are producing an open-access fully annotated, downloadable index of the magazine’s content for its first 50 years, which will launch in September 2016.  Titles of articles are accompanied by the names or pseudonyms of their contributors, and their contributors’ status (author, translator, extracter, or pilferer) is given wherever it can be clearly ascertained.  Attributions are made where possible.  In fact, we are amassing a small but growing body of evidence about a number of regular and mostly unknown contributors to the magazine and their lives or careers beyond its pages.  We regularly publish about these discoveries, and many other topics besides, on our project blog.

In addition to illuminating the production and composition of the magazine, we also pay detailed attention to its diverse, text-based contents.  Since the titles of articles in the Lady’s Magazine are often misleading (an article purporting to be about women’s dress might make an impassioned plea for reforms in female education, for instance), our index tags content by genre, key stylistic features and prominent keywords (marriage, education, politics, for example) making it easy for readers to find items of particular interest.

We are mining the data we are collating and will be presenting our findings in the form of web, book, and journal articles on attributions, the career profiles of magazine contributors, and statistical and interpretive analyses of the shifting content of the magazine over the course of its long history.  Jennie is also in the process of writing a book about the magazine’s place in the Romantic literary marketplace.  By making the annotated index of contributor signatures and content analysis freely available online, we also hope to promote further research by scholars and other interested parties on the Lady’s Magazine, late-eighteenth-century periodicals, and authorship and print culture in the period more generally.

One of the greatest joys of the project has been disseminating and talking about our research in progress via our Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog, all of which are regularly updated. Through social media, we have entered into conversations about the magazine, its diverse content, and the issues it debates and generates with modern-day readers all over the world.  Establishing a community of interested parties who felt they had a stake in the publication was vital to the success of the Lady’s Magazine, whose readers and subscribers were also its authors.  We like to think that, in a small way, the online community that has grown around the project captures and perpetuates something of the spirit of the magazine itself.

It has certainly been a genuine and generative collaboration that has advanced the project in ways that we could not have anticipated when we began.  For instance, Jennie’s happy acquisition of a copy of the periodical from one of our blog’s readers, which contained a number of rare surviving embroidery patterns, led to a flutter of Twitter excitement that snowballed into ‘The Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off,’ a non-competitive sewing bee in which dozens of people all over the world have recreated 10 Lady’s Magazine patterns for display at an exhibition at Chawton House Library to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), a novel whose hero and a major plotline are taken from a short story in the Lady’s Magazine.

To find out more, do visit the project website and blog, or contact Jennie ([email protected])

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

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Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a digital project in support of the teaching, study, and research of the poetry of the long eighteenth century.  It comprises a full-text collection of richly-encoded digital texts and a research project that aims to integrate texts and (digital) scholarship into a curated research collection.  ECPA is based on the principle of user participation, the corpus is edited and annotated collaboratively, and will grow and evolve with the requirements and interests of its users.

ECPA was originally intended as a way of providing literary and historical context for its sister project, the Thomas Gray Archive, covering the lives and works of contemporaries of Gray’s such as William Collins, Mark Akenside, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Christopher Smart, and James Thomson.  As the project evolved and widened in scope, its initial contextual focus shifted to an analytical one.

ECPA builds on the texts created by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).  The transcription and encoding has been enriched with additional descriptive (e.g., author attributions on poem level) and analytical markup (e.g., recording verse, stanza, and poem form, assigning of themes and genres, assigning rhyme scheme, assigning metrical pattern, recording of syllable pattern, addition of explanatory/editorial annotations) in support of a computationally assisted close reading process.

As readers engage with texts in different ways and with different objectives, we have modeled these different types of user engagement into distinctive “views” of the text.  So far, we have focused on views that support a first reading of a text (“reading” view) and the initial analysis of a text (“analysis” view) in the form of a close reading.  Over time, the ECPA research project will enable new modes of engagement and allow for increasingly sophisticated ways of interacting with the texts.

ECPA is currently available in public beta and is in active development.  Current developments are concerned with increasing the number of poets and poems represented, and exploring the possibility of including other European languages.  We welcome any feedback about issues, feature requests, or general feedback about the content, functionalities, or design of the Website.  Please e-mail <[email protected]>.

