>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[silence]
>> Welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the director for the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress,
which was created way back in 1976-77 --
better remember that -- by Daniel Borstein.
I do remember him, who created the Center as a way for the Library
of Congress to reach out, to promote books and reading,
and to get involved with the world of books and reading
through the public, through public libraries
and through a brand new educational outreach project.
We are very pleased first of all, to be among the first
of the three groups and the two groups I represent in addition
to the Center for the Book standing here are the European Division
of the Library of Congress and the Rare Book
and Special Collections Division.
You will hear from representatives from each before the day is over.
But the three of us, Mark, Carol and I want to welcome you
to the first pre-pre conference for the SHARP Annual Conference,
which indeed will be held here starting Thursday night here
in Washington, and we hope to see many of you back at the Library
of Congress for our full day of activities,
as well as at the Smithsonian.
But I also want to point out along, thinking back a little bit,
that I have in my hand a historical document or at least in this pile
of papers, which represents the SHARP meeting that the Center
for the Book hosted at the Library of Congress 17 years ago.
How many people were here?   There are a couple, I see that.
It was quite a session, and my confession is
that this was the second SHARP Conference.
The Center for the Book was new.   I knew we wanted to be involved.
I thought it might be a good idea
to be involved early before things really broke loose
and that I could help shape the Conference
at the Library of Congress.   And it was the first one, and we had
over 200 scholars, and we wrote it up.
And I have a quotation here from Dr. James Billington,
who helped greet all of our conference people in 1997 --
1994, I better get that right, too.
And Dr. Billington said that he thought this was probably with more
than 200 scholars, the largest scholarly conference ever held
at the Library of Congress, at least in 1994, which was interesting.
I know that Carol Armbruster was here.
Mark wasn't here, didn't know Mark yet, but we all three
of us just pleased as we can be to have you here
and to get started on this special project.
What has happened is of course the world has changed tremendously
since 1994, and we're looking at a particular project this year
that reflects books in the technological age,
and I want to congratulate the organizers of the project ahead
of time and tell you that we look forward to learning
about the project and also to doing what we at the Library
of Congress can do to forward it.
The project is the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe.
You will learn about the project and its accomplishments thus far
from the leaders of the project.   And to introduce our session,
I'm pleased to introduce Carol Armbruster, who is the Library
of Congress's own French Area Specialist who was here
on that fateful historic conference in 1994.
Carol?   [Applause]
>> Thank you.
I feel like I've just been nominated for historical preservation.
We do that a lot in this town
and in this institution, so I'll accept gladly.
I know what an honor that is.
I too would like to welcome everyone to the Library of Congress
and to this particular program.
Today we have the program, The French Book Trade
in Enlightenment Europe: A Digital Humanities Project for the study
of the books and ideas of late 18th century Europe.
The French Book Trade and Enlightenment Europe project is
at the University of Leeds, which is in the UK
for those of you who don't know.
This project uses database technology to map the trade
of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel,
a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794.
Operating outside the kingdom of France, its censorship
and other publishing controls, the STN as it is familiarly known,
published and distributed throughout Europe and the United Kingdom some
of the best titles of the time.
The STN's archives can be considered a representative source
for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas
in late enlightenment Europe.
The use of database technology with our data source as rich
as the STN archives, significantly enhances the research use
of the original materials and the books they involve.
The Library of Congress holds a notable collection of those books,
some examples of which will be on display.
Professor Simon Burrows, the project's director and Mark Curran,
research fellow, will lead the discussion.
The program, as John mentioned, is sponsored by the Center
for the Book, the European Division and the Rare Book
and Special Collections Division.
I would like to make one comment about we do have a display for you.
I picked out those titles.
It is a sampling of the holdings in the Library
from this publishing house and we really hope you will stop by to look
at them without water, coffee or anything else,
of course -- they really are rare.
But please do go over there and enjoy the books.
To introduce the speakers, start first with Simon Burrows
as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds
and is head project director for the French Book Trade
and Enlightenment Europe project, a project which is funded
by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.
As many of you know, this same British Council,
along with the British Economic and Social Research Council,
funds fellowships for a number of British researchers to come
to the Library of Congress and become fellows in the Kluge Center,
the Library's Research Center.
So we are well familiar with your funders.
Professor Burrows graduated from the University of Oxford
and then spent 7 years in New Zealand prior
to moving to Leeds in 2000.
He's the author of several books: "French Exile Journalism"
and "European Politics 1792-1814" which was published in 2000;
"Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London's French Libellistes,
or Libelist" published in 2006; and "A Biography
of the Pamphleteer Theveneau de Morande" published in 2010.
Professor Burrows has also co-edited books on the press in Europe
and North America, cultural transfers, and in the 18th
to early 19th century cross-dressing French diplomate The Chevalier
d'Eon, a subject that might be of particular interest
to those of us in Washington.
Dr. Mark Curran, we've had our scandals lately.
Dr. Mark Curran, you still research -- you still are --
is a research fellow in the School of History at the University
of Leeds and will shortly be taking up a post-doctoral Munby Fellowship
in bibliography at the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Curran's debut academic article, Mettons toujours Londres,
was recently awarded the 2010 article prize
by the Oxford Journal French History,
a cash prize, we might add, very good.
The article is now freely available online.
In addition to being a scholar of the 18th century French book trade,
he is also a Christian Enlightenment scholar.
His prize-winning article draws on both interests, the book trade
and the Christian Enlightenment scholar, and is substantially based
on evidence from the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel archives,
the very archives we are going to be looking at very shortly.
His first book "Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment
in pre-Revolutionary Europe" will be published
by the Royal Historical Society later this work.
Simon Burrows and Mark Curran have worked together for 10 years.
Since 2007 they have been creating an innovative online database
of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel publishing trade.
Let's see what this is and what they have to say about it.
[Applause]   >> Thank you very much, Carol.
Thank you very much, John, for very, very full introduction.
Now, we set this up that we'd talk for an hour.
I'm quite loquacious I speak too much,
so it's going to be a pressurized hour at least for me.
But before we do that, I just want to emphasize one thing
about this project and digital humanities.
It sometimes doesn't get voiced.
And that is I think that it provides new multiples
for academic partnership in the humanities.
Mark and I have run this project from the beginning very much
as a partnership enterprise.
He was with me when we first went on a pilot,
and we planned the whole thing together.
