State of the Project, May 2022

Since the April update, the month has been extremely hectic. The end of the semester hit along with all the deadlines for grading and teaching, I caught a cold that turned into bronchitis (but was not covid), and my father passed away — all of which left the project lying somewhat fallow. That being said, I did get some additional progress made.

Current Status: In addition to the completed data from April, I have completed the information for Henrietta and Old City Manners, and begun working on Lennox’s play The Sister, which is based on her novel Henrietta and has led to a couple of confusing entries as a result. I’ve gotten them sorted, but it took slightly longer than I’d wanted. I’ve also added a Maps page with links to the Google maps I’ve created to plot out locations of extant copies of Lennox’s work. I’ve only got two works up so far (more evidence of my busy month) but I will have more this month. The information in those maps will be distilled out and converted into spreadsheets, but I’ve got more verification and data clean-up to do before that will be useful.

In addition, I’ll be attending a session of the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School in June, likely prior to the next update, focusing on the early history of printing in America to help me suss out what’s going on with Lennox’s early American reprints. I’ll be spending a week at the Library Company in Philadelphia and I cannot wait. It should be greatly enlightening, not to mention the fact that the Library Company has a number of hard-to-find works of Lennox’s and is on my list of locations to revisit at a later date.

Overall, I expect to make a nice bit of progress this month, so check back for more changes as we go.

State of the Project, April 2022

Photo by Emily on Pexels.com

One of the reasons I started the blog was to give updates on progress and share discoveries as they come up, as well as offer transparency into what the process is of making a descriptive bibliography. In order to make that work, of course, it would help to show where we’re starting and what I’m working on at the moment. I’ll be putting up another post later to talk about how I’m doing the work, but for now, I’ll stick to in media res and get more into process later.

Current Status: As of this week, I have the completed the following:

  • Finished preliminary data gathering* for 11 titles, including:
    • Poems Upon Several Occasions
    • The Life of Harriot Stuart
    • The Female Quixote
    • Memoirs of the Duke of Sully
    • Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon
    • The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy
    • Memoirs of the Countess of Berci
    • History of the Count de Comminge
    • Philander
    • Shakespear Illustrated
    • Euphemia
  • Started collecting data on Henrietta
  • Converted data from two of these titles into a combined spreadsheet for test purposes
  • Worked on learning how to use pivot tables to get interesting data
  • Created a test data set to start playing with Tableau to see about data visualizations, particularly those involving generating maps

*Publication of excerpts in periodicals remains a tricky point, as those are hard to track down.

Upcoming Tasks: Keep working on preliminary data, start verifying entries on library web sites, keep working on Excel and Tableau skills

Challenges: Periodical info, as mentioned above. Keep working on fleshing out this website with info and links. Manage to keep moving forward while I finish the semester and the grading.

ASECS 2022 follow-up

As previously mentioned, I had the opportunity to talk about the project in a session at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) annual conference this past week. The panel was hosted by the Digital Humanities caucus, one of two back-to-back sessions titled “Centering Marginalized Voices in Digital Humanities Projects.” There were so many amazing projects discussed, and I was honored to be a part of it. The image to the right is the poster I presented, which I’m sharing here as well. You can also download this poster at the link below if you’re interested in getting a better look at it.

Among the many great projects discussed in that session, I’d like to give a shout out in particular to The Lady’s Museum Project, which is a digital version of Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum. The editors behind this collaborative project to create the first ever critical edition of TLM are Karenza Sutton-Bennet and Kelly Plante, both of whom are brilliant, passionate scholars. I urge you to go take a look at their fantastic work.

Poster presented at ASECS 2022
giving a project overview