Summer Plan

This blog post follows on and responds to Anna's excellent recent blog post on a potential to-do list. It's definitely true that we need to control our terms; first we need to make sure that we're happy with all of our current field names. Jon

So, a potential summer plan, slightly revised (and based on Anna's list):

1. Rachel and Jon meet to discuss finalizing fields and field names. (Done, last week.) Rachel revises Jon's notes on said field names.

2.Rachel, Anna, and Richard meet briefly to discuss finalizing fields and field names.

3. Rachel and Jon meet briefly to finally finalize fields and field names; Jon can then send them to Laurie, finally.

4. Anna and Richard, with guidance from Rachel, look through each field of each record compile lists of all the terms we've ever used to describe the books. Most of this will be easy, since we have the actual END website and our facets to refer to, but it will take time.

5. Anna and Richard sit down and create a list that displays both all of the possible terms gleaned from the records AND a selected standardized set of terms based on this list. Also create a list of formatting rules. (As Anna points out, the existing wiki bib guidelines are helpful but incomplete. To quote Anna: "Nothing should be left off; this should be The Guide to creating a .bib record. We already began this last year with our "Guide to Transatlantic.bib" wiki page, but it needs to be more current and detailed.")

6. Anna, Richard, Rachel, and Jon meet to finalize the the standardized sets of terms and formatting guide.

7. Based on this, we update the bib template.

8. This standardized list will lead to the creation of a glossary for the general public (written by Rachel, Anna, and Richard). It will describe the reasoning and meaning behind every facet/phrase we use. We should aim to get to this step by the end of this summer.

THEN we have two more tasks:

9.To clean up the existing records and

10. To add new records!

We can discuss the most efficient way to go about steps 9 and 10.

Anna points out:
Of course, it will be possible to add books to the database while we are completing these steps; it might make more sense to clean up the records first, so we aren't adding mistakes upon mistakes. (At the same time, I think it is important to get more books into the database as soon as we can, so I'm not sure what I think about this last part.) Since there are always characteristics of novels that fail to be defined by preexisting terms, we will certainly need to add more terms to the database as we go along; we can always add terms to our glossary with little trouble.

As we were cleaning records today, we noticed that...

...this faced needs to be edited, but we're not sure why it's messed up. Notice that there are 27 instances of "To the" and 9 "to"s (meaningless?).

Why we couldn't get to work on Friday

!!!

My first post of the summer!

Welcome to the Early Novels Database blog, summer 2010! This is the second summer Richard and I, both undergraduate students at Swarthmore College, have worked under the direction of Swarthmore Professor Rachel Buurma and our digital/technological specialist, Jon Shaw, on the web-based, open-access database that is "the END," and we're happy to be back on the sixth floor, examining [hilariously titled and] interesting rare books. For more information on the project, please feel free to look through our posts from last summer; for the current beta version of the END, go to http://syslsl01.library.upenn.edu/dla/earlynovels/search.html?q.

This post will be dedicated to what I think is important to get done in the month or so (!!!) of uninterrupted time I have left to work on the project this summer, and also what I will attempt to get done in the fall.

But first, here is what I accomplished this summer while Richard was off getting heatstroke in Tennessee and Jon and Rachel gave birth to/cared for their really cute children: I created 989 fields for 147 records, tagged each noun, adjective, person- and place-name as such, and deleted the words in between that were not any of these things. This was more slow-going than I expected, mostly because I was also looking through the records to see if I could correct any obvious mistakes (and it was hard to do too much of this at one time). I read some articles on 18th-century indexing practices and the history of the book, namely "Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection" by Jeffrey Todd Knight, "Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles" by Franco Moretti, "Richardson's Economies of Scale" by Leah Price, and "How Literature Becomes Knowledge: A Case Study" by Robin Valenza. I also wrote and submitted a proposal to present our project at an upcoming undergraduate digital humanities conference at Bryn Mawr.

Now that Richard is back in the world of air conditioning and Rachel and Jon are around again, it will be much easier to make some more visible progress on the database. For example, we can add new books to the database, which we began to do last week after we spent a day writing up call slips for 160 books (will it be possible to get all of these added to the database in the month of July? I think so!). Yesterday was spent adding new books to our database and attempting to get XP onto Richard's computer. On Thursday, Jon, Rachel, Richard and I are going to go to Bryn Mawr to look at some of their rare books in the hopes that we will be able to incorporate their collection into our database. So progress is truly being made.

