Manfred Jahn's Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative
Jay Clayton Narrative Theory Blog
Look especially at the reading list for this class.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Bibliographic Terms: Colophon, Device, Imprint
Three terms relating to how printer and publisher information is represented in a book; look them up in the now-familiar ABC of Book Collecting.
Bibliographic Terms: Chain Lines
From John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors:
The widely spaced lines (distinct from the lighter, close-set lines which run at right angles to them) visible in the texture of laid paper, made by the wire mesh at the bottom of the tray in which it is made. They are sometimes imitated in machine-made papers.
If there is any doubt about the genuineness or, in the case of blanks [blank pages - these may be integral to the gathering and called "printer's blanks" or added later as in the case of "binder's blanks"], relevance of a leaf or leaves in a book printed on laid paper, the chain lines, which vary in spacing between different papers, offer a useful preliminary check.
The widely spaced lines (distinct from the lighter, close-set lines which run at right angles to them) visible in the texture of laid paper, made by the wire mesh at the bottom of the tray in which it is made. They are sometimes imitated in machine-made papers.
If there is any doubt about the genuineness or, in the case of blanks [blank pages - these may be integral to the gathering and called "printer's blanks" or added later as in the case of "binder's blanks"], relevance of a leaf or leaves in a book printed on laid paper, the chain lines, which vary in spacing between different papers, offer a useful preliminary check.
ABC for Book Collectors
An electronic copy of John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors, via Swarthmore.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
LibraryThing (tangentially related)
Make yourself a free LibraryThing account - and then check it out, especially the statistics/memes.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
"Representative-ness"
There are certainly many questions that arise from asking a broad question about “representative-ness.” What does representation imply? Would we be simply be comparing a part to a whole—Penn’s rare books collection being the part and the rest of the world’s holdings being the whole, thus trying to decipher how representative our collection is out of all the preserved novels out there in terms of quantity? Or, are we speaking of more complex representative qualities, such as: How well does our collection represent sentiments of certain decades? Does our collection accurately reflect trends or changes that occur in novels of the same time period, as shown by the worldwide collection? And departing from the text: How well does our collection represent (un)common printing methods of certain years/decades? Is our collection an accurate representation of material that people of specific socioeconomic groups were able to access (through systems like circulating libraries or private purchase)?
A practical solution to figuring out the “representative-ness” of Penn’s RBC in many different terms: Create a branch of a website like Worldcat that not only tracks the first editions of rare books, but all editions of those books. It would do this by searching the catalogues of all online databases that include old/rare books, targeting the online databases of colleges, universities, and major libraries. Then it would take those books, catalog them, and be searchable using the grouping method that we talked about, used commonly in online shopping (what was that called again?). Some of the filters could be year published, open-access availability, edition (if known), and collection location (this last grouping could lead back to each individual collection’s more detailed website, since the purpose of the greater website would be more like a bibliography). If a system like this were in place, then it would be easier to determine the representative-ness of our collection. Perhaps this would truly be the “Transatlantic Fiction Project,” since it would certainly involve collections across the world, instead of what we’re doing which seems more collection-specific.
An issue I can see running into here is the fact that not every library is completely online yet (apparently even Penn still uses a card catalog for some things), so the world database of rare books wouldn’t be complete… although it would never really be complete, since there are certainly rare books out there that are privately owned and will never be declared. I’m also unsure if there are copyright laws that prevent taking bibliographic information without permission or payment, which could be a problem; another issue could be increasing the possibility of mechanical errors, since I imagine that in the transfer or calling up of information from one smaller website to a greater one could welcome many instances of typos, misspellings, eliminated words, errors in labeling/tagging of entries, etc. These all seem sort or minor, compared to the greater good of having such a website. Ideally, many of the books would eventually be digitized and made into searchable PDFs at no cost to the reader (we can only hope about this last part, I suppose).
This is just an idea, but perhaps another way we could determine the “representative-ness” (or maybe I mean relevancy) of Penn’s RBC is by examining the reviews that are associated with the text. Maybe we could infer how popular or relevant the text was to people by examining the reviews and noting how many reviews of the books there were. Perhaps this would give us some insight into how well our collection represents books of the time: If it turns out that there are very few reviews of all the books Penn holds (which I know isn’t true), then maybe our collection represents a more elite or unrepresentative portion of the whole. This is an oversimplification, but I still think that reviews might be useful when examining these books (or possibly, even something that we might eventually want to include in the database as a supplement to the novels).
Anna
A practical solution to figuring out the “representative-ness” of Penn’s RBC in many different terms: Create a branch of a website like Worldcat that not only tracks the first editions of rare books, but all editions of those books. It would do this by searching the catalogues of all online databases that include old/rare books, targeting the online databases of colleges, universities, and major libraries. Then it would take those books, catalog them, and be searchable using the grouping method that we talked about, used commonly in online shopping (what was that called again?). Some of the filters could be year published, open-access availability, edition (if known), and collection location (this last grouping could lead back to each individual collection’s more detailed website, since the purpose of the greater website would be more like a bibliography). If a system like this were in place, then it would be easier to determine the representative-ness of our collection. Perhaps this would truly be the “Transatlantic Fiction Project,” since it would certainly involve collections across the world, instead of what we’re doing which seems more collection-specific.