So though his official title is Research Fellow
and I am officially director of the project,
don't think there's any hierarchy called arrangements in it.
And when we play Laurel and Hardy passing between us
in this talk you can judge for yourself which of us is which of
that particular partnership.
There is, however, one thing that I did teach Mark this morning,
which is ways to bring a second copy of your paper, of your script
to any talk, because things can go wrong.
And how right I was, because John has actually walked off,
However, there is a second copy, John.
>> My apologies.
>> You can collect it again at the end as a souvenir if you'd like.
>> No, there we go.   Thank you.
>> So a Digital Humanities Pathway to the European Enlightenment,
from Account Books to Banned Books via Google books.
Scandal, incest, marital breakdown, courtroom drama, political intrigue.
Here we might think are all the ingredients
for an international bestseller.
Theodore Rea-d'coseur's books certainly contain every one
of these ingredients.
And he insisted that every detail was true.
You may not be surprised then that Rea's planter,
Daniel Sadi Anonotom [phonetic], heads the list
of Enlightenment bestsellers compiled from our database
of the Pan European trade of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel,
I'll pronounce that like a Swiss man, Neuchatel,
a business that I shall hence call the STM,
and that list covers their books sold between 1769 and 1794.
This is just what Mark and I hoped for when we began our project.
Our primary aim was to uncover the popular reading
of French-speaking readers across late 18th century Europe,
a time and place where French was the lingua franca
of the elites, as English is today.
And that historians, in recent decades have increasingly sent
to definitions of Enlightenment on print culture and the public sphere.
We hoped that we would also be able to speak authoritatively,
comparatively and originally, about the contours
of the Enlightenment across Europe.
When we first saw our bestseller list about a year ago,
it seems that our prayers had been answered, an unknown illegal work
by an little-known author heading our bestseller's chart.
Here indeed was a long-awaited award for our attempts to trace a root
from 18th century book trade archives
to the Enlightenment via publisher's account books
and digital humanities methods.
Better still, this work didn't even feature
in the most celebrated previous study of the STN's illegal trade,
Robert Darnton's groundbreaking Forbidden bestsellers
of Pre-revolutionary France," first published in 1996.
Darnton was drawn to the STN archives for several reasons.
They were the best available archive.
He believed that they were broadly representative as a source
for his purposes and because he was documenting popular demand,
it fell into his long-term project, very groundbreaking project,
of studying literary history from below; indeed that was the theme
of the last Shark Conference, so influential as his idea
of literary history from below the beam.
In "Forbidden Bestsellers," Darnton offered tables
of bestselling authors and illegal works --
the map on the screen is our own --   drawing on a sampling of orders
in French booksellers' letters to the STN.
These tables then underpinned his argument that liberty,
that is free-thinking banned books,
had desacrilized the French monarchy, so that at the outbreak
of the Revolution in 1789, it had lost its legitimacy.
Darnton's unashamedly bibliocentric
and statistical approach was the inspiration for our own project.
Let there be no bones about that.
But there are some significant differences.
Where Darnton studied demand from booksellers,
we have documented what the STN actually supplied.
And these, as the Rio case shows, are often strikingly different.
Where Darnton's study was limited
to sampling the French illegal book market, we have been able
through our database, to document the STN's entire trade.
And where Darnton's was a traditional pen and paper study,
probably much to his regret as he'd been an innovator
in using digital methods in book history,
ours was a heavily funded digital humanities database project.
Nevertheless, underlying our endeavors was a set
of common assumptions, first mooted by Darnton and widely accepted
by us and other STN scholars.
Darnton claimed that his bestseller lists were as accurate
as any modern bestsellers lists, and such an assertion is based on a set
of shared assumptions, that the STN was a representative source
for French and European trade,
selling cheap editions for the popular market.
But it and other book dealers tended to be ideologically neutral,
profit-maxing entrepreneurs,
good Americans selling whatever they could; that it specialized
in banned books due to safe geopolitical location
in the Prussian-ruled Swiss principality of Neuchatel.
But because 18th century publishers exchange works among themselves,
they sought to attract clients by offering as many titles as possible,
drawing on a free-floating general stock of books
from other publishers around Europe.
There was the added no system of returns, and therefore booksellers
across Europe were highly responsive to demand or they'd go bust,
ordering only what they believe they could sell in expectation
that the STN could supply them with anything from anywhere; thus,
supply broadly equaled demand.
When we embarked upon our project, it is fair to say
that with minor caveats, we subscribed to all these assumptions.
This talk explains how many of these assumptions broke down and how
through the power of a digital humanities approach,
we came up with new tools to compensate.
We feel we put Humpty Dumpty back together again as well
as cracking him in the first place.   In retrospect, alarm bells ought
to have run before we even embarked on the project.
For my own first major foray into the STN's accounting documents,
I'd been to investigate the company's rolling stocking ventures,
Iran Contra de magazin [phonetic], in order to prove
that the STN did not deal
in pornographic works attacking Marie-Antoinette before the
French Revolution.
These works, it has been argued, were the key desacrilizing works,
though that's not Darnton's argument, to be fair.
My work challenged this assertion,
suggesting that such works were not available
to the general public before the French Revolution.
The few works printed of this sort had all been suppressed or seized
by the French authorities and locked safely in the Bastille -- ha-ha.
They were then liberated, and the anniversary
of that liberation is of course tomorrow.
This apparently flew in the face of Darnton's revelation that some
of these pornographic political libels had been ordered
from the STN, notably
by a fly-by-night bookseller named Bissou Mouvelan [phonetic].
Darnton has Mouvelan's trait in detail, but our database suggests
that he was atypical in numerous ways.
Yet, even before the database was dreamed up,
I was able to demonstrate where and how Mouvelan had heard rumors
of the pamphlet's existence prior to placing his orders.
Thus, attempts to purchase the pamphlets were no proof
that they were in actual circulation before 1789.
Mouvelan's case appeared to uncouple supply and demand,
but only slowly did we realize that this was not an isolated case.
It was Iran Contra that first made me wonder
about creating a database at the STN's trade.
However because the surviving Iran Contra cover
about seven scattered years of the STN's history,
I wondered whether it would be possible to include data from other,
more challenging STN accounting documents,
which bore mysterious enticing names -- journaux, copie des compt,
mainker hunt, life commission, and the forebodingly impenetrable
and aptly named brouillard, which means "fog."