In my opinion, there are things that must happen before we can confidently begin adding books to the database, however; I will now attempt to articulate what these things are so that Richard and I can perhaps accomplish them. Most of them have to do with standardization and record cleanup, things that were impossible last year but are crucial this year.

Firstly, Richard and I need to look through the records that we updated last year and compile lists of terms that we used to describe different aspects of the book. Last year, we had no idea what to expect out of the books we were looking at, since we had never physically encountered 16th- to 19th-century novels before. It surprised us, for example, that there was so much paratextual material in each book--this one has a preface! and a letter to the reader! and a dedication! and an index! and a half title! and so forth. Because of this, last summer's challenge was familiarizing ourselves with 18th-century novels (we primarily worked with novels from 1740-1749) and then figuring out how to identify and then label these unfamiliar and varied parts of the book. Because we didn't know what to expect from the books at the beginning, we ended up tagging traits of the novels in many different ways and with many different phrasings. As the summer went on, Richard and I managed to create our own language of standard definitions, most of which we shared with Rachel and Jon and recorded in a guide online, but some of which we did not, since either they seemed obvious at the time or we simply didn't have a standard set of terms yet. Below is a relatively tame example of what I'm talking about:

You can see here that I have used the "Author gender claim" facet; essentially, I have chosen to sort books by what claims the book makes about the author's gender. Here, there are seven categories that we can choose from: books that claim to have been written by a "Female," a "female," a "Male," a "male," or "Indeterminate," "indeterminate," or "Unknown." Clearly, however, there are really only three options to choose from in this facet: one that means "female," one that means "male," and one that means the book doesn't make any gender claims about the author. From looking at our wiki and what I remember from last summer, by the middle of last summer we decided to use the phrase "Indeterminate" to describe books that don't make any gender claims about the author; we also decided that every one-word phrase that is used to describe something in our database would be capitalized. Therefore, the correct three categories here should be "Male," Female," and "Indeterminate." Since we decided on this rule of standardization in the middle of the summer, it makes sense that we have a variety of terms here. We created these standards as we went along, since we decided at the beginning that we wanted the database to be defined by the collection, and not the other way around.

This type of error can be easily cleaned up, since all we have to do is pull up the improperly tagged books and change our phrasing. The more complicated issues lie in categories where we never standardized our phrasing and don't have their own facets yet, such as in the 261 field (printer's stamp). Let's say that we want to be able to search by the location of the printer's stamp in the book. Currently, we have phrased this every which way: "Printer stamp located on the verso of the first title page and on the verso of the last page," "Verso of last page of text," "Located on the verso of the half title and the last page of every volume," "Printer's stamp located at foot of last page," etc. Since we don't have a facet for the location of the printer's stamp, it will be a little more difficult to sort through all of the different ways we have described the printer's stamp location, but it will be possible (and necessary, if we ever want to create a working facet for the printer's stamp location).

So, the beginning of our potential to-do list (in order of perceived necessary occurrence):

1. We first need to look through each field of each record compile lists of all the terms we've ever used to describe the books. Most of this will be easy, since we have the actual END website and our facets to refer to, but it will take time.

2. After this is done, we must make sure that we have a set of standardized terms for each field. Much of this will be review, since we already went over a lot of the terms last year. This will require a meeting with both Rachel and Jon.

3. Then, we must edit the .bib records that are improperly tagged. (And perhaps this might also be a good time to do some more general cleanup, especially since whole fields are most certainly missing from some .bib records).

4. Then, we need to compose a list of all of our standardized terms, and also our formatting rules. Nothing should be left off; this should be The Guide to creating a .bib record. We already began this last year with our "Guide to Transatlantic.bib" wiki page, but it needs to be more current and detailed.

5. This list will lead to the creation of a glossary for the general public. It will describe the reasoning and meaning behind every facet/phrase we use. I definitely think that we should aim to get to this step by the end of this summer.

Of course, it will be possible to add books to the database while we are completing these steps; it might make more sense to clean up the records first, so we aren't adding mistakes upon mistakes. (At the same time, I think it is important to get more books into the database as soon as we can, so I'm not sure what I think about this last part.) Since there are always characteristics of novels that fail to be defined by preexisting terms, we will certainly need to add more terms to the database as we go along; we can always add terms to our glossary with little trouble.

