Welcome back, Readers! I have returned from my research “vacation,” for certain values of “returned” anyway. I am still teaching the overload situation this semester, but it’s going well and I feel like I’m mostly not drowning at this point. I am only now resuming work on the project, though. It’s been a good time to take a break and I feel much more able to bring my attention back to it in a positive and constructive way.
One of the things this break brought home to me is how I’ve basically worked on this non-stop for two years at least, prior to the beginning of this past holiday season. It’s so easy to get caught up in the work, particularly when it’s something that we’re interested in and want to see happen, that we can fall victim to our academic training of “never stop working” and forget that sometimes it’s good to let the fields like fallow for a bit.
I’m not saying that everyone is always in a situation where that’s feasible, or necessarily even desirable — we all have our own relationships to our work and research. One of the things I’m discovering on my own career journey, though, is the inexorability of erosion. Time, familiarity, training, and anxiety all wear away at our boundaries, our self-images, our work-life balance, and our storehouses of resolve and empathy. It takes active work to shore up those borders and keep ourselves whole and healthy. Much like the mansions on the hilltops in California now being undermined by landslides and erosion, with the ground beneath them slipping away into the ocean, we’re similarly at risk of being washed out and ground down to nothing. The world, your institution, your research, your students — none of them will tell you to stop when you’re already spread thin.
I know I’m not saying anything really new here. The thing that really hit me, though, is that although I do want to push forward and I’m excited about where this project is going to go, I don’t have a clock on this or a deadline I have to make. I don’t have to push for some external timeline that’s only in my head and sacrifice myself and my enthusiasm for this project in the process. Pacing myself — taking breaks — is a good thing. So for those following along in the background, I appreciate your patience and hope you bear with me during quieter times. I should have more progress to relate soon.
Greetings, gentle readers! The summer has almost returned, and I’m managing to make this post mid-month as opposed to nearly-done-month. Overall I’m quite pleased with my industry.
Insofar as the project goes, finishing the semester has done wonders for my ability to keep working on my data. I completed working on the Marquis de Sully finally and was able to likewise finish Old City Manners, Philander, Poems Upon Several Occasions*, and Shakespear Illustrated, the latter just this evening. I’m very happy with the rate of progress I’m making.
In addition to working through the data and cleaning it up, I’m currently trying to work through two different problems. The first thing I’m trying to sort out is regarding periodical reprints of Lennox’s work. I want to catalog not simply the stand-alone volumes of her works, but also the various reprints, both partial and complete, of her work in periodicals of the time. The problem is, how do I track them? Using the Lennox bibliography in Susan Carlile’s book, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind, I have a list of excerpts in various publications.
The question, though is this: 1) is that actually all of them? and 2) (and this is a big one) how do I treat these periodicals within the same project as more traditional codex books? Lennox even had her own periodical, The Lady’s Museum. The same periodical may have (and in some cases does have) multiple samples from her various works across time. How do I record that data so that nothing is lost and yet I’m also not doubling my own effort? It’s not that this is a particularly complicated problem; it’s just that the solution I pick will necessarily inform the shape of the project as it goes, so I’d rather do my best to choose something that won’t cause problems later if I can.
The next issue, mostly unrelated to the above procedural quandary, is how to set up my database so that different records can have the same title without it being a gigantic mess. This is actually the easier one to answer, most likely, as I’m sure I’m not the first person building a relational data structure to have multiple entries with the same name, for example, but different data attached to each one. I’m working on doing some reading and I’ve got some feelers out with some data-oriented DBA people I know, and I’ll likely have an answer to this later this month. Once I do, I can keep working on the structure on my Heurist database and importing the material I’ve currently got in spreadsheets. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on the organization and getting the location data sorted, with the goal of being finished with it and organizing the next phase of the project by the fall, aka library fellowship application season.
Current Data Category:Shakespear Illustrated # of entries in this category to date: 126 # of entries in the worksheet so far: 2140 and counting
First of all, I am so very pleased to announce that I’ve received the 2022-2023 Helen F. Faust Women’s Writers Research Award from the Penn State Special Collections library. I’ll be traveling to the Eberly Family Special Collections Library next week to dig into their Charlotte Lennox holdings, starting the archival research in earnest. All my deepest thanks to the Penn State Libraries for helping fund this travel and research, and I can’t wait to see what we find!
The amusing part of all this, of course, is that — proceeding in an orderly planned fashion — I assumed next summer would be the beginning of my archival research, and I had tons of time to plan out the scope and types of data and do some trial runs on local holdings. And thus, to paraphrase the poets, does fate make fools of us all. I’m therefore doing all my data planning this week, then, and figuring out how I’m going to record it, what I want to take note of, where I want to store it, and how I’m going to eventually put it all together, as least to the extent that I can without having done it (which means it’ll absolutely change between now and later).
I’m recording the trials and tribulations of the project, by the way, not because I particularly feel they’re worthy of recording for the sake of the project, but because I want people who take on similar projects to be able to look back at this and know they aren’t alone. I believe very strongly in breaking out of the strictures of “professionalism” and the gatekeeping they enact. To be “professional” too often means to speak only of your successes, downplay your failures or challenges, and deny weakness or missteps. The parts we edit out, though, in order to achieve that seamless appearance, are where the opportunities for growth and the useful case studies for others happen to be. I’m under no illusion that this blog will be a source of fascinating reading material for a huge audience, but my hope is that for those who need it or like it, it will serve to light their own path a little, if only dimly.
