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The grub street project: aims and objectives

Imagine an “edition” of eighteenth-century London, where a single page as zoomable map provides the interface for “reading” the city, its communications, its economies and texts, its literature, history, architecture, art, and its music. Imagine a new way of sharing a scholarly edition in the digital environment, not as a single annotated e-edition, but as an expanding library of selected and topographically encoded, searchable books, maps, and prints. Still very much in an early stage of development, the Grub Street Project aims to create a system to assemble and map the topography, publishing history, texts, and people of eighteenth-century London. The project is intended to create an open-access collaborative space where students, scholars, and members of the public (e.g., genealogical societies, high school classes, or gamers inventing a new space to imagine D&D style narratives) can add their own annotations, literary mappings, e-editions, or digitized documents to the infrastructure. The digital infrastructure will include a number of maps of London from 1720 to 1799, including John Strype’s Survey of London (1720), widely understood to be the first authority on the history of London and its topography, and Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1799). Horwood’s map, intended to present a complete view of the city with every individual property, street, and alley, will serve as the main interface, while the others will provide comparative views of the city over time. Horwood’s thirty-two–page document is reconstructed as a single “zoomable” map that will be associated with data, including 11,000 place names and alternates, plus 5,300 place descriptions from the complete text of the public domain Dictionary of London (Harben 1918); addresses, trades, and tradespeople from Kent’s London business directories published annually from 1732 to 1828; bookseller and printer locations derived from bibliographical data; and links to full-text e-editions of books, pamphlets, broadsheets, images, and maps printed and sold in the city. London is, to a great extent, only a test case. Other cities or countries can be included over time once the infrastructure is in place (and participants involved).

In terms of scholarly goals, by applying topographical markup to a set of digitized maps, texts, and images, the project aims to provide a means to search, navigate and visualize trends and relationships between material contexts (such as networks of print distribution, literary commerce and other trades, or particular historical events). This will allow us to read and visualize the history of print culture in this particular space. I have sometimes had a very hard time convincing colleagues, potential funders, and even my mostly enthusiastic students of the potentials for visualization and mapping. Fortunately, the Stanford project led by Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen to map thousands of letters exchanged in the eighteenth century’s “Republic of Letters” shows one very exciting application of applying digital mapping technologies to large bodies of data. (External Link) . Raising new research questions as it does, this project will surely inspire new research projects in both the digital domain and that of special collections where the original documents and books are housed. But as a literary scholar I am also interested in the “immaterial” London: the London that is in the imagination of its citizens and visitors, the London that is both real and metaphorical topography depicted by contemporary writers such as Alexander Pope in The Dunciad . Maps can also help us to investigate how that space is represented by imaginary topos, for example a Dulness that is impersonated in localizable points such as Bedlam, Fleet Ditch, or St. Mary le Strand in Fleet Street and also lies like a cloud over the entire city. The utility of this concept for the study of literature and its spaces or topographies is that, as with Google Maps, annotated maps are not merely geography: they articulate the culture of places. By re-presenting the history of London as a network of literary communications, ideas, and physical-spatial relationships, by visualizing it as a heterotopia, Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics . 16.1 (1986): 22–27. localized in maps of “the real” but simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted by literary metaphor and ambiguity, we can gain new understanding of the city and its literature.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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