These are all thoughts in progress, so please comment/criticize. I'll update again if I have more thoughts on what we should be doing now besides adding books to the database (and, you know, starting that article that's due at the end of the summer...should we talk about that soon?). Also, I didn't write about re-wording facets; that's my next in-progress blog post, which will focus on the problematic (?) 592 field. More soon!

-Anna

Advantages and Disadvantages

ECCO is way, way bigger than END. It has swanky taglines ("Eighteenth Century Collections Online is the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken."), big numbers (over 180000 titles), a logo, etc. What ECCO can do, then, is allow the pinpointing of specific works amid an otherwise insurmountably large and otherwise inaccessible volume of works. Furthermore, ECCO has full-text scans, allowing for searches within these scans. Features include a compiled chronology of historical events, an image gallery, and a set of essays that establish a historical context. These features are pretty limited, however, and seem to be aimed at a more casual user. More serious users will likely just go straight to the search engines.

The search engine can search within the following fields:

Keyword, Title, Author, Subject, Main Text, Front Matter Back of Book, Publisher, Place of Publication, ESTC Number

Advanced searches can put a starting point and an endpoint on the range of years of publication, check off any number of subjects, look for works in a particular language, and look for particular illustrations.

The primary difference between us and ECCO here is that we cannot do Main Text searches, account for certain types of illustrations, and lack ESTC numbers, as far as I can tell. We can definitely put a range on years of publication, and most of the other information is searchable or accessible in one way, shape, or form. The subject checking in ECCO is confusing for me - there is a huge array of subjects, which include "History and Geography", "Fine Arts", "Literature and Language", "General Reference". Thus, ECCO broadens its utility, but we would seem to be much more focused on a subsection of one particular field, their "Literature and Language" section. That said, it's not always clear to me that we are in that subsection. They seem to have a lot of things that we would include in other sections, as well. For example, I found a set of educational, fictional epistles that were listed under General Reference. This should stress to us the importance of a glossary - we need to be at least relatively transparent about why we sorted certain information in a particular way.

I strongly suspect that ECCO is limited partly by its needs to be as comprehensive as it is. Its comprehensiveness seems to be its main selling point, something that we don't currently value as highly. The fact that it has so many volumes available limits it in some regards. The clearest example is that one can only browse by subject, author, and title. The more interesting kinds of advanced searches include year of publication, words in front of book, and number of illustrations. This may work against us in the sense that it takes longer to catalog and will also introduce a lot of "noise" into searching, but part of the advantage of faceted searching is that this "noise" can be filtered out. At any rate, ECCO does not lack for "noise", either - it does not pre-sort works in any way, shape, or form, and thus more or less assumes that people will already know what they are looking at once they initiate a search. They do have some really interesting ways to sort within books, like an eTable of Contents, which I'm not sure how they do.

We might talk about searching practices at some point, because since I am somewhat limited in what researchers actually do, I can only make conjectures. Still, ECCO is a little bit worrisome because it evades a lot of issues we're tackling head-on. For example, it does not make any claim to be a database of novels, though it certainly includes them. The opening statement is that it "includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and more", but the database subsequently doesn't really help you sort among them. In contrast, we are looking specifically at works of fiction, mostly novels, and are paring away differences between novels with fields like the narrative form field or book format field.

Their "browse" function begins by being alphabetical by title, and is somewhat analogous to just wandering down a stack of books. It is likely that something will be found, but alphabetical by title browsing alone is a hard thing to manage. The best thing about it seems to be "fuzzy searching", which I'm not sure I understand yet, either. It has a broader but somewhat different information outlay than we do. We have a sort of small-business advantage in this regard - we don't have to appeal to any potential scholar of any field within the era spanned.

Indexing

Authorship Claim

When I talk to random people about what I'm doing this summer and they don't understand how such a database would be useful for anyone (and ask, instead of just giving me a blank stare), the authorship claim field is always the example I use. I don't call it the authorship claim field, but regardless, most readers are usually interested in the people who write the texts that we read, and it provides a good example of a potential faceted search with a variety of levels.
Faceted searching allows us to check correlations between certain patterns that we are interested in. Like statistical analysis, we can then maybe think about the reasons that such correlations exist. Or, alternatively, we can find a single outlier and question what makes it different and special in comparison to all other texts of that time/genre/author.