So in early 2006, I invited Mark to accompany me on a pilot study.
We soon established that brouilard, journaux, copie des compt
and mainker hunt, were just different names
for the firm's day books and that they gave detailed breakdowns
of capital flows, including all book sales.
Thus they could indeed surrender up all the same data
as Iran Contra, and in more detail.   Armed with this insight,
we set about designing our project together.
In technical terms, although we little understood it then,
we were planning a relational database of extreme complexity,
as shown diagrammatically here.   It would have several parts.
At its simplest, all the data concerned books and you can see
that in green, clients or transactions; that is to say series
of books against other books or cache instruments.
But each section had several subsections.
Books data for example which comprised basic bibliographic data
as shown up here: title, author, publisher, language of publication,
et cetera; empirical measures of the book's legality or illegality,
not actually show on the slide; taxonomic data about subject matter,
and we introduced our own keyword system --
sorry, the Library of Congress system was too complex to apply
and didn't quite fit 18th century material we felt;
it was the second best on the market after our own,
and the Parisian system of book categorization developed
by Parisian booksellers in the early 18th century
for 18th century purposes.
Client data would include primarily: names and places of residence,
incorporating town, province and nation
in all their ancien regime complexity; client professions,
some of the data for which is still to be enriched in the database
for those of you planning to take a look at it;
details of the client's correspondence in the STN's archive,
which we have effectively cataloged electronically
for the very first time; and finally, transactions data,
which would link books to clients, places and the dates
on which they were accounted for.
The scale of this undertaking was, we think in retrospect, impressive.
Indeed, at times, it has nearly overwhelmed us.
Together, Mark and I have recorded, researched, cataloged
and categorized at last count -- the numbers may change slightly --
4,064 editions of 3,613 works written by 3,177 authors,
using both collective catalogs, WorldCat, the catalog of Porter
and Raro, the catalog of the Suisse Romande --
and new digital repositories,
particularly Google Books and Gallica.
In addition, we've cataloged 2,922 clients living in 516 towns
across Europe and recorded
over 70,000 transactions involving exchanges of 766,000 books.
Now, finally having done, we are checking
and revising much of our work.
Nevertheless, the studies we intended to write
from the project remain predicated on the assumption
that the STN archive is essentially representative.
But how far is this the case?
Perhaps the best case to begin answering this question is
at the summit of our bestsellers chart with Theodore Rea.
And here our troubles really begin.
But when applied to Rea's pamphlet planter Daniel Cevie and antitom,
the work which heads our bestseller list,
the very term bestseller is in fact a misnomer.
The STN actually sold very few copies of this work to the public.
Instead it was a propaganda piece, commissioned and paid for by Rea
for use of a vendetta with his brother-in-law,
the Baron de Planter, and his own struggle
to restore his civic status.
The following had devastating court judgment,
stemming from his allegations of incest against his wife,
Ursula von Planter, and the Baron, Rea had been stripped
of his Genevan citizenship.
To maximize its impact while minimizing costs, Rea asked the STN
to reprint the pamphlet
in a six-page tabloid newspaper-style format
in tiny print.
This condensed what was originally a 72-page pamphlet
into a cheap six-side broad-side sheet.
Rea probably helped distribute it free of charge possibly
to every household in Geneva, for he asked the STN to print 18,000 copies
of it, an enormous print run for the day.
Unfortunately, the STN had no sooner dispatched the first consignment
to the pamphlet, then Rea dropped dead,
presumably from a stress-related illness.
The pamphlets probably never reached their intended audience.
We've been unable to trace a single copy of the tabloid edition,
which was presumably destroyed by Rea's heirs or the Baron's agents.
Thus, Rea proves to be something of a Trojan horse,
a dish find concealing a mortal threat to our project.
His presence distorts our bestseller list
and our bestselling author list,
while the unlikely keyword combination, Geneva,
incest and politics, hardly represents the richness
and sophistication of Enlightenment political discourse.
This keyword combination also highlights the local dimension
of our archive.
Although the Baron de Planter was to achieve Europe wide fame
as a minor player in another scandal,
the Diamond Necklace Affair,
the Rea case was essentially a marital dispute
with a Genevan political dimension.
Rea certainly sent copies of these pamphlets into France,
hoping to discredit the Baron with his princely patron,
Cardinal de Rohan, and the STN sent others to business contacts
across Europe but they had little impact.
Indignant booksellers returned most copies unsold
and Rohan stood by his client.
Thus, the Rea case highlights the problem of commissioned works
within our dataset and raises worrying questions of localism.
Both issues challenge the assumption that we're dealing
with a representative archive.
This may come as a relief to the good Calvinist burghers of Geneva,
horrified at the sight of the striking correlation
of our database keywords, "Geneva, incest and scandal," but for us,
the Rea case was a mere harbinger of the devastating conceptual problems
that would arise once we began to analyze our data on the structure
of the bookcase in earnest.
But that part of the story is to be told in Mark's book,
so I'm now going to hand over to him.
>> Thanks, Simon.   [Background noise]
>> Say it afterward, the graphics do get better.
But I wanted to begin by showing you this today, because it means a lot
to me because it was our first attempt at mapping.
I've created it back in 2007, so on the wall of my Neuchatel office.
The orange stickers represent the towns that the STN corresponded
and the lines are unknown trade routes.
So it's very much the beginnings of our thinking
about the STN's trade networks.
And I think looking at it and thinking about it over a period
of time helped me to really think deeper
about the 18th century book market.
So as Simon has explained, the grant application that we drafted back
in late 2006 was rather optimistic.
How far we expected to reveal that patterns of demand
for Enlightenment text differ across time, over time
and across territorial space.
Which author's books and subjects sold best were throughout Europe?
What proportion of titles sent by the STN could be associated
with the Enlightenment, with the high Enlightenment,
with the Christian Enlightenment,
with the Grub Street Enlightenment, et cetera.
So many ambitious questions that we had back then.
Now, five years later, we think that we can begin to answer some
of these questions, or at least get closer
than other scholars have managed.
But it proved more difficult to get there than we imagined.
So for me today my role is to talk about the flies in the ointment,
and especially how we decided to deal with them.