The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD)

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Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD)

The period from 1790 to 1820 was a significant moment in British women’s literary history.  During this period more women published novels than men, even as the novel was solidifying as a respected literary genre.  By the end of this period the novel was reputable enough a medium for Sir Walter Scott, celebrated poet, to pen the wildly successful Waverly series (1814).  His success, however, came on the backs of the many women novelists who paved the way before him in the previous thirty years.

But what was the contemporary critical response to such a momentous period in the history of the British novel?  The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD) seeks to uncover just that.

The NRD is the first and only database to focus on one genre’s historical reception.  Cataloging reviews of novels from the period’s two foremost review periodicals, the Monthly Review and the Critical Review, the NRD brings together book reviews and book market data, providing a repository of criticism reacting in print to this period in the novel’s, and women’s, literary history.

The NRD includes 1,836 book reviews, representing 1,215 novels and 445 identified authors.  It features transcriptions of review criticism as well as data on women writers, novels, and review periodical makeup.  The NRD contains a unique combination of contemporary primary sources that speak to the novel’s solidification as a literary genre during this period, including review articles, advertisements, and novel prefaces, many from archival sources not available digitally.

The NRD also offers a data-set by which distant reading of this period in literary history can be explored, uncovering for the first time the Reviews’ role in shaping our modern novel canon.  Distant reading studies of the novel, such as this study from the NRD of publisher William Lane, offer a new means of asking questions about the history of the novel and how contemporaries experienced its evolution.  Its scope enables the NRD to encourage a broad survey of the literary marketplace in which the novel grew in the late eighteenth century, one that brings forward the many anonymously published and still obscure women novelists from this period that are often neglected in our study of the novel.  The NRD presents opportunities for text mining review criticism, tracing economic market changes in novel production and sales, or publishers’ trends, tracking the novel’s evolving gendered authorship, understanding how reviewers discussed and understood a novel’s authorial gender, and excavating growing genre parameters by which the novel was evaluated and effectively produced.

The NRD is currently in Phase I of three phases of development.  Phase I features transcriptions of review criticism—criticism that due to poor OCR in digital archives and scattered periodicals collections, are currently unavailable to most scholars.  The NRD seeks to make this text corpus available to scholars in an open-access relational database platform.  This platform, Phase II, which introduces a review bibliography, novel publication data, and authorial gender demographics, is under construction with hopes of a 2017 release.  Phase III will provide users with review page images and the ability to read issues of the Reviews in their entirety, tagged review subjects and the power to create their own tagging profile, and a formula builder to manipulate NRD data for their own research.

Curating The Mind Is a Collection

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The Mind Is a Collection is a born-digital museum of early modern cognitive models.  For the last decade or so, I have been studying the spaces in which the philosophies of the British Enlightenment were thought, penned, or put into practice.  One outcome of this research is a book, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth Century Thought (Penn, 2015).  But this book was all along imagined as the catalogue of a museum, a collection of the things that people used to make sense of mental processes.  The Mind Is a Collection is that museum, gathering in one place roughly a hundred objects used to model the mind.  Some of these objects can be found in private collections or museums around the world, but others have vanished, are fixed in place, or never existed in the first place.  In other words, such a virtual space navigates the world in much the same way as an ideal one.  It seeks thereby to capture the essential ideality of mind as an emergent property of imaginary objects.

We generally think of the mind as something absolutely different from the rest of the world.  There is, on the one side of a bright divide, the world of stuff: intelligible and unintelligible objects, things-in-themselves, perhaps other people, maybe our own bodies.  There is, on the other side, the world of the intellect: rational and irrational objects, things as we know them, our sense of others, and some sense of ourselves.  This is the bright line of the mind/body divide: there is mind-stuff and matter, consciousness and brute creation.  This is what is meant by the catch-all term “dualism.”

The philosophers tell us again and again that dualisms are nonsense–and I’m inclined to agree.  There is (they say) no final line in the mind, no screen where ideas pop up or frontier that separates there from here.  We are embedded in the world in which we move; “mind” is a category mistake.  Yet, there is a catch.  Despite the fact that philosophical dualisms have been overwhelmingly, repeatedly, and even routinely discredited, the figures of thought cling on, turning up in philosophy and folk psychology alike.  Some of the most powerful voices speaking against these sorts of dualisms have themselves noticed the difficulty of speaking beyond them (see for instance Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained); even if we accept that we are speaking nonsense, it is hard to know how to talk about mental activity without falling back on vocabularies hinging on difference.

