Project Manager, Webmaster, Social Media Coordinator, and Student Researcher
Sierra Eckert is a senior at Swarthmore College. She is an Honors English literature major and Honors interpretation theory minor, with a Mathematics course minor and a Creative Writing concentration. As a Tri-Co Digital Humanities Fellow, this summer she is working for the Early Novels Database research team to develop a website that makes bibliographic data on 18th century novels accessible, navigable, and engaging. When not working on END, you can find her editing Nacht literary magazine and researching for her thesis on literary databases, new media historiography, and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.
Exhibit A: The Novel Index Index, in indexes in fiction, see History of Peggy Black and Wilmot Bond, the (1784) History of Sir Charles Grandison, the (1754) Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1730, 1734) Memoirs of a Certain Island 1726 Salmagundi 1814 Search the pages of the above novels and you will find that they contain an object not traditionally associated with fiction: an index. Though the presence of an index now signals a metafictional self-consciousness traditionally associated with... [Read more]
Indexing the Index: Part I In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that […] the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. (Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”) Borges’ allegory of the perfect-yet-useless map frames the theoretical issues at stake in the Early Novels Database cataloging schema. Our extensive bibliographic records serve as maps to the physical, full-text novel. The... [Read more]
Sierra Eckert is a senior at Swarthmore College. She is an Honors English literature major and Honors interpretation theory minor, with a Mathematics course minor and a Creative Writing concentration. As a Tri-Co Digital Humanities Fellow, this summer she is working for the Early Novels Database research team to develop a website that makes bibliographic data on 18th century novels accessible, navigable, and engaging. When not working on END, you can find her editing Nacht literary magazine and researching for her thesis on literary databases, new media historiography, and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.