The biggest problem, the one that changed our project from top
to bottom, as Simon has just alluded to,
is that it quickly became obvious to us as we were looking for the data
that the STN archives are not representative
as previously thought.   Bookselling from Neuchatel --
I don't know if everyone knows where Neuchatel is;
I'm not sure I can point, but just under the left-hand side
of Switzerland, west of Switzerland --
is different, was a different affair from bookselling
in London or Paris, Amsterdam.
Now, to the uninitiated this may hardly surprise.
Nonetheless, it was the standard interpretation to see the opposite,
certainly dancers' interpretation.
The reason for seeing this network is relatively homogenous.
Putting such faith in the STN archives
as a representative source was as follows.
First, because a large part of the print rooms
of new additions were immediately swapped amongst publishers,
wholesalers from London to Geneva, all across Europe, quickly ended up,
it was thought, with pretty much the same stock.
And because booksellers,
because these wholesalers didn't allow returns, booksellers all
across Europe tended to just order what they thought they could
In other words, the STN stopped or could get hold of almost anything,
and its Europe-wide clientele,
only ordered what they thought they could shift.
So the story went.   The archive, the STN's archive,
was thus considered an exceptional source
for general European book trade inquiries.
So pretend the paper not there and sort of Google mockup
and for a little bit of precision it's still a very basic affair.
But it sort of confirmed this initial thinking.
All of the points on this network here, the towns where correspondents
of the STN lived in, they're all equally weighted.
And the possibilities for the Neuchatel booksellers
to source books, to send them, seem very extensive from this.
Distant markets seem extremely accessible.
Resembles in that manner a sort of London tube map.
Nothing is prioritized in a map like that.
We can see the Queen's part is linked to Battle Green.
We know people could make the trip.
We can see exactly how they would do it, but we don't know is if they do.
And I think that's indicative of a lot of work
into 18th century networks, certainly from the historian side.
We tend to get extremely excited about the possibilities
of this network, what could happen,
and overlook occasionally the realities.
And we were as guilty as anyone as that
when we initially designed the project.
Our idea was to flood this sort of static network
with the STN's real sales.
As Simon, Darnton had only used a sample of orders,
of the legal books, and he'd only looked at France.
So our idea was to flood this huge network
with the whole sales of the STN.
We then compared the popularity of Rousseau in northern Germany
to southern France, asked whether the American Revolution was a more
important topic in Paris or Marseilles.
Alas, it's not as simple as that.
And these static networks and discourses of book trade uniformity,
are fatally misleading, and I'll show you why.
[Background noise]
>> So this is the current task bed for our online interface.
It'll be available to SHARP delegates and to yourselves
to play around with next week.
And the address, the Web site address is here
with the user name and the password.
I believe it'll be put online tomorrow,
and it will be available until next Monday.
After then, it will be taken offline temporarily
until it's finally ready, but you can find any details
about the project at c18booktrade dot com.
Just a word of warning, it isn't finished.
Everything isn't fully checked, so I wouldn't use it
for academic purposes yet, the dates or the structures,
but it will give you a very good impression.
We're getting there slowly.   >> And please be back to that.
>> Yes, absolutely.   The book has common sections.
If you could feed that, that would be fantastic.
So yeah, this question of representativeness.
We're going to start on our database by ranking sounds.
So if we turn this into a map, I'm going to rank the sales,
the whole [inaudible] sales between 1769 and 1794.
So visualize here about 60,000 separate transactions,
around 400,000 copies of 4,000 different books.
Essentially it's the same as those previous maps I've been showing you.
But now it's actually weighted by the actual books clients received.
To some extent producing this was one
of the major goals of the project.
And already we can see some significant changes
from a static mockup.   The tight concentration of sales
around the Suisse Romande is noticeable, as is the lack
of real sales to western France.
But nonetheless, it has a relatively wide coverage.
Paris and Versailles are well represented,
so we're relatively happy with that.   Gave us food for thought.
It was different, but it wasn't enough for us to totally break
with the idea of the STN as a representative archive.
Let me just switch to purchases.
So this is where the STN purchased their books
This one's a bit more surprising.   So yes, they started networks,
show that STN could source works from anywhere.
They had the context to, but they didn't use them.
It's too expensive, too much hassle.
They almost exclusively traded in Neuchatel, printed books,
all those that they source locally from L'Usine, Geneva, Evadone,
and to some extent Lyon you can see there in France.
Remember, the majority of 18th century books
in this period was still printed,
French language books were still printed in Paris
or the low countries, Amsterdam and the likes, London.
And the STN are not sourcing these books in any significant numbers.
To gives us a scale of the problem, in Darnston's "Corpse
of Clandestine Literature," 144 of the 457 STN works
that he has listed there were never touched once by the STN.
They applauded titles like "The Dog after the Monks," or its sequel,
But they took the order and they said, never heard of it;
you'll have to go to Amsterdam for that.
So for our purposes this was both fascinating
and potentially catastrophic.
We clearly had a massive book history story to tell,
the reimagining of the 18th century book trade on polycentric grounds,
et cetera, with Neuchatel just one unrepresentative piece
of the puzzle.
But our But our Enlightenment ambitions looked
on rather dubious grounds.   Perhaps they still do, we'll see.
And it gets worse.   And we switch back to sales.
What we have here is the whole 25 years --
this is the map I showed previously --
the whole 25 years of the STN's trade being representative.
Now, we want to just keep an eye on Paris as I changed this
to give just the 1770s, Paris and Versailles, northern France.
[Background noise]
>> So Paris drops in the 1770s to a small.
It represents about 2 percent.
In this detail box it says "Paris, 1.85 percent,
and Versailles is point 1 percent.   That's the 1770s.
If we this to the 1780s--   [Background noise]
>> -- Paris and Versailles become massive players.
Paris, there are 13.9 percent of the STN sales, Versailles, 7.9.
So we evidently have big variations in spatial distribution
over time to contend with, too.
Paris did not become the center of the Enlightenment in 1780
And I can show you this in another way by comparing towns.
If we compare--   [Background noise]
>> -- Paris here--
[Background noise]   >> -- to La Chaux near Neuchatel--
[Background noise]   >> -- this is the Paris spike.
That's why our 1780 graph is giving us a radically different one.
In general, the STN sold almost nothing to Paris
through their whole history, the capital of Enlightenment,
apart from this huge spike.
I can explain very briefly why that is, by comparing some authors.
