Updates from Milan Terlunen, Researcher in Digital Humanities I joined the PromPrint team in September, and the first eight months have gone by quickly! With Hannah, I've collaborated on a book proposal for the Cambridge Elements in Digital Literary Studies series. One value of writing a proposal at this early stage has been to clarify how digital elements will work together with humanistic prose. As we're aiming to be accessible to literary scholars and book historians beyond just those who work with digital methods, we want to be transparent about our code and data without overwhelming readers who are more interested in the literary and historical arguments. With Nic, I've worked on digital aspects of the research. At first, I focused on using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to transform scans of 19th-century copyright records into tables of digital data. Later, I began to analyse the lists of missing books Nic generated, investigating questions like which title keywords correlated most strongly with presence and absence in a library's collection. Take these early findings with a pinch of salt, but it seems like keywords relating to Christianity and Englishness were an advantage in getting your book preserved (good old Victorian chauvinism!) while the first-person pronouns "I" and "my" were disadvantages (too egocentric?). I presented these early findings at several conferences in North America (more in this blog post) and am curious what we'll find for other libraries and other years. Lately, I've started exploring physical archives too. In April, I visited Cambridge University Library and found fascinating evidence of the human struggles and conflicts happening behind the scenes at universities and publishers (see photo). I also discovered just how vast the record-keeping efforts were (multiple 1000-page A3-size handwritten books every single year). I'm planning a visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford next - stay tuned for a blog post about these archive visits soon. [Image shows a pre-printed slip used by the copyright agent to try to obtain books from a delinquent publisher]
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