Examining the Early Modern Canon: The English Short Title Catalogue and Large-Scale Patterns of Cultural Production

Abstract

This chapter presents the findings of an ongoing digital project of the Helsinki Computational History Group at Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) focused on the history of eighteenth-century book publication. The authors have created a historical-biographical database based on The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), a standard source for analytical bibliographic research, and extracted a data-driven canon which considers changes over time, subject-topics, top-works, authors, publishers, publication place, and materiality. This chapter provides both methodological and historical insights into the development of print and demonstrates the huge analytical potential of harmonized metadata catalogs. While quantitative analyses of the book trade were attempted before, they did not engage with the complex process of canon formation at such a large scale. The authors’ work highlights the formative role played by publishers in this process and the epistemological shift started at the end of the seventeenth century, when religious works were increasingly replaced by literary works. As the authors argue, this shift in the production and consumption of print allowed for a reinvention of the canon during the eighteenth century.

The Anatomy of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

“…The full technical details of these harmonization and curation efforts for the ESTC catalogue are extensive, and instead of repeating them here we refer to our recent work that provides a more comprehensive description. 32 Hugh Amory claims that it is impossible to use the ESTC as a data resource for statistical analysis. 33 This has been sensibly countered by others, and we have demonstrated that bibliographical records can indeed be used for statistical purposes.…”