0.5 Non-consuming relevance: “the grub street project”  (Page 7/9)

I want to see what that project can show, and—to get back to John Unsworth’s notion of successful failure—what it cannot show. That is, what among those literary motions must be mapped in a different way, in a way other than through physical geography, and what kinds of mappings do we already have that abstract that information in more or less lossy form? Is the table of contents such a “map”? See Laura Mandell, “Putting Contents on the Table,” Poetess Archive Journal 1.1 (2007) (External Link) . One of Alan Liu’s classes re-invented the tables of contents of specific anthologies as geographical maps of authors’ locations: what could we see if we did such a thing on a large scale?

To summarize and conclude: I want to know what happens when eighteenth-century London is mapped with texts and words, and spaces contextualized by prosopographies, biographies, and fictions. How does reading differ when spatialized and so topographically rendered rather than anthologically connected? What kinds of information lurk in the format, skewing the form by (mis)placing the observer? And then, to switch to possible research questions opened up by 18thConnect’s burgeoning data set . . . what kinds of “genres” appear on the scene when algorithms search among huge bodies of texts for semantic regularities or morphological similarities based on documentary forms or syntactic structure? What difference does it make to ask particular research questions when examining hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century texts?—and what happens to such questions when they are reconfigured to be asked in terms of topographical orderings of cultural interactions? What difference do space and scale make? These should be our consuming questions as we speed along our Grub Street, the digital highway. For an excellent, thought-provoking account of this equation, see Muri 238.

Appendix i: 18thconnect: an update

temporary address for 18thConnect, prior to launch in July 2010: (External Link)

18thConnect, sponsored by NINES, began as an attempt to forestall severe degradation of information as the archive became digitized. But that has now changed. 18thConnect received an NEH-sponsored grant for supercomputer time and has conferred via NINES-sponsored meetings with other collaborative teams working on the same problem (all named in the table below). Now it looks as if it will be possible to know more than we could ever have known before about Anglo-American history, literature, crime, biography, anything conveyed by texts that were printed before 1850. Here follows a brief summary of the state of affairs, what 18thConnect is doing, and what we hope is to come. At the end of this report follows a table of those people with whom we would like to work in creating the cleanest possible data set of perhaps as much as half a million eighteenth-century texts.

Current state of affairs

The Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database owned by Gale Cengage contains page-images of 140,000 texts ranging in size from a two-page pamphlet to the 1500-page Clarissa . The Text Creation Partnership of the University of Michigan libraries has double-keyed 1,809 of these texts and then run out of money. The ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) at the British Library and UC Riverside has given us their catalogue of 400,000 eighteenth-century texts. We have loaded their bibliography into a SOLR indexer. These records are being reviewed and corrected by the ESTC before being made public with the launch of 18thConnect, projected for July 2010. Those records overlap with the bibliographic records of ECCO texts. Benjamin Pauley is working with ESTC and Google Books and engaging eighteenth-century scholars to connect ESTC numbers and other relevant data to items available through Google Books. Shef Rogers and Miami University have been given the right to digitally produce Cambridge’s Bibliography of English Literature, another resource for bibliographic data. These data sets will be the first to be aggregated by 18thConnect. In plain terms, when one searches the site, one will have returned bibliographic data from ECCO, ESTC, Google Books, and the DBEL (Digital Bibliography of English Literature).