The Mind Is a Collection focuses on one dominant instance of this habit, a mainstream cognitive model for the British Enlightenment; it is organized around a related batch of metaphors for mentation, bubbling up repeatedly at the time and place commonly named as the source of modern dualisms.  Its crucial intervention is to argue that dualisms name the state of certain forms of networks; it argues that the mind/body distinction, decried as a philosophical fallacy, arises as the proof and function of embedded cognitive systems.  Put differently, philosophical dualisms are constructed in working spaces of thought.  John Locke calls the mind a cabinet; he was a collector of books.  Joseph Addison compares thinking to a walk in a garden; Addison was a planter and an important figure in the development of English gardening.  These are metaphors foisted on working spaces of thought.

The usual way to explore this phenomenon would be to write a book about it, posing the argument that “mind” is a name for certain kinds of emplaced relationships.  But it seemed just as natural to me to pose this argument through a museum, since collections like museums were the smithies of modern mentation.  This, then, is that museum, which contains some of the critical objects of eighteenth-century philosophy.  John Locke says that the mind is a cabinet?  Well, some of the critical artifacts from his cabinet can be found in the first space of this museum, called “Metaphor.”  (The rest can be found in Oxford, at the Bodleian Library.)  Joseph Addison compares thinking to walking?  The back door of The Mind Is a Collection, located in “Digression,” lets out onto Addison’s favorite walk, the water-walks of Magdalen College.  And so on.

Taking these metaphors seriously involves recognizing a reverse vector.  We don’t just model our mind on the spaces in which we think.  We create gadgets, in turn, based on those mental models.  We invent tools that respond to how we understand our minds to work.  Call it the feedback loop of cognitive modeling.  We are the creatures of our gadgets, just as our gadgets are the creatures thoughts.  So, Locke says that the mind is a cabinet, and he becomes a minor pioneer in library science, developing indexing methods based on his library.  The pamphlet Locke authored that discusses this method is mentioned in Exhibit 1, “Locke’s Index.”  Joseph Addison claims that thinking is like walking, and he becomes a gardener, planting the walks that make his species of thinking possible.  The house he built, and walk he planted, is the subject of Exhibit 14, “Addison’s Walk.”  We, in other words, shape our environments to match our mental models.  This museum collects the traces of this sort of shaping.

Composing The Mind Is a Collection meant producing about 80,000 words of new prose, for the prose of the book is almost completely different than that of the virtual museum.  It also meant securing permissions for those handfuls of images not in the public domain—though even the most casual visit to the museum will show you that not many of the images in the museum involve simple photographs of things in the world.  Most of what you will find there was painstakingly worked up with architectural modeling software.  The process begins with 3-dimensional models built in Sketchup 2015—a museum inspired by multiple iconic C17 and C18 spaces (the old Bodleian, the Ashmolean, Stowe House, and so on), filled with objects modeled from scratch based on my personal viewings of various iconic C17 and C18 objects.  I then rendered this space, populated with these things, into photorealistic images, using Thea Render’s engine and studio.  Producing these images meant, among other things, developing custom materials, designing virtual “cameras,” and arranging a virtual lighting system.  I then cleaned up the resulting images in Photoshop, and built a clickable image map for each.  This leads to the final step, when image, image map, and prose are brought together in a single website, hosted by Squarespace.  It is here that the virtual museum springs into being.  Most of this work I did myself, but some involved work from some very special friends (see for instance Sir Kenelm’s Idea).  What results is, I hope, the half compellingly real, half dream-like fantasy of a virtual mind-museum.

Putting together this museum has been a labor of care.  But the labor has been about remaining true to the museum’s driving insight: that ideas are things distributed in space.  Even a philosophical dualism, so this museum argues, is the name for a certain kind of network—a network that can be seen online.  I invite you to visit, to see what I’ve been on about.  Admission to The Mind Is a Collection is always free.  You’re welcome to browse, to pursue whatever is of interest to you, and to skip what isn’t.  Leave for coffee and return.  Your ticket is good for multiple entries.  The longer, more detailed discussion of anything you find there is available in the book of the same title.  Links to places where you can find the book will be found in the gift shop.

