This subproject aims to build digital infrastructure for book history and reception research by aggregating different types of source material, leveraging digital tools to make data from different sources and national contexts interoperable. Its underlying premise is that in order to understand how books might have impacted readers, we need to account for the multiple ways in which 18th-century readers accessed books and their content: through reading aloud in the home, through informal lending networks, and through multiple varieties of sociability, in salons, coffeehouses and beyond, often perusing print material without buying it, and including also indirect encounters with the content of books (‘reading without reading’). Thus, the Civic Fictions digital infrastructure seeks to effectively model the 18th-century ‘bookscape’, by linking data on readers and their books at scale.
Taking the data-linking work already underway between various bibliometric databases one step further, this subproject combines large-scale data on the circulation of books with biographical data on owners and readers, in order to develop a new model to understand the effects that books may have had on 18th-century readers over the course of their lives. Specifically, it deepens existing collaborations with leading eighteenth-century historical bibliometric databases, as well as databases focusing on the history of literary reception, including Nijmegen’s MEDIATE (Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in Europe, 1665 – 1830) and BIBLIO (Bibliography of Individually-Owned Book and Library Inventories Online) databases, Western Sydney’s FBTEE (French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe), the University of Liverpool’s Reading Communities database (currently under construction), the DARIAH-EU Working Group SHEWROTE database (Studying Historical Early Women's Reception: Oeuvres, Texts, and Engagements), also under construction, and the CERL Thesaurus managed by the Consortium of European Research Libraries, aggregating bibliographic data on imprint, personal and corporate names and places found in material printed before the mid-19th century.
By linking data across these databases, this subproject therefore seeks to integrate several major, curated datasets, and create accessible, Open Access data infrastructure for future generations of intellectual historians. As part of linking and building these various databases, this subproject will also develop new ontologies and data models, thus producing new, data-driven and bottom-up ways to theorize reception and the historical impact of different kinds of books on real, historical readers.