An issue I can see running into here is the fact that not every library is completely online yet (apparently even Penn still uses a card catalog for some things), so the world database of rare books wouldn’t be complete… although it would never really be complete, since there are certainly rare books out there that are privately owned and will never be declared. I’m also unsure if there are copyright laws that prevent taking bibliographic information without permission or payment, which could be a problem; another issue could be increasing the possibility of mechanical errors, since I imagine that in the transfer or calling up of information from one smaller website to a greater one could welcome many instances of typos, misspellings, eliminated words, errors in labeling/tagging of entries, etc. These all seem sort or minor, compared to the greater good of having such a website. Ideally, many of the books would eventually be digitized and made into searchable PDFs at no cost to the reader (we can only hope about this last part, I suppose).
This is just an idea, but perhaps another way we could determine the “representative-ness” (or maybe I mean relevancy) of Penn’s RBC is by examining the reviews that are associated with the text. Maybe we could infer how popular or relevant the text was to people by examining the reviews and noting how many reviews of the books there were. Perhaps this would give us some insight into how well our collection represents books of the time: If it turns out that there are very few reviews of all the books Penn holds (which I know isn’t true), then maybe our collection represents a more elite or unrepresentative portion of the whole. This is an oversimplification, but I still think that reviews might be useful when examining these books (or possibly, even something that we might eventually want to include in the database as a supplement to the novels).
Anna
Keywords in Garside and Raven
Working on a bibliographic entry for Devil turn'd hermit makes one realize what an incredible effort Garside and Raven is. Even though they situate themselves within prior work and cataloguing of first-edition texts, the amount of sheer compilation, correction, and discovery involved in it makes me wonder how much time, exactly, was spent on this work. But that's not the point.
We are looking at a collection that is in some ways, then, fantastically broad, but also carefully defined in order to present a cohesive collection. Their years are 1770 - 1829. All novels within are published in the British Isles, situating themselves in a place. They limit themselves to what they term "prose fiction", allying themselves with certain generic conventions. These includetranslational works, but not including children's novels, "related works of non-fiction", "didactic fiction", and reprints and reissues. They also use popular reviews as sources of information for these texts.
A brief look at the Tables and Figures section of the 1770-1829 book gives a brief look at what questions Garside and Raven have already addressed through focusing on these particular times, places, and genres. "Publication of New Novels in Britain and Ireland 1770 - 1799", "Publication of Epistolary Fiction 1770 - 1799", "Republication rates before 1801 of Novels First Published 1770 - 1799", "Authorship of New Novels 1770 - 1799" (which includes male/female/anonymous/other author categorizations) indicates that we are spiritual siblings to the questions that Garside and Raven have already asked. Specific patterns are elucidated upon in both volumes of the text in their introductions. We get an interesting depiction of relationships between women and men, authors and their publishers, England to other regions (in terms of publication), and specific subgenres to the overall genre of "prose fiction".
This brief and token resummary already invites particular questions. For example, in their prominent use of keywords in titles to broadly grasp at some generic convention, they give us some pretty broad, but interesting fractions. In epistolary fiction, for example, they give us a sense of rising popularity and then decreasing popularity (1750 - 1760, 10%. 1770 - 1790, 20%, afterwards falling), but we don't know what they judge as "epistolary fiction". One sort of assumes that an epistolary fiction would be 100% letter, but that is probably rare. At any rate, the level of epistolarity in an epistolary novel is not addressed, and the precision to which they judge a novel as epistolary or not seems to be absolute (one column in Table 2. Publication of Epistolary Fiction, 1770 - 1790 is "Epistolary Titles as % of Total Year).
I have a moderate pet peeve in that they also don't offer tables for all of their conclusions, and some of their tabling suggests bias in evidence selection towards their overall argument. I looked on the internet database (or what I assumed to be their internet database), and the search abilities don't really seem to be sophisticated enough to generate really really subtle statistical comparisons that are based in the form of the novel, and the results are unspecific enough so that I wish that this didn't result in just an introduction, but more carefully parsed analysis. For an example, Table 2 in Vol. 2, Keywords in Titles, 1800 - 1829 traces how many times the word "Novel", "Romance", and "Tale/s" are used throughout those years.