Early Novels Database

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Every reader of eighteenth-century literature is familiar with the paradox of the Google Books era: while the archive of digital texts has expanded exponentially in recent years, our ability to locate them has diminished.  Even basic bibliographic details such as complete titles, prefatory materials, narrative forms, and tables of contents are often missing from digital facsimiles.  The Early Novels Database (END) project reunites missing metadata with digital facsimiles of early fiction to make them easier to find and categorize.  Uniting twenty-first-century data structures with the sensibility of eighteenth-century indexing practices, the project creates detailed metadata about novels published between 1660 and 1850.  END captures detailed information about the organizational structures eighteenth-century readers relied on—title pages, tables of contents, author claims, narrative forms, prefaces, epigraphs, advertisements, and more.  Transforming these paratextual elements into machine-readable, searchable data, END offers researchers and readers new ways of connecting and exploring digital collections of fiction.  END’s metadata will also expand the possibilities of corpus analysis of early fiction, allowing users to create more sophisticated models of large full-text corpuses.

END is a collaborative, multi-institutional project based at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College.  Faculty, staff, and fellows from both institutions lead a team of undergraduate researchers drawn from Penn and the Tri-College Consortium (Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr) as well as Williams College.  In Summer 2016, END is expanding to NYU’s Fales Library, whose rich holdings in early fiction will expand the END dataset significantly.  After intensive training alongside the core END team based in Philadelphia, a team of NYU staff and students will catalog selections from the Fales Collection; expansion to additional New York repositories is planned for Summer 2017.

Thomas Gray Archive

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Thomas Gray is most famous for his poem “Elegy written in a country churchyard.”  It was an instant success, and even today it is the most visited page on the Thomas Gray Archive website.

There is more to Thomas Gray than just this one poem, however.  Born in 1716, he was one of the key poetic figures in the early Romanticism of the mid-eighteenth century.  The Thomas Gray Archive aims to make all his writing universally accessible online, along with important secondary works and crowd-sourced comments from today’s researchers.

The starting point for the Thomas Gray Archive was high quality digital scans of key editions of Gray’s work.  As well as the images, the texts were transcribed using a standard text encoding format (TEI/XML).  This allows the text to be searched, annotated, and analysed.

The Archive now contains the full-text of Gray’s published poetry, a selection of his prose writings, particularly his travel writing and literary criticism, and his correspondence.  There is also a digital library with digital images of key editions of his works; translations into other languages; his prose and letters; and with audio tracks of readings of a small sample of his poems.

Not all of Gray’s poetry is as seemingly accessible as the “Elegy” or his humorous verse.  In fact, given Gray’s background as a scholar poet, most of his poetry has always posed a considerable challenge even for professional readers of his works.  In order to make his works more accessible to a wider readership, the Thomas Gray Archive includes a large number of explanatory notes and offers readers the opportunity to add their own notes and interpretations. This not only helps other readers access Gray’s work, but also demonstrates how an online archive such as this can transcend the single authority of a printed book, by presenting a range of authorities and readings.

Today, the Archive contains more than 3,500 notes on Gray’s 74 poems.  These range from basic notes on the meaning of obsolete or obscure words to elaborate interpretative glosses on the use of figurative language, or references to places, people, and events that have influenced or shaped his works.  Any contributions of notes or queries on any level and of any length are very welcome and will enhance all readers’ enjoyment of Gray’s work.

2016 marks the occasion of Gray’s 300th birthday, and anyone interested in Gray’s life and work is welcome to follow the hashtag #Grayat300 on Twitter where any talks, exhibitions, and events in the UK and beyond will be announced during the tercentenary year.

Adverts 250 Project

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We live in a world saturated with advertising.  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, new technologies and new media have been created or adapted to deliver so many marketing messages to potential consumers that sometimes it has become impossible to recognize advertising when we encounter it.  Other times advertising is blatant, obvious, and even infuriating as it infringes on the rest of our daily activities.  Many of us tend to think of advertising as a modern invention, something that became ubiquitous in American life as a result of radio, television, and the Internet.  Sometimes we assume that widespread advertising got its start in the twentieth century.