So if we compare--   [Background noise]
>> -- famous Breso, Voltaire.   [Background noise]
>> This is Voltaire's sales in red and Breso's in blue.
Voltaire's red line is actually representing
about 100 different works of his,
selling modestly throughout the 1770s and slightly decreasing,
or significantly decreasing in the 1780s after his death.
Rousseau's is a huge job printing, sent to Paris in the early 1780s;
the same with the works of Louis Sebastian Mercier.
It's the same with the works of Rea, through Geneva.
And I could go on, pulling apart dissemination maps
in 1,000 different ways, revealing discrepancies across the board.
Instead, I'll try and just tell you briefly how we're dealing
with the issues.   So to recap, we can't quite get
to the Enlightenment for several reasons.
First, the STN predominantly traded Swiss editions.
Second, aside from job printing and commissions,
the work hardly reached Paris.
The same was true for London, Amsterdam, Brussels,
all of that northern book-producing region.
Third, because the actor is redistributors of books
and a publisher, often with large commissioned orders,
we're sometimes comparing apples with oranges, Breso with Voltaire.
Fourth, and finally, the data shows huge variations
about how they operated their own business over time.
So if you imagine that this 20-year block we're trying to discuss,
they began the business in 1769.
Two years later in 1771, they've got ten books in stock,
all of which they printed.   By 1785, they have 1,500.
So time is a huge problem.
Obviously, any books that were published
in the early 1770s they're likely to be selling less of than
at the height of their own business.
So our ability to deal with these issues lies
in how we constructed the database.
This is a typical page of the manuscripts we're using.
So you can see here, folio 280, 20th of August 1772, G.C. Walter.
We know that's George Conrad Walter.
From other sources we can give you his street address,
lots of biographical detail about him.
He owes the following accounts for Ballow, a box of books marked W,
number 59, sent via John, J.J. Habistock in Moiter,
which is a little town just bit across the lake from Neuchatel.
And he's bought all these books, so the first one is Kesetiaan,
and the second one is also Kesetiaan,
just volumes 6, 7, 8, and 9.   Now, we know from other sources
that this is Voltez Kesetiaan salon cyclic BEDI.
Addison, the next one, is Addison's [inaudible], et cetera.
So from the manuscript data, we have the basic sales,
and from elsewhere we can fill in all the addition details.
This, as Simon has demonstrated, all goes in here.
And this hyperanalytical approach,
once we've got it all, comes into the database.
So if we browse a client, we're going to look at Walter,
George Conrad, here, not just that page, but we can visualize
and analyze his whole trade with the STN throughout the whole period.
So this was Walter's data stream, if you like, what was going in and out.
Each one of these, we can get the full bibliographic details.
And because it's so structured, well, these queries would allow us
to query any of this information by anything else, so we can query
by publication place or by number of sheets, or everything is
so structured in that way.
So as you can see, these are STN editions he's actually ordering
at this time.
My book, my second book that I'm currently in the process of writing
with Simon, is going to try and rewrite the history of the STN
and to some extent make a contribution
to the European book trade using all of this data.
So it should act both as a guide to the database,
to understanding how it's put together and its facts and aim
to explain this conception of two different markets, where the STN fit
in the European book market, using my book,
using this hyperanalytical approach.
We're still a long way from the Enlightenment,
which is the subject of today's talk.
We've got two strategies to get there.
First, we, potentially others as well,
can add more data to this database.
We have Neuchatel now, but there's plenty of other archives
around in Europe if you look hard enough.
There's also a lot of other bibliometric sources we can use
and add.
Hundreds of extant booksellers catalogs give us a lot of this sort
of information, journals, newspaper reviews,
all sorts of book trade-related events that we can pin in time
and space and out to the same system to try and compensate
from this Neuchatel bias we have.
I'll be speaking about these plans in a shop on Sunday.
And second, in the meantime, we've introduced the whole series
of tools we've got in the options menu here,
that allow us to compensate for the biases in the Neuchatel source.
So queries here, these affect the global database.
So queries can be restricted by time to minimalize corruptions resulting
from changing market conditions, by space to gauge variation
in regional trade patterns from national averages, by source data
to compensate for the small holes in the archive, by publication place,
to address the overrepresentation of Neuchatel and Swiss-printed works,
by work type, to eliminate anomalous commissioned editions, like Breso's.
And finally, client type
to distinguish the wholesale from the retail trades.
So let's examine this but I'll just show you how it works in briefly.
If we wanted to do any of those searches I've done before,
we could for example, eliminate STN editions
or eliminate commissioned editions, which help us deal
with that question
of representativeness a little bit while we're waiting
for further data from other sources.
And at that point I'll hand you back to Simon briefly.
>> Thank you very much, Mark.
Those of you who are going to use the database,
we strongly encourage you to look at these options menus.
The first two are about data integrity
because of the sources we've used, and they all have definitions
and details about why you might want to turn them off
in many cases or leave them on.
So you've got edition types, but you can also look in terms of clients,
commissioning clients, say you cut out people like Breso and Rea,
wholesale clients, Swiss and otherwise.
We might have broken that one down further I've begun feel
to feel in the last week.
And we've also have a few women in the database, far less than men,
but we decided that we'd allow some sort of analysis of the trade.
Women in the book trade were said to be more free than women elsewhere
to conduct their businesses, and I think our data bears that out,
but the data says so little it is a problem.
But we hope that someone will find that one particularly useful.
It's not something we've investigated greatly,
and I think we need more data.
And then, one can also look at things such as works,
markers of illegality, so you could look at your searches to work
in Darnton's illegal corpus or on the papal index
or Joseph's index and so for the search.
In a sense, this is our way with dealing with the key problem,
the problem I want to say thank you, Mark, for so destroying our faith
in the representativeness.
It's a forge of discovery for both of us,
but in a sense Mark was entering the data and he got onto some
of these problems; therefore, sooner than I did.
And that's really why we decided to write the books we originally did
because he started out as the Enlightenment scholar
and I started a book scholar.
But I was categorizing all these works and looking at them,
so now the big problem even more for me than him, is what do we do
in the light of our shattered faith
in the representativeness of the STN archives?
We've revolutionized our understanding
of the European book trade,
and I think that will carry my book forward as well as Mark's,
but there is a real problem in getting beyond the local.