"While sometimes these terms can seem virtually interchangeable, generally the term 'Novel' is found in titles which contain contemporary domestic matter, whereas 'Romance' more usually describes fiction with an historical, fantastical, or exotic orientation. 'Tale' is naturally used for shorter works, and in the plural for compilations, though its relative freedom from negative connotations also gave it an attraction as an alternative for Novel" (51, v.2)
This is moderately objectionable because in the previous volume, there is a different method of defining subgenres within the novel through title keywords based on "epistolary" (with "letters" as its keyword), "sentimental" (with "sentimental" as its keyword), and Gothic (which is presumably more internally recognizable). (31 - 34) This generic parsing based on the keywords of titles is blunt, but perhaps necessary. As they state in the second volume, "In a period where large numbers of new novels were published anonymously, titles naturally played a crucial part in signalling the specific generic character of indivdual works" (49). They don't, however, trace the appearance and frequency of all of the keywords used over all of the era surveyed. I refuse to believe that "novel", "romance", and "tale/s" failed to show up before 1790, for example, and the lack of stretching these keyword-based generic conventions across the entire time surveyed strikes me as bizarre. There is a problem that arises not only between the largely arbitrary distinctions of individual decades surveyed, but also between introductions between the two volumes of the bibliography.
Similarly, in their addressing of the prominence of the "Adventures of" and "Sentimental" types of tales in the first volume, we could ask (but they don't) what other types of keywords exist, as well as the frequency of these other keywords. Part of the problem, as they clearly already note, is that the differences between the "Adventures of", "Sentimental", "Romance", "Novel", "Tale/s", "letters of" works of prose fiction aren't necessarily going to be distinguishable.
They do note, "Even the basic labels of Novel etc. were expendable to give a more specific generic indication, an additional epithet sometimes overriding in importance the root term (as in Fashionable Novel/Fable/Tale). Seen in unison, various elements of a title might point more closely to distinctions within a broad mode, such as Gothic". Still, they are highly explicit with some of their data regarding this, and not all of it - is "sentimental" popular across the entire timespan, though the epistolary novel loses popularity before the 19th century?
Some basic questions also arise from their use of tables. When I read Table 2 in vol 2., "Keywords in Titles, 1800-1829", they give, separated by decade:
Use of the word Novel by frequency
Use of the word Novel by percentage
Use of the word Romance by frequency
Use of the word Romance by percentage
Use of the word Tale/s by frequency
Use of the word Tale/s by percentage
They do not include (but one could figure out easily) total novels published over 1800-1829, and it's probably someplace else in the text, but it would still be useful here. Furthermore, given the length of the titles and the commonality of the words, I suspect that "Novel", "Romance", and "Tale/s" can possibly appear more than once in one title, and they don't address that. If they don't appear more than once in the same title ever, that might actually be interesting. One might assume that a "novel" is not a "romance" is not a "tale", but that's not certain, and if it's true, then one can also logically assume that these are at least, in terms of titles, completely distinct works, which would be cool.
The internet, of course, helps with all of this, and one could run searches without too much difficulty to answer some of these questions. I feel like somewhere, someplace, someone has already figured out all of the questions I've asked, if at least because Garside and Raven make a gesture towards concluding something from the titles and seem to back off rather quickly because of the paratextual nature of titles.
"Any full study of generic movements within fiction at this time would soon encounter problems such as those arising from the generic instability of a number of the works under view. The following observations concerning trends are therefore necessarily tentative and provisional. While title-page information offers a useful initial indicator of mode, first-hand knowledge of texts is utilized whenever possible, and guidance is also sought from a number of previous studies of specific genres"
Still, Garside and Raven offer a wealth of statistical information about titles, but what they finally use and conclude from is a pretty narrow range among a fairly limited set of words in titles. In retrospect, this got overly specific, ranty, and didn't lead me anywhere, really, but it was fun and educational.
We are looking at a collection that is in some ways, then, fantastically broad, but also carefully defined in order to present a cohesive collection. Their years are 1770 - 1829. All novels within are published in the British Isles, situating themselves in a place. They limit themselves to what they term "prose fiction", allying themselves with certain generic conventions. These includetranslational works, but not including children's novels, "related works of non-fiction", "didactic fiction", and reprints and reissues. They also use popular reviews as sources of information for these texts.
A brief look at the Tables and Figures section of the 1770-1829 book gives a brief look at what questions Garside and Raven have already addressed through focusing on these particular times, places, and genres. "Publication of New Novels in Britain and Ireland 1770 - 1799", "Publication of Epistolary Fiction 1770 - 1799", "Republication rates before 1801 of Novels First Published 1770 - 1799", "Authorship of New Novels 1770 - 1799" (which includes male/female/anonymous/other author categorizations) indicates that we are spiritual siblings to the questions that Garside and Raven have already asked. Specific patterns are elucidated upon in both volumes of the text in their introductions. We get an interesting depiction of relationships between women and men, authors and their publishers, England to other regions (in terms of publication), and specific subgenres to the overall genre of "prose fiction".
This brief and token resummary already invites particular questions. For example, in their prominent use of keywords in titles to broadly grasp at some generic convention, they give us some pretty broad, but interesting fractions. In epistolary fiction, for example, they give us a sense of rising popularity and then decreasing popularity (1750 - 1760, 10%. 1770 - 1790, 20%, afterwards falling), but we don't know what they judge as "epistolary fiction". One sort of assumes that an epistolary fiction would be 100% letter, but that is probably rare. At any rate, the level of epistolarity in an epistolary novel is not addressed, and the precision to which they judge a novel as epistolary or not seems to be absolute (one column in Table 2. Publication of Epistolary Fiction, 1770 - 1790 is "Epistolary Titles as % of Total Year).