The Adverts 250 Project, however, offers a different story of advertising in America.  This blog features a new advertisement every day, an advertisement that appeared in a newspaper printed in colonial America exactly 250 years ago that day.  Each advertisement is accompanied by short commentary providing additional context, explanation, and interpretation.  I guide readers through the world of buying, selling, and promoting products in colonial America.  On occasion, students from my Colonial and Revolutionary America courses at Assumption College join me as guest curators, bringing their own perspectives and curiosity to the project as they select and research everyday life as revealed in the advertisements.

Although colonists placed advertisements for a variety of reasons, the Adverts 250 Project primarily focuses on commercial notices for goods and services in order to better understand how products were marketed in eighteenth-century America.  In comparing advertising then and now, the Adverts 250 Project often discovers that many of the strategies considered innovative today actually had precursors in the colonial era, such as limited time only sales and money-back guarantees.  In addition, some standard marketing practices were already in place or being developed in eighteenth-century America.  The Adverts 250 Project documents a variety of standard appeals–such as low prices and high quality and cutting-edge fashion–that continue to be central components of modern marketing.  It also examines the origins of other familiar marketing strategies, including “Buy American” campaigns that emerged in the decade prior to the Revolutionary War.  Colonists promoted merchandise they had made themselves instead of importing from England as a means of resisting Parliament’s abuses.

On occasion, the Adverts 250 Project features other kinds of advertisements, including domestic squabbles revealed in runaway wife advertisements.  Such advertisements appeared frequently.  Husbands warned merchants and shopkeepers against extending credit to disobedient wives, sometimes prompting responses defending the wives.  In an era before reality television or primetime dramas, readers followed complicated and messy family dynamics revealed in newspaper advertisements.  Other advertisements from the period expressed frustration about thieves who stole merchandise from shops or listed the amenities included in houses or land for sale or announced what we would consider garage sales when colonists wished to get rid of things they no longer wanted or needed.

Every advertisement tells its own story.  The Adverts 250 Project connects modern readers to some of the stories told in the advertisements printed in colonial newspapers, demonstrating in the process that advertising has been a part of American life since before the Revolution.

Home Subjects

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“I put historical Art out of the question of course, for alas!  There’s no employment in it—nor are our houses, if there were a taste for it, adapted to receive large pictures, but for our comfort, where is it practiced nowadays, with success? . . . but in Portrait, Landscape, Seaviews, Home Subjects—animals, and in every branch for which there is a demand I am proud to say—and I am sure you will agree with me—we yield to no country.”  –British sculptor Richard Westmacott, 1834

Home Subjects is a website and blog that brings together those interested in exploring an alternate history for the display of art in Great Britain:  its important role in decorating the private interior, c. 1715-1914.

The decoration of and display of art in the private home have become the focus of a tremendous amount of academic energy during the past five years.  Yet much scholarship of the past two decades has posited that British art developed primarily in relationship to the growing number of art institutions and exhibitions that captured the public imagination.  This compelling narrative has overlooked the persistence of a cultural ideal premised on private and domestic spaces for exhibiting and experiencing art.

Though the quote from Richard Westmacott that headlines our page focuses on the display of painting, the parameters of this working group are much broader.  The goal is to explore the display of art in all media, especially the decorative arts and their interaction with the “fine arts.”  Domestic display also hinges on the related subjects of collecting, marketing, and even new developments in architecture, to name only a few of the directions this research could take.

Home Subjects grew out of a conversation enabled by the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University:  in April 2012, Dr. Anne Nellis Richter visited Wake Forest and presented her research on the display of art in the home to my eighteenth-century European art class.  We talked to students about this new direction in the field, about the challenges of researching and recovering decorative schemes, and about the ways in which social class and institutional histories inflected these endeavors.  These concerns fascinated the students, who were familiar with some of these issues from their class visits to Reynolda House Museum of American Art.  At that time, Anne and I began to talk about a way to bring together interested students and researchers to create an online scholarly community, and our conversations soon grew to include Melinda McCurdy.  As a curator at the Huntington Art Collection in San Marino, California, Melinda added a new perspective to our conversation.  Her audience is the general public, rather than the college student, and the art under her care is displayed in a way that addresses both the domestic interior and the museum gallery.  We launched Home Subjects in April 2014.  We have presented at conferences in New York and London, and we have gathered nearly 2,000 views of the blog.  Our posts are cross-posted by professional organizations like the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Art, as well as research centers and museums.