Does a given author use the work of certain poets as epigraph material? How often and where and when do the male authors of female texts represent themselves as females, and when they do, how often does a portrait of the female occur? (The reverse has -female author representing self as male with a portrait of the fictional male in question- occurred in at least one text, I think) Are male or female authors more likely to be named with a "By" or be anonymous or be referenced to by their other works? Even the subfields within the authorship claim field seem to provide uses for faceted searching.

The authorship claim field, specifically, is divided into:

‡a (Claim type - ex: Author) ‡1 (Name as it appears) ‡2 (Phrase in which the authorship claim appears) ‡3 (Location of Claim - ex: Title page) ‡4 (Authorship Claim Notes - ex:The author of the preface claims to be the author of the text to follow.) ‡5 (Gender Claim) ‡v (volume)

Subfield a has had some minor problems - sometimes the precise claim is can be ambiguous: author, translator, whatever. Perhaps most problematically is that we do not have time to go through the whole text and find authorship claims - where "I" is in a text, for example, and where that implies an authorship claim. Furthermore, authorship claims are somehow often so deeply stacked on top of each other that it's impossible to concisely convey the information in a database format. Author-translator-translator will get confused, for example, and the precise order of things won't necessarily be clearly shown. Further complicating the issue is the inclusion of both false and actual authorship claims in the database, while excluding certain types of false authorship claims (those included within the text itself).

Our solution right now is pretty haphazard - focus on the title page, try not to worry about too much about authorship claims in paratextual material, ignore authorship of paratextual material. It's a pretty knotty situation that isn't going to get resolved anytime soon.

Also, this is pretty useful, maybe, and has lead me to wonder exactly how this faceted search will become implemented, because that also has some pretty broad implications.

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/user_interface_implementations_of_faceted_browsing/

592 FIELD

The 592 field is divided up into two main subfields. The first, $a, denotes the dominant narrative form of the text. The second subfield, $b, is what we call the "contains" field: it indicates if there are any other narrative forms within the volume that are not expressed in $a. This categorical system has proven itself useful in many cases. If there is a book that is written completely in letters, for example, but between the different letters there is third-person narration, we would categorize the book as such:

592. $a: Epistolary $b: Third-person

And then to further explain, we could include a general note field, $x:

592. $a: Epistolary $b: Third-person $x: The novel is epistolary, but third-person narration is present between each epistle.

In this situation, our dominant narrative form/contains subfield system is quite useful: $b allows and highlights narratorial exceptions, while $a honors the preeminance of the dominant narrative form.

Another useful characteristic of our categorical system is that we do not have to impose a narratorial hierarchy on the text if we do not feel that it is truly present. We can do this by either creating more than one $a (thus claiming that there is more than one dominant narrative form within the volume), or abstaining from using $a and instead only using $b (which scraps the notion of a dominant narrative form completely and instead only focuses on what narrative forms the volume contains). If there is anything that is not completely self-explanatory, we can always create a notes field ($x) and clarify in a sentence or two.

Here are some phrases we commonly use to categorize narrative forms:
$a:
Third-person
First-person
Epistolary
$b:
Third-person
First-person
Letter(s)
Poem(s)

Of course, there are inherent problems with the 592 field. The most obvious problem is that since Richard and I are not reading the full text, there are bound to be narratorial intricacies that we cannot pick up on just from flipping through or skimming the book. For example, if a novel is written in third-person, but there is an instance where the narrator slips into first-person, we might not notice it. Therefore, our system cannot be viewed as completely accurate or all-encompassing, because we are not reading the full works. Another problem with our system is that is does not necessarily make room for more unique circumstances, such as instances of narrative monologue or free indirect discourse. These are more nuanced narrative forms that are difficult to capture within our current categorical system, and even more difficult to pick up on while flipping through novels.

The solution to these problems, I suppose, is to view the 592 field as a guide to locating certain narrative forms rather than all-inclusive or exclusive evidence of their existence. I imagine that such a guide could be extremely useful to scholars and students alike, especially coupled with unconventional mapping techniques. It would be interesting, for example, to put the information from the 592 field on a timeline and see if there are any trends in narration that could not have been tracked without our quantitative work coupled with digital tools (does third-person narration in epistolary novels increase/decrease over time? Does third-person narration within the epistles in epistolary novels increase/decrease and could this lead us to broader hypotheses about the rise of the novel? and so forth).