I have a moderate pet peeve in that they also don't offer tables for all of their conclusions, and some of their tabling suggests bias in evidence selection towards their overall argument. I looked on the internet database (or what I assumed to be their internet database), and the search abilities don't really seem to be sophisticated enough to generate really really subtle statistical comparisons that are based in the form of the novel, and the results are unspecific enough so that I wish that this didn't result in just an introduction, but more carefully parsed analysis. For an example, Table 2 in Vol. 2, Keywords in Titles, 1800 - 1829 traces how many times the word "Novel", "Romance", and "Tale/s" are used throughout those years.
"While sometimes these terms can seem virtually interchangeable, generally the term 'Novel' is found in titles which contain contemporary domestic matter, whereas 'Romance' more usually describes fiction with an historical, fantastical, or exotic orientation. 'Tale' is naturally used for shorter works, and in the plural for compilations, though its relative freedom from negative connotations also gave it an attraction as an alternative for Novel" (51, v.2)
This is moderately objectionable because in the previous volume, there is a different method of defining subgenres within the novel through title keywords based on "epistolary" (with "letters" as its keyword), "sentimental" (with "sentimental" as its keyword), and Gothic (which is presumably more internally recognizable). (31 - 34) This generic parsing based on the keywords of titles is blunt, but perhaps necessary. As they state in the second volume, "In a period where large numbers of new novels were published anonymously, titles naturally played a crucial part in signalling the specific generic character of indivdual works" (49). They don't, however, trace the appearance and frequency of all of the keywords used over all of the era surveyed. I refuse to believe that "novel", "romance", and "tale/s" failed to show up before 1790, for example, and the lack of stretching these keyword-based generic conventions across the entire time surveyed strikes me as bizarre. There is a problem that arises not only between the largely arbitrary distinctions of individual decades surveyed, but also between introductions between the two volumes of the bibliography.
Similarly, in their addressing of the prominence of the "Adventures of" and "Sentimental" types of tales in the first volume, we could ask (but they don't) what other types of keywords exist, as well as the frequency of these other keywords. Part of the problem, as they clearly already note, is that the differences between the "Adventures of", "Sentimental", "Romance", "Novel", "Tale/s", "letters of" works of prose fiction aren't necessarily going to be distinguishable.
They do note, "Even the basic labels of Novel etc. were expendable to give a more specific generic indication, an additional epithet sometimes overriding in importance the root term (as in Fashionable Novel/Fable/Tale). Seen in unison, various elements of a title might point more closely to distinctions within a broad mode, such as Gothic". Still, they are highly explicit with some of their data regarding this, and not all of it - is "sentimental" popular across the entire timespan, though the epistolary novel loses popularity before the 19th century?
Some basic questions also arise from their use of tables. When I read Table 2 in vol 2., "Keywords in Titles, 1800-1829", they give, separated by decade:
Use of the word Novel by frequency
Use of the word Novel by percentage
Use of the word Romance by frequency
Use of the word Romance by percentage
Use of the word Tale/s by frequency
Use of the word Tale/s by percentage
They do not include (but one could figure out easily) total novels published over 1800-1829, and it's probably someplace else in the text, but it would still be useful here. Furthermore, given the length of the titles and the commonality of the words, I suspect that "Novel", "Romance", and "Tale/s" can possibly appear more than once in one title, and they don't address that. If they don't appear more than once in the same title ever, that might actually be interesting. One might assume that a "novel" is not a "romance" is not a "tale", but that's not certain, and if it's true, then one can also logically assume that these are at least, in terms of titles, completely distinct works, which would be cool.
The internet, of course, helps with all of this, and one could run searches without too much difficulty to answer some of these questions. I feel like somewhere, someplace, someone has already figured out all of the questions I've asked, if at least because Garside and Raven make a gesture towards concluding something from the titles and seem to back off rather quickly because of the paratextual nature of titles.
"Any full study of generic movements within fiction at this time would soon encounter problems such as those arising from the generic instability of a number of the works under view. The following observations concerning trends are therefore necessarily tentative and provisional. While title-page information offers a useful initial indicator of mode, first-hand knowledge of texts is utilized whenever possible, and guidance is also sought from a number of previous studies of specific genres"
Still, Garside and Raven offer a wealth of statistical information about titles, but what they finally use and conclude from is a pretty narrow range among a fairly limited set of words in titles. In retrospect, this got overly specific, ranty, and didn't lead me anywhere, really, but it was fun and educational.