In the Fall 2015, the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute sponsored a redesign of the Home Subjects site to allow for the creation of a network of researchers working on related topics.  Please visit us at homesubjects.org.

Manuscript Fiction in the Archive

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The Life of Frederick Harley by Lady Katherine Howard

The Life of Frederick Harley by Lady Katherine Howard, Chawton House Library

“As these sheets will never appear in the form of a book, and I have not the fear of the Reviewers last before my eyes . . .” writes a wise older friend in the introduction to a novel written to a young woman in the middle of a years-long lawsuit.  Another young woman writes a novel in 1799 as a gift to a friend she loves so much that over forty years later they will be buried side by side.  These novels—and many others—survive in single copies, often all-but lost in the corners of unlikely archives, never brought together.  Until now.

This project will create a vocabulary and taxonomy for discussing manuscript fiction in the age of print (c.1760-1880).  While significant and exciting research has been done on the process of manuscript circulation and “publication” by scholars such as Margaret Ezell, Harold Love, and others following in their wake, those accounts of manuscript culture do not extend themselves very far (if at all) into the eighteenth century.  Moreover, studies of later eighteenth and nineteenth-century manuscripts concentrate on those that achieve fame by association (the Brontë juvenilia, the Dickinson fascicles, the working manuscripts of various published authors) or those that have value as social documents (friendship books, copybooks, etc.).  The 2015 conference “After Print: Manuscripts in the Eighteenth-Century” at the University of California Santa Barbara gathered together those interested in manuscript in this period, but most of those researchers worked on manuscripts that ultimately saw print, political, or scientific nonfiction, and the literary form most common in manuscript culture:  poetry.

Where is fiction in manuscript during the age of print?  While difficult to find the archive, it exists, and I collect it.  Since 2009, I have collected examples of what I call “manuscript fiction”:  a term I use to describe works (complete or incomplete) of fiction that survive during the age of print culture, despite never seeing print.  (You can see my early work on this here).  Some are found in the archive bound and resembling print in sizes ranging from heavy tomes to tiny packets, while some survive only in fragments.  Some resemble print editions closely and include elaborate title pages, while others are barely decipherable without intense deciphering.  Some contain chapters and a clear plot, and some ramble in ways worthy of Smollett or Richardson (or are, indeed, parodies of those famous novelists).  Some are written by those famous in other fields (such as playwright/actor Charles Dibdin or Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings), while some linger just on the edges of the historical record.  While a few may have been imagined as future printed books, none of them made that leap.  Most challenging, none of it appears in obvious ways in any cataloguing system.

I currently have thousands of pages of this material from the American Antiquarian Society, Chawton House Library, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archive.  At the time of this writing, I am preparing to collect more examples from the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, and Princeton University,  and I know of examples at Newberry Library and Yale University.  From meticulous searching of various finding aids, I also have evidence of more in various libraries, public records offices, and other archives in the United Kingdom and the United States.  Together, this growing collection provides exciting and illuminating insights into the writing and reading lives of the period.

Dr. Freidman and Kelsie Shipley

Dr. Friedman and Kelsie Shipley

Thanks to in-kind support from Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts information technology and digital projects departments, as well as internal grant funding from the College, a two-year University-level seed grant, and support from the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, I am creating a database that includes full-text transcriptions of these texts.  These texts will be fully encoded according to best practices so that they can be used for the full range of digital projects, including easy interface with many other projects in eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies, such as the aggregation tools 18th Connect and NINES.

The first phase will use the currently collected material to create a text-only proof-of-concept database, designed to include later images of the manuscript pages themselves in another phase if possible.  In fall of 2016 Auburn’s metadata specialist Dana Caudle has pledged at least 40 hours of her time to create the data dictionary that is the foundation of the project.  During the 2016-17 academic school year, I will be training (with assistance from Dana) both undergraduate and graduate students in the finer points of transcription, TEI markup, and metadata tagging.  One student, Kelsie Shipley, was awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship, while others are members of my year-long Honors Research Seminar and will receive course credit for their contributions to this project.

