About PromPrint
PromPrint is a research project funded by the European Research Council, running from 2025 to 2030.
Legal deposit is a vital institution for preserving literary heritage. A select group of national copyright libraries preserve indefinitely a copy of every published printed text. The practice is well established—first implemented in UK libraries in the sixteenth century—and widespread; more than sixty countries now employ similar practices.
All the same, the practicalities of storing and cataloguing so many texts, as well as cultural biases around which printed texts have value, mean that copyright libraries haven’t always preserved everything deposited with them. These rejected texts are a shadow of the literary canon, encompassing everything from almanacks and joke books to guides on fly fishing, as well as renowned novels and paper ephemera like blacking labels.
Together, our team is using digital tools and quantitative analyses to work out what texts deposit libraries have rejected, and how their features change over time. Although our focus is nineteenth-century England, Scotland, and Ireland, we’re creating tools and methods that researchers interested in other regions and periods can use to map their own literary heritage through deposits—and its absences.
At a moment of increasing threat to humanities institutions, PromPrint shows how even the most maligned printed texts—the rejects—have the power to shape cultural knowledge.
Project Phases
In the project’s first phase, the team is working out what our case-study libraries rejected by comparing library holdings with the records of works sent to libraries by the Stationer’s Company in London. We’re using various tools and resources to do this, including digitised and paper records of the Stationers’ Company, and AI-powered Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools such as Google AI Studio.
In the second phase, different team members will look at types of works that pose particular challenges (cultural or practical) to legal deposit. Strands include children’s literature (led by Dr Hannah Field), colonial texts (led by Dr Milan Terlunen), and publications classed as obscene (strand leader to be appointed).
The Team
Dr Hannah Field (she/her)
Hannah is the principal investigator of PromPrint and an associate professor in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex. Her research sits at the intersection of book history, children’s literature criticism, and Victorian studies. Hannah’s monograph Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the Justin G. Schiller Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. She is from Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Tiffany Murphy (she/her)
Tiffany is the senior project officer of PromPrint, a performance maker, doctoral researcher and tutor at the University of Sussex. Her PhD research adopts a queer feminist lens of failure as a means to engage with gendered trauma in autobiographical feminist performance. At Sussex, Tiffany co-convenes the Sexual Violence Research Café, and she founded the award-winning research culture initiative for autoethnographic research, Close to My Heart. In 2025, Tiffany received the Adam Weiler PGR Impact Award for Media, Arts and Humanities.
Dr Nicolas Seymour-Smith (he/him)
Nicolas is the Research Software Engineer for the PromPrint project. As the RSE for the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, his role is to develop and maintain tools, models, data, algorithms and websites that address research questions in the Digital Humanities in reproducible, sustainable, ecological and socially responsible ways. He has been involved in collaborations with local digital heritage and humanities foundations, acoustic ecological monitoring, sustainable AI policy research and embedded machine learning research.
Dr Milan Terlunen (he/him)
Milan is a researcher in Digital Humanities at PromPrint. His research interests are in 19th-century literature, book history and digital humanities, with a focus on storytelling and the history of reading practices. His work has appeared in Book History, Modern Language Quarterly and Victorian Studies. He has also co-created two podcasts, How To Read and In Sacred Spaces, co-founded the Humanities Podcast Network and co-edited the Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting (forthcoming 2026).