Open Access Facsimile Copies
I was unable to find any open-access copies of the first few books we pulled using Google search; I was, however, able to find all of them on ECCO which I accessed through my Swarthmore account. The closest I found to an edition of a book that I could view online was a review of The Devil Turn'd Hermit through Google Books... somewhat disappointing. Here are the links that I found to the first six books we pulled (I shortened their titles):
Devil:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?subjectParam=&sort=Author&tabID=T001&sgCurrentPosition=&subjectAction=&prodId=ECCO&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&searchId=R1&docId=CW3316271708&orientation=¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=swar94187&docLevel=FASCIMILE&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale(en%2C%2C)%3AFQE%3D(BN%2CNone%2C7)T106614%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&scale=0.33¤tPosition=1&workId=1109200501&relevancePageBatch=CW116271707&contentSet=ECCOArticles&callistoContentSet=ECCOArticles&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&reformatPage=N&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&scale=0.33&orientation=&lastPageIndex=2&showLOI=Yes&quickSearchTerm=&stwFuzzy=&forRelevantNavigation=true
Polite Correspondence:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R2¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3324638527&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW124638527&relevancePageBatch=CW124638527&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Chinese letters:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=ECCOArticles&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R3¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3324634678&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW124634676&relevancePageBatch=CW124634676&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Court-secret:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R1¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3313415603&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW113415602&relevancePageBatch=CW113415602&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Mrs. Christian Davies:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R2¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3300134615&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW100134615&relevancePageBatch=CW100134615&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
History and adventures of Don Alphonso Blas de Lirias:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R3¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3310057023&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW110057021&relevancePageBatch=CW110057021&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
I think it's great that ECCO has all of these books as PDF files online, since very few other organizations seem to. At the same time, their "search" function within the PDF doesn't work very well... I wish that was higher on ECCO's list of priorities, since I think an error-free version would be invaluable to many students and scholars.
Anna
Devil:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?subjectParam=&sort=Author&tabID=T001&sgCurrentPosition=&subjectAction=&prodId=ECCO&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&searchId=R1&docId=CW3316271708&orientation=¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=swar94187&docLevel=FASCIMILE&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale(en%2C%2C)%3AFQE%3D(BN%2CNone%2C7)T106614%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&scale=0.33¤tPosition=1&workId=1109200501&relevancePageBatch=CW116271707&contentSet=ECCOArticles&callistoContentSet=ECCOArticles&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&reformatPage=N&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&scale=0.33&orientation=&lastPageIndex=2&showLOI=Yes&quickSearchTerm=&stwFuzzy=&forRelevantNavigation=true
Polite Correspondence:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R2¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3324638527&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW124638527&relevancePageBatch=CW124638527&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Chinese letters:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=ECCOArticles&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R3¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3324634678&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW124634676&relevancePageBatch=CW124634676&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Court-secret:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R1¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3313415603&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW113415602&relevancePageBatch=CW113415602&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
Mrs. Christian Davies:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R2¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3300134615&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW100134615&relevancePageBatch=CW100134615&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
History and adventures of Don Alphonso Blas de Lirias:
http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.swarthmore.edu/ecco/retrieve.do?resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSet=&inPS=true&sort=Author&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&searchId=R3¤tPosition=&userGroupName=swar94187&showLOI=&docId=CW3310057023&docLevel=FASCIMILE&workId=CW110057021&relevancePageBatch=CW110057021&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&callistoContentSet=ECLL&docPage=article&hilite=y
I think it's great that ECCO has all of these books as PDF files online, since very few other organizations seem to. At the same time, their "search" function within the PDF doesn't work very well... I wish that was higher on ECCO's list of priorities, since I think an error-free version would be invaluable to many students and scholars.
Anna
Some Internet Facsimiles on Internet Archive
I went down the list of novels and searched for each, typically by putting what I thought to be the most significant part of the titles in quotation marks. If a work doesn't appear on this list, that's because it wasn't there when I searched for it. If a work's link appears as a search query (these will be pretty obvious in comparison to the actual specific works), that's because many editions/novels popped up on the search (more than four). Typically this was because they are more famous works than the rest.
For some of these in particular, I haven't included the full title. To limit this searching a little, I only used Internet Archive- I can do Google Books and ECCO later. Also, the dates I used are a little bit deceptive. I sorted the 1740 - 1749 collection into individual years to make the project less daunting, but when I searched on Internet Archive, there's not always a specific date attached to the result found. The dates reflect the initial sorting, not necessarily the edition found. Where titles appear more than one in the 1740-1749 collection, only one search in the Internet Archive has been made.
If you can edit this and update it with Google Books information or more indepth information, I think that'd be good - this entry, at any rate, is more of a start than a finished process.
---
1740s:
1740 edition of Life and adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies on Internet Archive, coupled with a Daniel Defoe novel: http://www.archive.org/stream/memoirscaptaing00defogoog
1741:
Devil turn'd hermit. Different edition from the one we looked at today - this one includes some kind of list of books (advertisement? catalog?) with prices included!
