• Nicola Wilson

University of Reading

The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is an international book history and DH project that aims to make disparate materials relating to the production and distribution of C20 books more readily available. Currently funded by SSHRC, we have been partnering with archives and libraries to aggregate records held in publishers’ and other archives relating, in the first place, to the early publications of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s iconic Hogarth Press (phase 1 1917-22). 

This poster will explore some of the issues we have been engaged with as we develop the data model and structure of MAPP, which takes inspiration from book history models of Darnton’s “communications circuit”, Adams and Barkers’ rejoinder to this, and Drucker’s work on the text as distributed object. Our data model and site pays attention both to the role of human agents in the production and reception of texts and to the materiality, provenance histories and bibliographic details of the texts themselves. Key content types to reflect this are business-person-work-edition-primary object-correspondence-related materials. Yet digitizing the qualitative and (often masses) amounts of quantitative material held in a publishers’ archive in a way that makes it useful for book history, bibliographic and literary critical research is a challenge. The poster will offer some reflections on the structure of archives - both physical in situ as institutional collections and in the ‘virtual’ sense - and highlight some of the decisions we have made with our data model and in the ever thorny problem of how to incorporate so much disparate material into a new open access structure.  

Poster size: can be A0 (841/1189) or A1 (594/841)

n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk

• James Brown

University of Sheffield

Established in October 2013, ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740’ is a three-year ESRC/AHRC research project exploring the importance of intoxicants and intoxication – alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, opium, and associated practices – to the economic, social, political, and cultural life of early modern England (http://www.intoxicantsproject.org). A central output of the project, and the evidential basis for many of its traditional research publications, is a relational database that will affiliate and make publically accessible several fresh datasets derived from analysis of a wide range of primary sources featuring intoxicants (including port books, court depositions, licensing materials, probate inventories, objects, and printed texts). This paper will provide an introduction to and overview of the digital methods adopted – and some problems confronted – by the project as it attempts to generate and federate a variety of heterogeneous materials not usually combined within the same electronic resource. It will describe its approach to ontology modelling and data design; discuss its bespoke online forms for data entry and creation, in use by two research associates across two case study sites (Cheshire and Norfolk); and introduce its plans for the discovery interface, which will go substantially beyond conventional results listings by incorporating a suite of dynamically generated, in-browser visualisations of intoxicant-related entities (graphs and charts, timelines, maps, topic models, and network diagrams). Overall, the paper will provide insights into the intellectual and technical development of what is hoped will become a major new tool for the social history of early modern England, while reflecting more broadly on the opportunities and challenges of collaborative digital scholarship in the humanities.