Blog
Updates from the END team.
2017
- Reflection: The Common Press
On Wednesday, July 5 we took a tour of the Common Press at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and had the opportunity to print our own broadsheets. An article written by Jacquie Posey about Penn’s Common Press explains that “The Common Press is a collaboration of interests, including writing through Kelly Writers House (KWH), print culture via the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and visual arts and design at PennDesign. The facility provides a mixed... [Read more] - Reflection: Reading Will Never Be the Same
I used to go to the library every week as a child. Specifically, my parents and I would frequent the Northeast Regional branch of the Free Library. As suggested in its name it was free, accessible, and inclusive. And the purpose of my regular visits to the library was to of course acquire books, novels, to read. Reading has always meant losing oneself into a story and getting to know the characters. It was an... [Read more] - Reflection: On the Physical Presence of Books
It is easy to forget the physicality of a modern trade paperback. You throw it in your bag to take to the beach. You put your drink on it when you don’t have a coaster, confident you can wipe the condensation off of its glossy cover. You smush it between other books in your backpack, bending the edges a bit so you can get the bag to zipper because you know that if you press... [Read more] - Reflection: SCETI and the Labor of Digitization
While working for END this summer my conception of digital texts has been continuously redefined through readings, attending lectures, and developing my personal project. Prior to END I viewed digital editions of texts with a certain amount of contempt and skepticism, as “less real” versions of works useful for parsing with the “find” function on browsers and little else. Although I still can’t imagine sitting down to read a novel on Project Gutenberg, my experiences... [Read more] - Reflection: On Media and the Common Press
One of the most memorable parts of our visit to the Common Press was the opportunity to operate the printing press itself—the process seemed very sudden, and almost magical, in the way that the blank paper rolled forwards as you pushed the handle and then popped up immediately afterwards to reveal the text in fresh ink. However, despite the machine’s ability to instantly and neatly manifest words on paper, the creation of our sheet of... [Read more]
2016
- Reflection: Sleuthing
We asked our END student researchers to reflect on some aspect of their experience this summer. Prior to my employment at END, I’d never seen an 18th century edition of a novel (or, frankly, many contemporary editions of 18th century novels, either. The earliest book I’ve read is Huck Finn.) so many of the day’s common paratexts and features were unusual and surprising to me. I’d never seen the word ‘advertisement’ used to refer to... [Read more] - Reflection: The Social Side of Cataloging
A lot of the Early Novels Database project feels like common data entry. We see the paratexts, learn the various data fields, and plug and chug from one record to the next. Except for the very first week on the job (which was spent learning with our more experienced peers), the day to day protocols have little to do with social interactions. Looking at it this way, the act of cataloging itself seems like it... [Read more] - Reflection: Learning Through Glitches
This post is a collection of thoughts that came out of a conversation I had with Abby about our experience at END this summer, and our feelings about learning new digital tools. Abby and I discussed our experiences at END this summer as women and as humanities majors. Both of us have often felt uncomfortable learning STEM-related or digital techniques in school, particularly in male-dominated environments; we ended up sharing many sentiments about this summer’s END program... [Read more] - Reflection: Digital Confidence
As English majors without a lot of prior experience with or exposure to digital humanities, Colette and I found the idea of using digital tools in conjunction with studying eighteenth century novels to be somewhat foreign. We agreed that one of the great things about END is the fact that it helps us reconcile these two fields, by demonstrating how digital tools can be integrated into the study of English. END emphasizes the fact that... [Read more] - Reflection: The Book as an Object, in Two Lectures
Both Charlotte and Jeremy investigated the book’s status as an object in their lectures. Charlotte’s lecture was about Eliza Gifford, a female book collector in early 19th century England (and Wales). Collecting was the province of wealthy men; the collectible-object status of the book was a privileged, gendered status. This means that to treat the book as an object was a male privilege that Gifford appropriated. She collected many non-canonical books, further subverting gendered methods... [Read more]
2015
- Text Analysis with R for Beginners - Summer 2015 Open Lab
Friday afternoons, 2-4:45, beginning June 5. Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Vitale II (room 623), sixth floor. Weekly summer open lab focusing on computational text analysis using the free and accessible R Studio to reveal patterns in texts. Join us in person Friday afternoons on the sixth floor of Penn’s Van Pelt Library as we work through Matt Jockers’s accessible textbook Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature, or follow along at home and... [Read more]
2013
- On Marginalia
Image 1: Monimia END currently deals with marginalia by placing it in its own 595 category. The field contains subfields for medium (ink, pencil, etc.), content, and extra notes. All in all, the field is extremely open, a necessity considering the range of information it is meant to contain. Marginalia by its very nature varies widely and pushes against any sort of uniformity. Leaving the field open appears to be an attempt to place all... [Read more] - 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] - Footnote Findings
When perusing the pages of “Fifty Shades of Grey” or the latest Franzen novel, you don’t expect to find footnotes. As an undergraduate, I tend to associate footnotes and endnotes with academic articles and Chicago Manual of Style citations, or the more leisurely nonfiction read. What, then, are footnotes doing buried in the pages of eighteenth century novels? As it turns out, a plethora of things. Footnotes are describing the novel or volumes they come... [Read more] - On Cataloging Verse
Paging through _The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle__, one discovers a wealth of offset, italicized lines that at first glance appear to be poetry. END’s current practice for recording these lines is to catalog them in something called a 592 field, subfield “c”. Non-prose form: Poems. If a cataloger is feeling very ambitious, she can even throw in an “x” subfield, which allows her to provide additional description: “attributed to Dryden,” perhaps, or, “poems appearing on... [Read more]
2012
- Thinking Genre Dialectically
We had an interesting discussion today about the potential anachronism of thinking about the novel as a genre in the 18th century. It’s certainly a valid question, and one that scholarship has overlooked to a frightening extent until recently. Whatever one chooses as the first novel – Don Quixote, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or something else – odds are it wasn’t sold as such. In fact, we’ve learned from this project that to the extent... [Read more] - Interparatextuality: Love It, Use It
Oh, how I love jargon! And thus, I unleash “interparatextuality” into the blogosphere. As I will soon explicate in my own blog (still yet to be created), I will be doing thesis research on the discursive history of the paratext of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. I’ve been clumsily attempting to articulate the phenomenon for which I am searching: something to do with paratext–specifically, the epitext, or paratext within the literal bounds of a monograph–being an important... [Read more]
2009
- 'Representative-ness'
There are certainly many questions that arise from asking a broad question about “representative-ness.” What does representation imply? Would we be simply be comparing a part to a whole—Penn’s rare books collection being the part and the rest of the world’s holdings being the whole, thus trying to decipher how representative our collection is out of all the preserved novels out there in terms of quantity? Or, are we speaking of more complex representative qualities,... [Read more]