• John A. Walsh ,
• Alexandra Wingate ,
• Caroline Nurkkala ,
• Jennifer Christie

Indiana University

Keywords: text analysis; bibliography; Victorian literature

Abstract: 

This paper will discuss a digital literary research effort to study influence and intertextuality in the works of Victorian poet, novelist, and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne. This line of research is particularly relevant for Swinburne, a poet whose work and life are steeped in books, documents, and literature. Swinburne’s friend William Morris wrote in an 1882 letter: “I never could really sympathize with Swinburne’s work; it always seemed to me to be founded on literature, not on nature.” Morris draws a sharp distinction between literature and nature, but Swinburne recognized no such distinction. For Swinburne, poetry is omnipresent in the natural world, and books are— like a flower, a child, or his beloved sea—living things. In a poetic manifesto, the “Dedicatory Epistle” that introduces his collected Poems (1904), Swinburne writes:

The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty shelves of libraries.

Swinburne’s own library was sold at auction, the catalogs for which were published in volume 6 of Sales Catalogs of Libraries of Eminent Persons (1972), edited by John Woolford. We transcribed these auction catalogs to compile a digital encoded bibliography—populated with links to full-text sources from the HathiTrust Digital Library and other repositories—of the works in Swinburne’s library. Using the full-text sources, we will compile a corpus of the contents of Swinburne’s library, apply text data mining and computational analysis to the corpus, and compare the results to a similar analysis of Swinburne’s own works. This comparative analysis will, we hope, reveal similarities in vocabulary, syntax, and diction and identify similar passages or paraphrases that might otherwise escape detection. Our paper will provide an overview of the project and our findings to date.

• Esther Solé ,
• Màrius Bernadó

University of Lleida

Keywords

Ricardo Viñes, Wikibase, Linked Open Data

Abstract

This paper will present a Digital Humanities project focused on the personal archive of Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943), one of the finest pianists of the early 20th century. Our aim is to reconstruct his musical career and set data-oriented grounds for an innovative path of analysis within the history of musical performance. Viñes, renowned for his audacious recital programmes and a rare commitment to contemporary music, was trusted with the premiere of dozens of works by composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Satie, Séverac, Poulenc, Falla or Mompou, to name just a few.

His personal archive —almost entirely unpublished and recently entrusted to the library at the Universitat de Lleida— is surprisingly comprehensive and consistent. It is comprised of hundreds of concert programmes, a large collection of press clippings, a fair amount of photographs, plenty of correspondence, and an impressive personal journal where he recorded all sorts of details concerning his professional and personal life between 1887 and 1915. Since an accurate reconstruction of his artistic journey seems plausible, we seek to examine Viñes’ musical repertoire and career through structured data extracted from the aforementioned sources.

After a brief description of the collection and the data mining procedure, this paper will devote special attention to our chosen methodology and workflow. These are based upon the development of a Wikibase instance and the subsequent definition of a suitable data model and ontology. Furthermore, the challenges and opportunities of this approach will be discussed in the light of open knowledge standards and requirements. Finally, a summary of a data-driven analysis of Ricardo Viñes’ career and further uses of the generated resources will be outlined.

• Sarah Middle ,
• Alex Butterworth ,
• Duncan Hay ,
• Rebekah Higgitt

National Museum of Scotland

Keywords: history of science, data modelling, object histories

The Tools of Knowledge project is remodelling the legacy Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes (SIMON) database, and significantly enhancing the information it contains about the scientific instrument trade between 1550-1914. One key aim is to reconnect the persons involved in the craft and trade with the instruments that they made, advertised and sold, through reference to collections metadata from a range of core and partner museums, in order to enable diverse and detailed forms of analysis. This process is grounded in the collaborative development – primarily with the Whipple Museum – of an ontology that encompasses instruments as objects (individually and as types) with complex biographies of their own.

In this paper, we discuss our methodology for an event-based representation that links collections and other data sources (including records of patent applications) and consider how a ‘speculative design’ perspective on innovation in the scientific instrument trade may suggest new avenues of historical analysis. These include how individual makers distinguished themselves through the instruments they advertised and how these advertisements are patterned over time, in relation to correlations between claims of novelty; shifting intensities of trade activity around particular instrument types; and localised changes in trade structure.

This process has surfaced several cases that raise intriguing questions about how makers advertised their work in search of commercial advantage. Inflated claims were made about instruments that were fantastically unrealisable (e.g., a perpetual motion machine), while others with grandiose names prove to be differentiated by only minor variations in design. Noting that such phenomena appear to echo the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ in the Gartner hype cycle of emerging technologies, we additionally probe the origins of that concept: might it be applied to the history of technologies preceding the digital or is the notion of the historical ‘hype cycle’ itself mere hype?