And it's important I guess,
that I do that to make Mark's work get the attention it deserves more
broadly so people don't pigeonhole it as just another STN book,
because I don't think it is for a minute.
So in other words, if the STN was a distantly Swiss printing house,
how much can it tell us about wider Enlightenment culture?
Now, some of these options have only been available for a week,
and I've been grappling, sweating, blogged over this question.
It had been bothering me for many months since we reversed the books,
particularly as I began to hear
about what Mark was putting into his drafts.
Our first part of the answer was to develop the new options,
compensating the problems in our data to enable us and other scholars
to better interpret it, and we hope that that will lead us
to draw wider representative, and comparative insights.
To illustrate that point,
I now intend to examine how our option menus can give us a more
nuanced and we hope more representative view of two things
that we promised in our title today.   [Mumbling voice]
>> So banned books in Enlightenment.
Let us start with the contours of the illegal trade.
But how is this to be defined?
The database as you've just seen, offers us a number of measures.
But we could do worse than concentrate
on Darnton's corpus of highly illegal works.
We might also be tempted if we do this,
to compare his bestsellers lists based on booksellers orders,
with our own table of what the STN actually supplied,
and if we do this -- I am going to need to move back to the slide show
that somehow has been taking out, so we'll just push that forward.
You can see our top 10 versus Darnton's top 10.
The two lists, as it is I think immediately apparent,
are very different.
Indeed, they have only two works in common.
In contrast to Darnton's top 10, ours consist primarily of works
by serious and often philosophic writers, whereas Darnton's is headed
by a variety of things, but one associates his work partly
with discovering scandalous works and pornographic works,
but we also have clearly have some important philosopher,
Dolbach, Reynaud, and so forth.   Why are the two so different?
Primarily, it's because ours is chock-full of commissioned editions,
such as l'asin d'maison's contract conjugal, a work with no sales
at all in Darnton's corpus, and the works of the young philosophe
and future revolutionary, Jacques-Pierre Brissot.
Such works were frequently unique in their STN editions, and hence they
and their authors are overrepresented in our statistics
as a proportion of the wider trade.
We might, therefore, decide to exclude
such commissioned works using our options menu, and if we do that,
we get a somewhat different bestsellers table.
The works in blue are also in Darnton's top ones,
so now we have six of them in common and I've also recorded
which ones appeared in our previous table
Among the heavyweight works of Raynal, Voltaire and Linguet
in our table, we now see some of Darnton's bestsellers then,
including a scandalous political biography,
the scandalous political biography, the anecdotes du Madame du Barry,
his futuristic fantasy, [titling in French], "The Year 2440,"
and pornography [titling in French].
But we still have STN editions dominating the topmost Stratter,
albeit works more genuinely popular and better known
than the Contract Conjugal.
Perhaps then, we should exclude STN editions altogether,
and this would produce a list like this, actually slightly less
of parallel to Darnton's top 10.
So this list is much closer, despite that, to Darnton's bestseller table,
at least in tone, hated by a scandalous biography
of Louis XV's mistress and including a French translation
of Moll Flanders alongside three further licentious works.
In fact, it's actually more pornographically inclined
than Darnton's top 10.
And this is arguably, our most representative list
of illegal bestsellers.
But how significant was this illegal sector and how was it structured?
Well, here is my chance to name drop --
Carol Armbruster, and thank her once more for inviting us --
because she edited a book that contains an essay
by the French cultural historical Roger Chartier, who was brave enough
to estimate the illegal sector at 50 percent
of the entire 18th century French book trade.
This, when combined with Darnton's and indeed now our own statistics,
might lead the unwary to assume that 18th century France was awash
with pornography and graphic accounts of the royal sex life.
But illegal covers a multitude of sins.
It includes many innocuous titles published outside the formal
channels of censorship, as well as pirated foreign editions
of works whose publishing rights, tre delage,
were held by French booksellers.
This latter group includes a large proportion
of Swiss editions sold by the STN.
Nonetheless, a striking 28 percent of the STN's trade
with France was composed
of seriously illegal libertine works listed in Darnton's corpus.
Illegality clearly matters.
Perhaps then we should interrogate this illegal sector in the round.
Here, keyword analysis, using our taxonomies that we've developed,
is our most useful tool,
and it produces some slightly unexpected results.
Here is our keyword rankings.
I hope they're visible on the screen,
for works in Darnton's corpus and their sales by the STN.
At the top of this list is philosophe, our catchall term
for a traditional Peter Gazda Enlightenment.
Philosophe under our definition, is characterized
by religious skepticism, demands for toleration in religion, and humanity
and often also a representative element
in the political sphere and criminal punishment.
Such works comprise two-fifths
of the illegal sectors sales, 41 percent.
Clearly, the traditional High Enlightened philosophers
were important.
After philosophe on our list comes law, with 24 percent of sales,
politics at just over 20 percent, religion, a similar level,
and history, 15.75 percent of sales, and that doesn't include works
of contemporary politics which we categorized under politics.
These categories outscore erotic works of 15 and a half percent,
anticlerical work at just under 11 percent, pornography at 10 percent
of illegal sales, scandal at 6 percent
or scandalous works concerning King Louis XV, at 5 percent.
Of course, if we think it more representative to get rid
of commissioned words, these figures would change.
The big loser in this case is law,
with all of Rousseau's jurist provincial works,
which tumbles crashing down the table to a mere 8.5 percent
of sales while numbers for other keywords rise,
but their order stays much the same.
Anticlerical and pornographic works now hover either side
of the 15 percent barrier.
Religiously sketched coworks account for 19 percent of illegal sales,
and philosophe for a whopping 45 percent.
Or we might decide to cut out STN editions altogether.
This makes considerable sense, for the STN's published output
of illegal works reveals some marked preferences.
The STN in fact, printed very little erotica, which accounts
for just 2 percent of sales of their own editions,
and not a single work meeting our strict definition of pornography.
That definition formulated by celebrated French Revolutionary
and gender historian Lynn Hunt, is limited to works designed
to cause sexual arousal through the explicit description
of genitalia or sexual acts.   I'm not going to show any pictures.
And if we exclude the STN editions to take account of this,
we get a keyword table that looks like this.
We now seem to be in territory much more familiar
to students of the illegal sector.
Erotic works now account for over one-third of our sample, 35 percent;
pornography for 22 percent; anticlerical
and anti-Christian skeptical works, also around 22 percent.