Pamela - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22pamela%2C%20or%20virtue%20rewarded%22
Pamela's Conduct in High Life: http://www.archive.org/details/pamelasconducti00kellgoog
Tale of a Tub - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22tale%20of%20a%20tub%22
"Works of Jonathan Swift" - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22works%20of%20jonathan%20swift%22
---
1742:
History of the adventures of Joseph Andrews - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22Joseph%20Andrews%22
History of the world under-ground -
http://www.archive.org/details/journeytoworldu01holbgoog
http://www.archive.org/details/journeytoworldu00holbgoog
Don Quixote -
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=life%20and%20exploits%20of%20the%20ingenious%20gentleman%20Don%20Quixote%20de%20la%20Mancha
Gulliver's Travels -
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=travels%20into%20several%20remote%20nations%20of%20the%20world
---
1743
Mogul Tales - http://www.archive.org/details/mogultalesordre00gueugoog
---
1744
Adventures of David Simple - http://www.archive.org/details/adventuresdavid00fielgoog
Felicia to Charlotte - http://www.archive.org/details/feliciatocharlo00collgoog
Adventures of Gil Blas - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=gil%20blas
History of John Bull - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=history%20of%20john%20bull
---
1745
---
1746
Ascanius, or the Young Adventurer - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=ascanius
---
1747
---
1748
The Adventures of Roderick Random
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=adventures%20of%20roderick%20random
Clarissa
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=clarissa%2C%20or%2C%20the%20history%20of%20a%20young%20lady
Life's progress through the passions
http://www.archive.org/details/lifesprogressthr15455gut
---
1749
History of Tom Jones
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=history%20of%20tom%20jones
For some of these in particular, I haven't included the full title. To limit this searching a little, I only used Internet Archive- I can do Google Books and ECCO later. Also, the dates I used are a little bit deceptive. I sorted the 1740 - 1749 collection into individual years to make the project less daunting, but when I searched on Internet Archive, there's not always a specific date attached to the result found. The dates reflect the initial sorting, not necessarily the edition found. Where titles appear more than one in the 1740-1749 collection, only one search in the Internet Archive has been made.
If you can edit this and update it with Google Books information or more indepth information, I think that'd be good - this entry, at any rate, is more of a start than a finished process.
---
1740s:
1740 edition of Life and adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies on Internet Archive, coupled with a Daniel Defoe novel: http://www.archive.org/stream/memoirscaptaing00defogoog
1741:
Devil turn'd hermit. Different edition from the one we looked at today - this one includes some kind of list of books (advertisement? catalog?) with prices included!
Pamela - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22pamela%2C%20or%20virtue%20rewarded%22
Pamela's Conduct in High Life: http://www.archive.org/details/pamelasconducti00kellgoog
Tale of a Tub - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22tale%20of%20a%20tub%22
"Works of Jonathan Swift" - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22works%20of%20jonathan%20swift%22
---
1742:
History of the adventures of Joseph Andrews - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22Joseph%20Andrews%22
History of the world under-ground -
http://www.archive.org/details/journeytoworldu01holbgoog
http://www.archive.org/details/journeytoworldu00holbgoog
Don Quixote -
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=life%20and%20exploits%20of%20the%20ingenious%20gentleman%20Don%20Quixote%20de%20la%20Mancha
Gulliver's Travels -
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=travels%20into%20several%20remote%20nations%20of%20the%20world
---
1743
Mogul Tales - http://www.archive.org/details/mogultalesordre00gueugoog
---
1744
Adventures of David Simple - http://www.archive.org/details/adventuresdavid00fielgoog
Felicia to Charlotte - http://www.archive.org/details/feliciatocharlo00collgoog
Adventures of Gil Blas - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=gil%20blas
History of John Bull - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=history%20of%20john%20bull
---
1745
---
1746
Ascanius, or the Young Adventurer - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=ascanius
---
1747
---
1748
The Adventures of Roderick Random
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=adventures%20of%20roderick%20random
Clarissa
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=clarissa%2C%20or%2C%20the%20history%20of%20a%20young%20lady
Life's progress through the passions
http://www.archive.org/details/lifesprogressthr15455gut
---
1749
History of Tom Jones
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=history%20of%20tom%20jones
The Devil Turn'd Hermit
Bibliographical Information
Lambert de Saumery, Pierre. The Devil turn’d Hermit, or, The Adventures of Astaroth
Banish’d from Hell : A Satirical Romance. London : J. Hodges, J. Robinson, J.
Wilcox and J. Brindley, 1741.
(Quasi-)Facsimile Transcription
THE Devil turn’d Hermit: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF ASTAROTH Banish’d from Hell. A Satirical ROMANCE.
EXPOSING, With great Variety of Humour, in a Series of Conversations between that Demon and the Author,
The scandalous Frauds, lewd Amours, and devout Mockery of the Monks and Nuns; the Intrigues of Courts; the Ambition, Avarice, and Cruelty of Ministers; the Insincerity, Luxury, Prostitution, and Ingratitude of many private Characters; with other Capital Vices of the present Age.
Founded chiefly on real Facts, and interspersed with the Portraits and secret History of most of the considerable Persons that have lived in Europe within these thirty Years past.