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.

Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

From the Stanford Humanities Lab website:

"The 2.0 version of the Digital Humanities manifesto, a collaborative project of the 2009 UCLA Mellon Seminar on the Digital Humanities, has now been released for commentary and debate. Principally authored by seminar leaders Jeffrey Schnapp and Todd Presner, with contributions by other members of the seminar, including Peter Lunenfeld and Johanna Drucker, as well as by commentators on the 1.0 release, it seeks to formulate, albeit in a ludic and polemical fashion, a mission/vision statement for the future development of the Humanities disciplines."



Useful? Silly? Interesting?

A Side of Text

I don't understand the use of epigraph materials. And of all the things that have been on my mind, this is probably one of the least academically interesting, but I can't help but think about it, seeing as how there are just so many that we are cataloguing and requoting in the database. I consistently have to wonder how epigraphs are being used in each one of these books- does the average reader understand the Latin being quoted? The significance of those particular three or four lines in that poem of Cowper's? And who are some of these people? Thomas Otway has a Wikipedia article, but it's moderately terrible, terrible enough so that scholarship on him can't be as indepth as it is on Shakespeare or Cowper or Pope, and I've never even heard of him before running through all of these epigraphs.

We requote the epigraph material in the database in the 591 field. It's one of my favorites to update because of the quotation aspect of the field (subfield a, I think), but it's also always a puzzling feeling, because its significance and meaning is somehow often distant from the perceived aim of the actual text (which is expressed, through us, by the title and a flip-through of the book).

I wonder how common epigraphs are now. The example that springs to mind is the one that T.S. Eliot uses one in the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and there's something weird and allusive and problematic in the sense that you have to be familiar with the quote from the Inferno, and the Inferno, but I wonder if it's worked the same way in works in the period we're working on. There's certainly some kind of urge to quote, and link a work back to some other, "greater" work, potentially, but without reading the texts in conjunction with the epigraph, I can't say what that relationship is. There's something weird about a quote being one of the first things a reader sees. I wonder what the origins of epigraphs are to begin with - do they have something to do with advertisement? Did they just catch on magically? Does this happen with any literature that precedes our era? How do "false" epigraphs work, epigraphs that quote something fake? Where do those come from?

For my side-reading, partially to address some of these questions as well as to increase my familiarity with periods and authors with whom I'm not as familiar as I should be, I started reading some Pope, who is pretty often epigraphed, alongside Latin figures as well as Cowper and Shakespeare as some of the most common. I've liked "The Rape of the Lock" so far, but I don't understand all the allusions, and it strikes me how important some idea of the historical context is to reading this stuff, because I don't understand a lot of it. Pope's writing is situated in a pretty weird social atmosphere, where he's explicitly both writing for specific people and a broader audience. A lot of literature works to promote itself to the mass-market, with specific demographic in mind - it's not necessarily produced in these private places.

Too much to read and think about for now, though.

Data Visualization

post forthcoming...

Your Reading Blog Post Here

Hint, hint.

Thoughs on Facets and Searching

About a month ago I started thinking about some possible searches - faceted and otherwise - that we might want to be able to do; I also started thinking about different ways we might eventually want to be able to visualize the results of the searches. See my first thoughts, below.

Your thoughts - perhaps in the form of some individual blog posts that explore and speculate on a single or a couple of facets in detail?

A few thoughts:

Genre and geography
Search: ‘adventures’; map to discover correlation in US/UK
[q about value w/in SM collection vs with larger set]

Genre and time
Search: ‘life’ in title; show by decade

Narrative form
Search: all epistolary novels; narrow to all with “letters” in the title; narrow by date further to compare changes in understanding of genre 1660-1830

Title page authorship
Narrow entire set to books w/ no proper name on title page AND THEN
Narrow to those w/ paratexts claiming to be by the author OR
Narrow to those paratexts w/ and author’s name

Narrow to those with no proper name on tp with author’s name in paratext which is identical w/ bibliography’s author’s name (?)

More facet sample searches:

Narrow to first editions

Narrow to novels first published in N. America/UK

Narrow to novels with no other existing edition

A Treatise on Title-Pages

Take a look at Theodore Low De Vinne's book on one of our favorite topics!