Obviously there's an overlap between categories.
Nevertheless, serious philosophe still outsells all
of these categories at almost 40 percent of these sales,
and politics, which contains subcategories covering both
political theory and public affairs, accounts for 30 percent.
Against this backdrop, perhaps the most surprising discovery is
that biographical text at 13 percent, denunciations of despotism
at 12 and three-quarter percent and works on scandal at 12
and a half percent, are less prevalent
than we might have imagined.   This seamy underbelly
of 18th century illegal literature remains worthy of study,
but it also needs to be kept in a proper perspective.
Even in the STN archive, pornographic
and scandalous biographies of the French king
and his consort only account for at the end of the day, around 3 percent
and 1.5 percent of total French sales respectively.
And prior to 1789, the STN sold no works combining the keywords
Moreover, the majority of publishers
who supplied the French book trade were based inside France
and probably dealt far less heavily
in seriously illegal works than the STN.
The STN figures undoubtedly exaggerate the illegal traffic
several times over, thus French ancien regime decided he was not
saturated in pornography and desacrilizing works,
although obviously we ignore their existence at our peril.
[comments].   So much for the illegal sector.
How then can keyword analysis
of the entire STN archive aid our understanding of the shape
of popular reading and print culture
in the Francophone Enlightenment more generally?
Obviously we need to remember Mark's caveats
about the Swiss nature of the archive.
For example, we look in vain
for Lyonnais among the scientific writers in the database,
in contrast relatively minor, Swiss luminaries, except if you're
in Switzerland, of course, such as Charles Bonnet, Albrecht Haller,
and Tisza are ubiquitous,
We thus need to establish whether our keyword data is broadly
representative and reflects more general trends.
This presents us with a problem.
Previous studies of reading taste, such as those based
on library records, have biases significant to the STN data.
They may be geared towards the richest sections of society.
The illegal may be concealed, and so on.
They do not, therefore, provide a reliable standard for comparison.
Eventually we hope to address this problem
by incorporating the new datasets Mark mentioned.
For now, we believe, we can find complementary data
in the database itself.
By dividing up the STN's import trade, the books they bought,
we can determine whether the French language book market addressed
broadly the same concerns across Europe.
And we believe that our database dataset, is large enough
to support some general conclusions here.
An examination of the volume of keywords sold
by putative edition type suggests
that the Swiss output differed little from the rest of Europe
in terms of subject matter and that
within Switzerland the STN output did not deviate greatly
from the norm.   A very complex table here.
It ranks the top 12 keywords for the STN sales of Swiss works
by other publishers, the second column, and then contrasts them
with other edition types,
both in terms of absolute ranking and percentage sales.
It's color-coded, according to a rainbow pattern,
with red for the highest selling keyword in each column
to show more effectively which words sold best.
Gray is anything in the top 20 but outside the top 12
on the Swiss non-STN editions list.   So what does it reveal?
Broadly, that the top dozen non-STN keywords and those
for all non-Swiss editions were broadly similar.
The top 3 keywords appear in identical order on both tables,
and 9 keywords appear on both lists.
This is the third and the fourth column.
In the non-Swiss rankings, the lowest ranked
at the top 12 Swiss keywords is science, which appears at number 18.
Works of religiosity, our catchall term
for works expressing a Christian purpose and works
with the keyword Christianity,
are also outside the non-Swiss top dozen but for a clear reason.
The STN were a Protestant publishing house in a Protestant state.
They did not tend to import religious books from Catholic states
such as France, Belgium, Avion, Italy, and much of southern Germany.
The fifth column, listing sales of STN editions
by keyword, is also revealing.
It suggests that the STN tended to publish across a broad front.
This helps to explain the lower sales percentages
on almost every row of the STN editions column.
The personal preferences
of the publishers may also have been involved here.
After some early run-ins with the local clergy, for example,
the STN apparently decided to produce less philosophe
than the general run of Swiss publishers.
They also appear to have printed less copies of scientific
and biographical works than their compatriots.
I'm sorry, we're going to finish in about four minutes, I should think.
Finally, the STN seems to have printed less works
of creative literature than other publishers.
However, they dealt rather more heavily in drama,
not least because during the 1780s, they became the pet publishers
of Louis Sebastian Mercier, one of the most prominent
and creative forces in the popular literary market,
who gave them several important plays.
The phenomenal success of Mercier's Tabloid de Paris,
which markedly wasn't a play, of which the STN sold 13
to 15,000 copies of each volume, also helps to explain the prominence
of the keyword France among sales of STN editions.
Yet despite such divergences the overwhelming impression
of the keyword table is that the same subjects,
genres and ideological tendencies predominate in every column,
often with remarkably similar percentage scores, too.
Occasionally significant divergences exist but they're usually explicable
by regional religious or cultural differences or as the outcome
of very small datasets such as the international editions,
as books published by publishers in more than one country.
So our statistical evidence suggests to us
that we can use the STN archive to take the pulse
of the late Enlightenment within limits,
despite its Franco-Swiss orientation.
Dorinda Outram has conceived of the Enlightenment
as a set of capsules of debate.
Our database allows us to track the lifeblood of many,
if not all of those debates,
as well as some wider intellectual and reading trends.
It permits us to trace the waning sales and presumable influence
of Voltaire after his death in 1778 or to measure the failing demand
of both scandalous libel and the religiously skeptical works
of the Dulbach corpus in the 15 years prior
to the French Revolution; to track the rise of a new wave of writers
in the 1780s, shown in this slide and measure their shifting concerns;
to trace the dissemination of English and German novels
in French translation; or to explore the colonization
of new literary genres by Christian writers in their struggles
against atheism and irreligion as Mark has already plugged his book,
I won't do so again there; to witness the heat and excitement
in this next set of graphs,
generated by Necker's sensational publication
of the French government accounts,
discussions of which dominate our bestseller tables;
in fact the top six words on the 1781 bestseller list relate
to Necker and French finances.
Or we can reconstruct the market for, popular market
for medical books, encountering the wonderful
and still topical sounding anarchie medicinal, medical anarchy,
with all its calls for more regulation
of the medical profession.
Ortisos' ave la purpos le sonte, or celebrated treatise as well
on onanism, which were rejecting traditional Christian arguments,
still concludes that masturbation is destructive of human health.
