SHARP 2013 Digital Projects and Tools Showcase

In mid-July the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) met for its twenty-first annual conference, “Geographies of the Book,” in Philadelphia. Hosted by University of Pennsylvania, the conference included a three-hour, stand-alone digital showcase on Saturday, July 20th. Before I turn to the sixteen projects featured in the showcase, a few words about the history of digital sessions at SHARP are in order.

The tradition of showcasing digital projects at SHARP conferences was begun by Dr. Katherine Harris (San Jose University) for the 2008 conference held in Oxford, England. Currently serving as the E-Resources Review Editor for SHARP News, Dr. Harris continued to organize showcases for subsequent conferences. These highly popular sessions ran concurrently with other sessions. Although the 2011 Washington, DC organizers had attempted to find space to hold a stand-alone session that would not compete with other panels, space limitations prevented this desire from becoming a reality. A successful digital project session for the DC conference, however, was organized once again by Kathy Harris. Yet, the 2013 Digital Showcase at Penn marked the first time that the demonstrations of new digital projects and tools at SHARP had a dedicated time slot of its own as well as a setting well-suited to such an exhibition.

With a dedicated three-hour running time, the digital showcase ran from 12:30 to 3:30 pm; it competed for attention with parallel programming only during its final hour. The showcase’s location in Penn’s Houston Hall’s Hall of Flags easily accommodated 16 six-foot tables, each with its own monitor, and afforded the room for numerous attendees to navigate the various stations with ease.

Mitch Fraas (UPenn) demonstrates his project.
Photo credit: Alex Franklin (Univ. of Oxford)

Alan Galey (UToronto) demonstrates his project.
Photo credit: Alex Franklin (Univ. of Oxford)

The following is a list of the sixteen projects:

• The Book History BiblioGraph
  Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University, USA), Tom Mole (McGill University, Canada)
• END: The Early Novels Database
  [not yet public]
  Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College, USA)
• Reading in 1950s South Africa: Records of the Cape Libraries Extension Association
  Patricia G. Clark (Westminster College, USA)
• Visualizing Antebellum Reprinting Networks
  Ryan Cordell (Northeastern University, USA)
• Expanding the Republic of Letters: India and the Circulation of Ideas in the Late Eighteenth Century
  Mitch Fraas (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Image Matching on Early Modern Printed Illustrations
  Alexandra Franklin (University of Oxford, UK)
• The Borders of the Book: Visualizing Paratexts and Marginalia in Multiple Copies and Editions
  Alan Galey (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Atlases of the Rhode Island and Dutch Book Trades”
  Jordan Goffin (Providence Public Library, USA), Michael Putter (Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Book History and the Early Modern OCR Project
  Jacob Heil (Texas A&M University, USA)
• Mapping Sheila Watson’s Paris: Using a Geo-Location Smartphone App to Retrace Walks the Canadian Modernist Records in Her Journal
  Paul Hjartarson (University of Alberta, Canada), Harvey Quamen (University of Alberta, Canada)
• The Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707
  Alastair Mann (University of Stirling, Scotland)
• Mapping Creative Women in the History of Book Publishing: A Contrasting Geography
  Brigitte Marguerite Ouvry-Vial (Université du Maine, France)
• Mapping Printers’ Lives and Letters
  Sydney Shep (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Flora Feltham (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Sara Bryan
  (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)[not attending]
• Geographical Content, Geographical Context: Mapping the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle(s)
  Rebecca Pomeroy Shores (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
• ARC and Collex: Federated Resources for the Study of Book History
  Timothy Stinson (North Carolina State University, USA)
• The Eighteenth-Century English Grammars Database: A New Resource for the History of the Book and Linguistic Historiography”
  Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Manchester, UK)

Eight of the sixteen projects deal directly with the early modern period, and at least two–Mark Algee-Hewitt and Tom Mole’s Bibliograph and Tim Stinson’s ARC and Collex–extend beyond the historical confines of the early modern but possess specific relevance to the period. I have counted Alan Galey’s The Borders of the Book: Visualizing Paratexts and Marginalia in Multiple Copies and Editions among the early modern projects because his work relies on texts from this period. Yet, his work on digital visualizations of differences in paratextual features and different readers’ marginalia found in multiple copies of the same books has larger application, too. All of the projects, no matter what the period, embody approaches and strategies afforded by the digital that can help advance work in book history and related fields. The projects are also at various stages–and you will notice that some have links, and some don’t because they are either in very early stages or simply not ready for widespread release. Bibliograph, for instance, is currently a prototype, with a beta version in the works for testing; the project launch date is aimed for 2014 or 2015.

END: Early Novels Database is a collaborative project involving several Philadelphia academic institutions but still in the midst of digitization and construction. In contrast, the Eighteenth-Century English Grammars Database is, in one sense, “complete, but as Professor Yáñez-Bouza noted, it is also “an open-end project because one can always add more grammars and some of the fields could be completed with more information had we the resources to look into contemporary book reviews and sales catalogues (e.g. the fields Price and Target Audience).”

Several of the projects have made previous appearances in EMOB posts. A post last June mentioned ARC (Advanced Research Consortium), and it is very good to see the progress since then. The Mellon grant that the Early Modern OCR Project (see the entry for Jacob Heil) received was announced in a post last fall. More recently, EMOB devoted a post to the image-matching software developed at the Bodleian that Alex Franklin presented at SHARP. Finally, the Mapping the Republic of Letters project the EMOB discussed in a post several years ago, served as the inspiration for Mitch Fraas’s Expanding the Republic of Letters: India and the Circulation of Ideas in the Late Eighteenth Century.

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