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte

Take a look at the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism entry on "book history".

See also the 2006 PMLA Special Issue on "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" edited by Leah Price and Seth Lerer. Especially important for us - given the fact that we have embarked on a bibliographic project focused on a particular literary genre - is the Seth Lerer asks in the conclusion to this issue: "What is the relation between the book as artifact and the aesthetics of the literary imagination?" (230).

In the PMLA special issue also take a look at Peter McDonald's essay "Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?," especially ot pages 222-223, where he offers a re-translation of Derrida's famous statement "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (usually translated as "there is no outside the text," this phrase from "Of Grammatology" became a shorthand for deconstruction's attitude towards matters of literariness and textuality). McDonald's reading points out the pun on hors-texte(in McDonald's words, "a technical bookmaking term roughly translated as "plate") and hors texte("outside of the text), and uses this reading to draw some important connections between theory and the history of the book.

Renaming

On Friday we discussed the fact that we would like to change the name of the database and project from the increasingly inappropriate "Transatlantic Fiction Project" to something more accurate (and perhaps with a better acronym into the bargain). Suggestions so far:

END: The Early Novels Database
ENDO: The Early Novels Database Online
EFNO: Early Fictional Narratives Online
NEO: Novels in English Online

Important considerations include the fact that our project includes a wide range of fictional narrative genres but focuses on the novel and the fact that we include works in English no matter where written or published.

Further suggestions?

On June 10, 2009:
END: The Early Novels Database
FIN: Fiction in Narrative
REAL:
SWIFT: Early Fictional Narratives
FIND: Fiction in Narrative, um….
The 246 Project
The subfield 4 project
The 5xx Project
FACET: Fiction and C English T
BAMP: The British and American Fiction Project

Ian Watt's "Point of View" Bibliography

Here's a transcription of an handout I came across last week in the Ian Watt Papers; it's an interesting snapshot of what one important novel critic was reading in the mid-twentieth-century.

Point of View and Its Application to Eighteen Century Fiction: A Selective Bibliography, by Ian Watt*

1.History

Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England

Norman Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction – The Development of a Critical Concept” PMLA LXX Dec 1855, 1160-84

II. Idea

Henry James, The Art of the Novel, Blackmur ed

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

Peter Swiggart, “Mr. Booth’s Quarrel with Fiction,” Sewanee Review,
LXXI (Jan-March 1963), pp 142-59

III. Application

H.K. Russell, “Tristram Shandy and the Technique of the Novel,” Studies
in Philology, XLII (July 1945), pp 581-591.

Mark Schorer, “Technique as Discovery,” Hudson review, I (1948), 67-87.

Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel

Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel

*SC 401 (Ian Watt Papers), ACCN 1990-131 box 49, Folder 2 – English 340 Notes. Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives.

Through the looking-glass

Something really interesting happened today: as I was paging through v.2 of Pamela, I noticed that there was ink residue on the verso of the title page. Upon taking a second look, I saw that the ink had not come off of the proceeding page, but rather came off of a preface that was not/no longer in the volume. Since the writing was backwards, the only way to read the ghost-like marks was with a mirror, which Lynn provided. Richard demonstrates our reading method in the following photo:















It's hard to tell since I took this picture with my cell phone, but you can kind of see the words in this photo as viewed through the mirror:















Anyway, it was quite hard to read since there also was ink residue from the first page of the text, but we were able to decipher what most of it said. Here is what we got:

Preface. If to give practical examples ... to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife: If to effect all these good ends so probable, so natural, so lively a manner, as shall engage the passions of every sensible reader, and strongly ... in the edifying story : and all without raising a single idea throughout the whole, that shall ... the [exactest?] ... instances where the [exactest?] purity would be most apprehensive: if these (embellished with a great variety of entertaining incidents) laudable of worthy recommendations of any work, the editor of the following letters which have their foundation in nature venture to offer-

So it's pretty rough. But it's a start! Now we have to check online PDFs of Pamela to see if it appeared in similar editions of the novel. Doing so will hopefully answer some questions, such as: Was this preface ever included in the text, or was the ink residue left over from something else? Was this preface meant for Pamela, or was it meant for another novel? What is the full text of this preface? and so on. To be continued...

