About the Project (for those just joining us)

The first phase of the provisionally-named Transatlantic Fiction Project (TFP) seeks to develop a web-based, open-access database of bibliographic information about the University of Pennsylvania Library's 3,000 works of fiction in English published between 1660 and 1830 (centered around the world-class, and under-utilized, Singer-Mendenhall Collection of Early Novels). (Future phases will expand the set of works of fiction to include those held in other libraries). We hope that this database will help transform the ways in which investigation into the origins and history of the novel can be conducted, enabling scholars and students to gather literary and sociological data of unparalleled sophistication from a broadly representative body of fiction.

The TFP draws on a recent exciting work in humanities computing and database construction, and therefore presents a chance to help contribute to the ongoing conversation about database design in the humanities in particular, and about the role of quantitative approaches to the humanities in general. (On this last topic, see for example Franco Moretti’s Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for a literary history (Verso, 2005).) It presents an opportunity for groundbreaking work combining web-accessible database technology and recent approaches to literary history. Our database will track the full syntactic and generic possibilities of elements like title pages, authorship claims, illustrations and frontispieces, subscribers’ lists, introductions, dedications, tables of contents, indexes, and narrative type (to name just a few), allowing users to perform sophisticated searches across these fields using both faceted and Google-style searches in combination. This database will complements existing open-access and proprietary full-text databases by making information about the novels included in such databases searchable in a way that it currently is not. To take a simple example, the Early Novels Database would allow a researcher interested in authorship and gender to do a search for all novels published between 1770 and 1780 which claim on their title pages to be penned “by a lady” but which in fact have been since discovered to have been written by men; it could further allow the researcher to distinguish between the kinds of authorship claims made on the title page and those made in prefatory material - all before visiting the actual collection or calling the physical volumes of the novels in question.

The TFP Database seeks to privilege the internal claims of works rather than impose modern systems of categorization on them (while also acknowledging that this is an impossible project to fully accomplish). Its design combines traditional bibliographic categories with those capturing the work's own self-representation, as in the example above. Such methodologies, long a staple of historicist approaches to literature, are currently incorporated sparingly, if at all, into existing databases. By incorporating them into our database, we hope to bridge the gap between the past and the present, enabling the recovery, in part, of this lost literary tradition - one that modern habits of categorization have effectively erased from collective memory.

This blog is primarily a used for internal communication between project members, but we think it conveys a good sense of our project's day-to-day operations and overall goals.

If you have any suggestions for us or questions about the project, please email me at rbuurma1 at swarthmore dot edu.