-
Translated from the Original French of Mr de M***.
-
LONDON:
Printed and Sold by J. HODGES, at the Looking Glass, over-against St Magnus’s Church, London-Bridge; J. ROBINSON, at the Red Lyon, in Ludgate-Street J. WILCOX, in the Strand; and J. BRINDLEY, in New Bond-Street.
MDCCXLI
Pot 12˚: A6 b2 B-Aa6[$3 (-A; -C; -H3; +I2 -I3, -K3, -Aa2 +Aa3)] 140 leaves, pp. [2] iii iv v vi vii vii ix x xii xii, 1 2-276 [=288]
Contents
A1r title, A1v blank, A2r –A3r advertisement, A3v -A5r preface, A5v –A6v to the reader, A7r –b2v table of contents, B1r-Aa6v text
Technical Notes
Frontispiece illustration
Copy Specific Notes
Bookplate on front pastedown signed “Joseph Pickford Esq.”, with “Sivincula gero non vincor”
On title page, “E libris Thomas Perci […?] de Moyton”
*Exercised based on the invaluable descriptive bibliography assignment of Professor Alexandra Gillespie
Lambert de Saumery, Pierre. The Devil turn’d Hermit, or, The Adventures of Astaroth
Banish’d from Hell : A Satirical Romance. London : J. Hodges, J. Robinson, J.
Wilcox and J. Brindley, 1741.
(Quasi-)Facsimile Transcription
THE Devil turn’d Hermit: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF ASTAROTH Banish’d from Hell. A Satirical ROMANCE.
EXPOSING, With great Variety of Humour, in a Series of Conversations between that Demon and the Author,
The scandalous Frauds, lewd Amours, and devout Mockery of the Monks and Nuns; the Intrigues of Courts; the Ambition, Avarice, and Cruelty of Ministers; the Insincerity, Luxury, Prostitution, and Ingratitude of many private Characters; with other Capital Vices of the present Age.
Founded chiefly on real Facts, and interspersed with the Portraits and secret History of most of the considerable Persons that have lived in Europe within these thirty Years past.
-
Translated from the Original French of Mr de M***.
-
LONDON:
Printed and Sold by J. HODGES, at the Looking Glass, over-against St Magnus’s Church, London-Bridge; J. ROBINSON, at the Red Lyon, in Ludgate-Street J. WILCOX, in the Strand; and J. BRINDLEY, in New Bond-Street.
MDCCXLI
Pot 12˚: A6 b2 B-Aa6[$3 (-A; -C; -H3; +I2 -I3, -K3, -Aa2 +Aa3)] 140 leaves, pp. [2] iii iv v vi vii vii ix x xii xii, 1 2-276 [=288]
Contents
A1r title, A1v blank, A2r –A3r advertisement, A3v -A5r preface, A5v –A6v to the reader, A7r –b2v table of contents, B1r-Aa6v text
Technical Notes
Frontispiece illustration
Copy Specific Notes
Bookplate on front pastedown signed “Joseph Pickford Esq.”, with “Sivincula gero non vincor”
On title page, “E libris Thomas Perci […?] de Moyton”
*Exercised based on the invaluable descriptive bibliography assignment of Professor Alexandra Gillespie
Afternoon of May 21, 2009
Some useful things to do:
1. See previous blog post.
2. Continue to familiarize yourself with the 1740-9 novels.
3. See if you can find any open-access facsimile copies (in any edition, but note differences) of any of our 1740-9 novels; check the Internet Archive, Google Books, and any other online sources you can think of. Check separately to see which of the books exist (in any edition) in ECCO. Post links to anything you find in a blog entry.
4. Revisit the Garside and Raven British Fiction, 1800-1829, and try to figure out what kinds of questions it allows you to ask and answer - and what kinds of questions/searches it does not allow. Any thoughts? Please blog.
5. Any thoughts or questions about the project inspired by your morning descriptive bibliography adventure, or by your afternoon explorations? Blog about them!
1. See previous blog post.
2. Continue to familiarize yourself with the 1740-9 novels.
3. See if you can find any open-access facsimile copies (in any edition, but note differences) of any of our 1740-9 novels; check the Internet Archive, Google Books, and any other online sources you can think of. Check separately to see which of the books exist (in any edition) in ECCO. Post links to anything you find in a blog entry.
4. Revisit the Garside and Raven British Fiction, 1800-1829, and try to figure out what kinds of questions it allows you to ask and answer - and what kinds of questions/searches it does not allow. Any thoughts? Please blog.
5. Any thoughts or questions about the project inspired by your morning descriptive bibliography adventure, or by your afternoon explorations? Blog about them!
Representativeness of Our Collection
How might we go about determining how representative of all existing fiction in English our own collection is? If our collection was made up of entirely first editions, all we would need to do would be to check each decade with the appropriate bibliographies (although this would be easier to do for British than for American novels). However, as we know, this is not the case. So your challenge is to come up with a useful series of questions and answers about our collection's representativeness.