A Red-Letter Day for Jargon and Shtuff

The site posted below on narratology, by Jahn, and the mind-bending journey across the internet that ensued has filled my head with an immovable, solid mass of various interconnected terminologies. My father would approve. He, the first-generation immigrant, claims that any pursuit of any discipline revolves around the internalization of the language of that discipline, and that of its practitioners. But the cataloguer's discipline is not the discipline of the narratologist, and the wild intersection of our narratologist lives and our cataloguer lives is resulting in a mild MARCatastrophe.

The challenge is to come up with a way to simply catalogue "narrative form", the infamous 592 field. In dreams, I reach out to all the unreachable mass of literary works in the decade of 1740-1749 and flip through those pages, unable to come up with a conveniently small number of narratological classifications for these particular works. As I attempt to list some classifications, the books endlessly expand, their 200+ year old bindings bulging, falling apart, until the texts transform into nightmarish Rolodexes of nigh-infinite possibilities. But I digress.

Two thoughts about the field-

1) We must generate a finite list of labels that consistently describe predictable variations of certain parts of narration, if our aim is to classify and make searchable narratological occurrences. We cannot label one thing "heterodiegetic" and the other "figural narration", so we are restricted to a specific set of ideas. If we had four fields, one for "presence of certain specific characterization techniques", "presence of certain specific modes of focalization", "overt or covert narrator" and "heterodiegetic v. homodiegetic narrator", we could split our classifications. As it is, we have one field, and therefore we are limited to comparing apples to apples, without bringing in the entire aisle of narratological fruit.

Our current list of labels/labeling system consists of "third-person, first-person, and epistolary"

2) Each work of prose fiction needs to be labeled in under a reasonable amount of time. This disqualifies narratological classifications that are very specific, rely on close reading, or aren't representative of a text - the detailed tree of characterization, for example, while universal, is potentially too specific for us to use. For example, "figural characterization" may not representative of an entire work's characterization, and ""public explicit figural autocharacterization". In this way, "epistolary" is actually a nice categorization, because despite the fact that we might worry about how epistolary a given novel is, we have a sense that if letters permeate through an entire work, it's epistolary, hands-down, without question, just by the presence of many epistles.

The de facto current practice for the 592 field is a simple process, and one that actually makes a lot of sense for its simplicity and minimal profit-gained-to-time-expended ratio.

Subfield A:

1) Open the book. Page through it.
2) Look for letters (epistles). If there are letters, proceed to 2a. If not, proceed to 3.
2a) Does the book have a lot of letters? If so, the book is now epistolary! Proceed to step 4.
3) Look for pronouns. Are these mostly first or third-person? If the former, the book is now first-person! If the latter, the book is now third-person! Proceed to step 4.

Subfield B:

4) Put anything that isn't included in subfield b.

While we are labeling the presence of letters, first-person pronouns, and third-person pronouns, we're saying virtually nothing about what the 592 field actually has been theoretically designed to mean. The 592 is labeled as the field for "narrative form", but narrative form isn't necessarily dependent on pronouns. The closest thing which pronouns-as-evidence approximates is homodiegetic narration vs. heterodiegetic narration. While all books can be said to possibly have homodiegetic or heterodiegetic narrators, while at least having one, resolving our cataloguer's needs, classifying narration as simply homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, while easy, might not satisfy us.

In fact, our current practice already suggests the limitation and insufficiency of classification via that convenient binarism. Labeling things as first-person, third-person, as well as "epistolary" might seem less advanced in a jargonistic kind of way, but it actually reflects our concern with greater, more generic conventions, not necessarily narrative. As a result, I feel sort of torn between labeling things from the bottom-up narratologically (suggested by subfield B, the labels third-person, and first-person) and labeling things from the top-down (suggested by subfield A, and the label of "epistolary").

I've been thinking about the 592 field for awhile now, and reading the Jahn article sort of crystallized a suspicion that I just don't understand our objective of the 592 field, which is why we keep running into snags regarding relative magnitude like "How much of the book is epistolary and does it matter?" These books are pretty idiosyncratic, it seems, and the confusion of texts makes me take cautious baby-steps with the 592 field, just noting down third and first-person. And while this is satisfactory to some degree for now, every time I run into a novel with mostly mixed narration, it's going to induce some kind of fugue state where I can't simplify things from these two different fields.