In the summer of 2017, I will return to the UK to access relevant manuscripts I know to be in the collection of the Yorkshire Archeological Society.  The holdings of the YAS are being moved to the University of Leeds and will not be available in any form until the transfer is complete in 2017.  I am hoping by that time I will have still more leads for further collection.  This is the challenge of this project:  because these are works that are not often catalogued specifically in library holdings, I often rely on word of mouth from the knowledgeable archivists and librarians who know their collections.

James Gillray: Caricaturist

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James Gillray (1756-1815) was one of the greatest caricaturists of the 18th century.  From around 1775 until 1810, he produced nearly 1,000 prints—including brilliantly finished portrait caricatures of the rich, famous, or frivolous, wonderfully comic caricatures of people being awkward, and unquestionably the best satiric caricatures of British political and social life in the age of Napoleon.  His preeminence in graphic satire, especially in the 1790s made him both sought after and feared.  No sooner did a new Gillray print appear than it was sure to be plagiarized or imitated by contemporaries both in England and abroad.  And even today, there are few political cartoonists who would not admit to some debt to Gillray’s work.  For those interested in the development of English caricature and especially the prints of James Gillray, I have created a web site you can visit for a comprehensive overview of his work–James Gillray:  Caricaturist.

The site includes, first and foremost, a chronological listing of his known prints–both satiric and otherwise.  But it also contains a list of major museums and archives where his work can be seen, information about Gillray’s life, working methods, and techniques, and links to short biographical sketches of many of the people he caricatured.

Here is the background.  A couple of years ago, I decided to return to a book I had long since planned to write on the development of 18th-century caricature.  But, of course, anyone hoping to talk about caricature must confront the monumental presence of James Gillray.  So I began to look carefully at Gillray and his own development as a caricaturist.

I was soon frustrated, however, by the lack of a comprehensive and chronological catalog of his work.  Most of the books devoted to Gillray offer only a selection of his work, or, like Thomas Wright and Dorothy George, divide his work into political or satirical prints and social, personal, and miscellaneous prints.  And none of them include the prints Gillray created in his bid to be recognized as a “serious” artist and engraver.  I wanted to see Gillray’s work as he saw it, as a day by day effort at making a living and honing his craft.

Using the British Museum Catalog as a point of reference, I began doing searches of major Gillray archives online and visiting some of the non-digitized collections near my home in central New Jersey.  I will spare you the tales of my additional frustration while searching online for prints whose spelling and punctuation are highly idiosyncratic, and whose dates are sometimes difficult to decipher even up close.  Needless to say, I discovered that search results are only as good (or bad) as the very human process of cataloging the prints in the first place.  And I came away with a deep respect and appreciation for the heroic efforts of the staffs at the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Lewis Walpole Library, and other institutions who have made it immeasurably easier (though still challenging) for someone like me to come along and build upon their work.

The first result of my efforts, then, was a spreadsheet of over 900 rows containing a chronological listing of the prints and at least some of the collections where they could be found.  After months of labor, I realized I had only arrived at a starting point.  I could now begin to look at and think about Gillray’s development as an artist.  And that’s when I thought:  no one should have to go through this again.  And that’s when I also realized that I should make a website so that people could easily see what I was seeing–the wonderful artistry of James Gillray.

It was a natural enough thought for me.  I spent most of my life outside of academics at a major technology company, AT&T Labs (the successor of Bell Labs).  And the last part of my career there was managing a website design and development group.  Thinking in terms of web publishing, then, was almost second nature to me.  So I began to design a website around the idea:  what would I want to see and know if I were trying to get acquainted with Gillray and his work?  And that is still the guiding principle of James Gillray:  Caricaturist.  I launched the site on the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death on June 1st, 2015, and its basic design has not changed.  But right now I have a goal of providing commentaries on at least a representative sample of the 900+ prints Gillray created over the course of his career.  About 50 are now up on the site, and I am continuing to add more.

If you wish to be alerted when I add more commentaries or make a substantive change to the site, I have included a form to subscribe to updates on my contact page.  I welcome feedback, corrections, and suggestions, and I have provided my email address on the same page.