Back to business. I’ve finished importing The Life of Harriot Stuart and I’ve been working on Henrietta for a while now — see previous posts about the better selling books taking far longer. I’ve also added the Henrietta maps to the website. As a note, this process of importing might take longer than one would ostensibly wish, but it’s already helped me locate some discrepancies and repeated data points, which I am correcting in the maps as well when I find them. I’ve also discovered, for anyone playing along at home, that my KMZ-to-CSV converter does not know what to do with a layer in Google Maps that has symbols in it, like ” or , or so forth. It therefore simply does not extract that layer, which means I have to go in and enter it by hand (which fortunately I can do, having the maps to hand). Things to know for the future, I suppose.
Next up: Finish Henrietta, move on to the next item on the list, travel, do archival stuff, take lots of notes and images, start creating the archive!
The tattoo’s Latin text reads, “Remember to live, remember to read, remember you will die.”
In his Principles of Bibliographical Description, Fredson Bowers talks about how every bibliography has to have a unifying purpose in order to be something more than just a list of minutiae — or to borrow a phrase he borrowed, a “spire of meaning.” That sounds very elevated, very idyllic, to have a spire of meaning for your project. I have a hard time picturing Bowers as being fanciful, but his obvious attraction to the term “spire of meaning” goes a long way toward making that argument.
To the point, though, Bowers’ statement that a descriptive bibliography in particular cannot be simply a collection of raw facts about material books has a point. Like every fact or list thereof, a descriptive bibliography requires context and cohesion in order to make the data mean something. A collection without a theme is just material noise; it’s the order and context that give it meaning and transform it into a signal worth hearing. The same thing holds true for this project.
Now, while the foundational unifying principle for the Lennox Bibliography Project is in the name — a descriptive bibliography of the works of Charlotte Lennox, 1747-1850 — that’s more of a descriptor than a mission statement. All communication is edited; a perfect and complete transmission of knowledge is impossible, particularly in such a long-term effort at information gathering and presentation as this one. While it is currently a solo effort, it’s entirely possible that there will be collaborators down the line. It is crucial, therefore, to lay out not only the raison d’etre for the project, but also the rationales that guide our choices and determine how priorities are set and acted upon. Some of these are clear (and will be discussed in time); some are more challenging, and I have to define them as I go. One of the latter is the concept of feminist bibliography and how it relates to this project.
I am by no means the first scholar down this path. Sarah Werner is a leading voice in this field and has done a considerable amount of work, including some fantastic recorded talks, such as this one.
Kate Ozment’s article “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography” (Textual Criticism 13.1 2020) is pretty much required reading for why this approach matters and what forms it might take in application. It’s also open access and well worth your time, so if you haven’t looked at it, you should.
Margaret JM Ezell, Tia Blassingame, Lisa Maruca, Megan Peiser… all of these powerful scholars have engaged and are engaging with what it means to take feminism into a discipline so foundationally gendered as bibliography can be. It is only to be expected, then, that in a project like this one — focusing on a woman author, written by a woman scholar, with the hope of inspiring and facilitating the work of others in this vein — would have to come to terms with not only what a feminist approach entails, but what its ramifications are as a guiding principle. To take a page from others, then, I will lay out the following precepts.
Feminism for this project is defined as:
Intersectional — it functions on the principle of inclusion, not exclusion. It is not exclusive to race, class, or gender identity.
Transparent — by documenting this journey, its progress, and how decisions were made, it can serve as something between inspiration/object lesson for those who might be interested in doing something similar.
Accessible — This bibliography will always be available to the public at large, at least if I have anything to say about it. There will be no charge to use it. It is an open resource.
Political — choosing to carve a new path is inherently an act of resistance. The systems that led to an unbalanced representation and focus within bibliographical studies (among other things) are still there; it’s our participation and examination of how we got here and what really happens that makes change happen and keeps the discipline vital.
Feminist bibliography in praxis for the Lennox Bibliography Project is a work in progress, but here’s some building blocks to work with based on the above statements.
The Lennox herself: It’s focused on Charlotte Lennox, who was a working woman writer who needed to support her husband, children, and herself.
Bibliographical work is not — cannot — be limited to only “original” works. Lennox wrote plays based on existing material and translated numerous works. She collaborated and cultivated professional relationships of mutual benefit. A feminist bibliography cannot ignore all the nonstandard (but very common) types of work she did simply because she was not the sole original author of the material.
Provenance is key, as is looking for copies in unexpected places and tracking how the copies came to be where they are. This is beyond the scope of most bibliographies and is something I’m still trying to figure out, but I feel like it’s an important piece of the puzzle and I want to find a way to include the data where I can.
Open access and shared data sets. I want to make what I find available for others to use and replicate. I would dearly love to get an interface together that others could use with their data, but that’s almost an entire second project. We’ll see. I’ve got time.
Elevating voices. I want to stay connected with others doing work in DH and who are working on women and people of color.
Time will tell if this is going to work or not, and how all of this gets implemented. But it’s better to think about it from the beginning than retrofit things as we go, inasmuch as that’s a possibility. As always, I welcome thoughts and input on anything I may have overlooked.
Lennox Bibliography Project 