Please record your thoughts in the blog.
Please record your thoughts in the blog.
Collection of British and American Fiction, 1660-1830
For calling up our collection from Franklin:
"Collection of British and American Fiction, 1660-1830" search "as a phraes" in "keyword"
Then post limits for the year(s) you desire to call up.
"Collection of British and American Fiction, 1660-1830" search "as a phraes" in "keyword"
Then post limits for the year(s) you desire to call up.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Welcome and Preliminaries
Welcome to the Summer 2009 phase of the Transatlantic Fiction Project!
First, read this description (adapted from the successful Hungerford Grant application which is partially funding our summer work) of the goals, present state, and future possibilities of the Tranatlantic Fiction Project. (Accessing the pdf will require you to accept the invitation I sent you to sign up for a Dropbox account: https://www.getdropbox.com/home)
In a nutshell, the TFP aims to produce a database of information about early novels that allows researchers to search the kinds of information the novel itself offers us along with the kinds of information that bibliographers and scholars have discovered about the novel through their research.
By separating rather than conflating these two kinds of information, the TFP allows us to do things like search for all novels in the collection between 1780 and 1820 (search field 1) that claim to be "by a lady" on the title page (search field 2) and yet were later discovered to actually be authored by a man (search field 3).
What kinds of information are we interested in?
This document gives you a ROUGH sense of the sorts of categories of information that we are interested. This information comes from two sources. First, from the existing MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) record. A MARC record is the record of imformation about a book that the library holds in its catalog; when you search Tripod, for example, the information you get on a particular book is drawn from its MARC record. Look briefly at this presentation from the Penn library on MARC just to get a sense of what MARC is.
The rest of the information will come from the actual copies of the books themselves; you will be the ones extracting the information from the book and entering it into the template that Jon has created for us. (Training about how to do this will be all day on Friday, May 22nd.)
Another really innovative and exciting thing about our database is that it allows for the use of both very complicated faceted searching and more familiar keyword searches.
What is a faceted search? Essentially, in a faceted search database we assigned multiple facets, or classifications, to each of our novels, and then allow users to filter the set of novels (all nearly 3,000 of them) using multiple facets. Here are two examples of existing databases that allow faceted searching:
1.Penn's Fine Arts Library Image Collection
Note the different facets (categories) on the righthand sidebar.
2.Penn's Wheeler Collection
3. World Digital Library
By contrast, the existing database that is most like ours, British Fiction, 1800-1829
allows for basic and advanced keyword searches across its own information categories, but does not allow facet searching.
Do spend some time playing with the British Fiction database so that you know what it can – and can’t – do.
Yet another innovative aspect of the TFP will be the was we allow users to visualize and store their search results - maps, timelines, etc. More on this soon....
More to come!
First, read this description (adapted from the successful Hungerford Grant application which is partially funding our summer work) of the goals, present state, and future possibilities of the Tranatlantic Fiction Project. (Accessing the pdf will require you to accept the invitation I sent you to sign up for a Dropbox account: https://www.getdropbox.com/home)
In a nutshell, the TFP aims to produce a database of information about early novels that allows researchers to search the kinds of information the novel itself offers us along with the kinds of information that bibliographers and scholars have discovered about the novel through their research.
By separating rather than conflating these two kinds of information, the TFP allows us to do things like search for all novels in the collection between 1780 and 1820 (search field 1) that claim to be "by a lady" on the title page (search field 2) and yet were later discovered to actually be authored by a man (search field 3).
What kinds of information are we interested in?
This document gives you a ROUGH sense of the sorts of categories of information that we are interested. This information comes from two sources. First, from the existing MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) record. A MARC record is the record of imformation about a book that the library holds in its catalog; when you search Tripod, for example, the information you get on a particular book is drawn from its MARC record. Look briefly at this presentation from the Penn library on MARC just to get a sense of what MARC is.
The rest of the information will come from the actual copies of the books themselves; you will be the ones extracting the information from the book and entering it into the template that Jon has created for us. (Training about how to do this will be all day on Friday, May 22nd.)
Another really innovative and exciting thing about our database is that it allows for the use of both very complicated faceted searching and more familiar keyword searches.
What is a faceted search? Essentially, in a faceted search database we assigned multiple facets, or classifications, to each of our novels, and then allow users to filter the set of novels (all nearly 3,000 of them) using multiple facets. Here are two examples of existing databases that allow faceted searching:
1.Penn's Fine Arts Library Image Collection
Note the different facets (categories) on the righthand sidebar.
2.Penn's Wheeler Collection
3. World Digital Library
By contrast, the existing database that is most like ours, British Fiction, 1800-1829
allows for basic and advanced keyword searches across its own information categories, but does not allow facet searching.
Do spend some time playing with the British Fiction database so that you know what it can – and can’t – do.
Yet another innovative aspect of the TFP will be the was we allow users to visualize and store their search results - maps, timelines, etc. More on this soon....
More to come!
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