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Wednesday Noon Digital Scholarship
Series Applying Digital Scholarship to Book History Research
October 11, 2023 | 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm In-Person (Wells Library) or via Zoom
Alexandra Wingate, Doctoral Student in Information
Science at Luddy School of Informatics, Engineering and Computing,
Inventories are one of the most useful types of documents available to book historians. They are essentially lists of person or organization’s goods, but these seemingly simple lists
contain a wealth of data and information. For a private individual, an inventory of their household goods can point towards their wealth and status in society while an inventory of their books allows us to analyze their book ownership habits and potential
reading. For members of the book trade, inventories of their businesses can tell us about the size and characteristics of their business, the typical tasks they performed, as well as what types of books they produced or sold. Aggregations of these book inventories
help us understand the production, sale, ownership and reading of books in a given geographic and temporal space as a whole. However, the data found in inventories of early modern private libraries, booksellers, and printers are usually published by book historians
as simple transcriptions of the documents (sometimes with metadata identifying the book described in each entry) in print or in online journals as PDFs. Whether in print or in PDF, this static presentation of inventory data makes it difficult for book historians
to browse, search, aggregate, compare, and build upon each other’s data.
As part of my doctoral work investigating bookselling and private libraries in early modern Navarre, Spain, I am using TEI-XML and the open-source database builder Heurist to address
these issues of dissemination, interoperability, and sustainability for book inventory data and to improve my overall process for conducting historical research. In this presentation, I will outline my current workflow for moving from historical documents
in the archives to a final dataset. I will discuss my use of TEI inside and outside of the archive and the development of my Heurist database, Libros
en Navarra | Books in Navarre (LN|BN), which stores data for private library and bookseller inventories documenting what books were present in Navarre during the 16thand
17thcenturies. I seek to show how these methods of digital scholarship provide a base which facilitates not only my research but hopefully the research of other book historians who in the future may wish to incorporate and transform my data in their
own work. The Wednesday Noon Digital Scholarship
Series is held Wednesdays from12:00-1:00
pm EST. The complete schedule, including abstracts, is available at: https://libraries.indiana.edu/wednesday-noon-digital-scholarship-series.
Register for each session for more information, including access to the Zoom link.
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