Finally, without even proceeding beyond his sensational title,
which I have translated here for you to read for yourselves,
we can revel in Theodore Rea's struggles
with his once beloved Ursula.
Thus, the French book trade database offers a digital pathway
through the cultural life and fluctuating tastes
and preoccupations of the final decades
of the European Enlightenment, while imparting fresh insights
into its heroism, novelty, complexity,
ambiguity, folly and human color.
And its failed statistics may sometimes be seen as a crude
and reductive means of measuring the influence of a test,
they remain a useful indicator nonetheless,
and sometimes the best tool at our disposal.
In an age when books were an expensive commodity
and cheap editions like those pedaled by the STN were bought
for use, sales statistics can help us to recapture the concerns,
ideas and priorities of ordinary readers.
Such readers became important historical actors
in the emerging public sphere and age of revolutions
but remain a problem for the historian
because they usually left little trace of how their opinions changed
in the intellectual maelstrom of the Enlightenment.
We hope our database provides new
and powerful digital means to address this problem.
Thank you all very much.   [Applause]
>> Well, thank you, both Simon and Mark
for a truly thundering presentation.
Before I forget, Mark Dimunation who had to leave,
wanted to remind all SHARP participants
that there is an open house tomorrow between 11 and 1,
and he encourages you to come.
There is additional room available, and he hopes to see you.
So that is 11 to 1 on Thursday, tomorrow,
and that's in the Jefferson Building, Room 239.
We've had a very nice, with lots of details,
very nice presentation with lots of details.
Again, I encourage you to take a look at the books
that we've brought from Rare Book.
This is a very small sampling but they are titles
that you've just heard about,
and so you'll see what those books actually like,
and you can imagination all that dissemination and popular reading
of materials that are here.
We've had a rather lengthy presentation,
but I think our speakers might be able to take a couple questions.
Is that right?   >> Yeah.
>> Good, good.   Tom?
[Inaudible question from the audience]
>> So the question was what are the beginning
and ending years of the dataset?
The STN began trading in 1769, and ended trading in 1794.
Although there are some complications after about 1787,
the sources are less complete than before.
So we have completed the entire account books
but after 1787 it's certainly a less complete dataset,
and therefore the pre-revolutionary crisis,
French Revolutionary books aren't included.
[Inaudible question from the audience]
>> The question is--
>> There are some interesting thoughts about Rousseau,
and that's one issue we've got, because previous studies based
on library records and so forth, found Rousseau rather missing.
He dies early in the piece and he's not producing big works
in such a way, so it's possible that some of the demand has disappeared.
The STN volumes of Rousseau are almost entirely literary volumes,
his great political works on there.
Presumably demand was saturated earlier,
and maybe demand was much lower than we think at the time,
although there are phantoms editions around.
What we have also found is the profit doesn't seem
to be welcome in his own country.
I've done quite a bit of working looking at the Enlightenment authors
and themes and where they sold, usually.
I just use a tripartite, France, Switzerland, rest of Europe,
way of dividing that up, because the individual countries in the reset
of Europe the figures are a bit small,
unfortunately to be representative on that level.
And what we find in the STN dataset is
that the Swiss are buying very little Rousseau.
Presumably he's still persona non grata,
even that the Swiss are buying very little, you'd expect the French
to be buying a bit more of their share, but they're not.
The French are also buying less Rousseau
than other philosophy, other philosophe.
Although I stress that this isn't Rousseau's literary work.
The rest of Europe is buying them in quite large numbers, comparatively.
So I think that the answer is either that the French and Swiss are not
as key on Rousseau as the rest of Europe, or that we're looking
at a dissemination pattern and we may need to do this
with other authors, whereby the vogue type begins in France
and Switzerland, and because Rousseau dies in 1778,
because he's not publishing his great works in the 1770s,
French and Swiss demand has already been sated.
So there's two possibilities there and I don't know if we're going
to be able to get to the bottom of that
in the short term unfortunately.
There's is a blip in Rousseau's sales.
They do go up massively in about 1791, too,
and our dataset is very small, but that's suggestive that it is moment
in the Revolution and there's more of them, and I'd like --
I've not actually done the number crunching and see
which works they are yet, but it's clearly something for investigation.
And I'm sure we're always going to get asked about Rousseau.
[Inaudible audience question and inaudible background voices]
>> Feedback to CAT book trade dot com would be exceptionally welcome.
>> Do you see your methodology [inaudible] and I'm thinking
of 19th century British archives, since I've worked with this,
your methodology being able to be spread, to be used
but in other places, other times.   Would your database be a model?
>> We believe that it's a model.   We believe -- our initial --
Mark's going to talk about it in much more detail in the plenary,
which is why I've grabbed the microphone here.
Thanks for letting me do it.
Basically from the very beginning we've wanted to expand our dataset
and think about what else could be used.
In principle, the methodologies and the structures we've got we think,
are very, very applicable to other periods.
Obviously the explosion,
particularly after mechanized printing in the 19th century,
begins to mean there's so much material out there, it's difficult.
And the 18th and 17th centuries you've got more limited books
and we dream of being able to import say
if you're doing British things you can import the 18th century
collections online and the English or titled catalog metadata to try
to identify books, where we've had to work --
we don't have the equivalent in France,
in the French-speaking world.
So some things we've had to do very long hand with great difficulty.
And as you've seen, sometimes we've had -- we didn't --
we thought that the archive, our initial investigation
into the Iran Contra, made you think
that we'd find books relatively easily
and that they'd be recorded in a standard way.
But once you get into the broulliards, they're not.
So in some cases Mark's had to look at 20 or --
sometimes I think 20 ways of recording the same book,
some of them not immediately apparent.
We've had to marry them up, and that's taken us an extra year
and a half of hard work over what we expected.
I mean, it's remarkable that we're both sane
after what we've done the last few years.
So always allow extra time in your project.
But yes, we think it's transferable.
We certainly are looking and thinking about other archives.
We think Britain may be a test bed case because of these good sources,
and one of the things we've got to address ourselves is do we want
to keep working up our dataset on France, do we want to bring
in the English-speaking world, how many collaborators
across plays do we do, how do we make these things accessible
but also try to integrate everyone who's doing things into a network.
We're immodest about the work.   It wasn't us.
We were grilled for many, many hours by our original database designer.
She took a very long time to do the project, get the thing to us.
We were panicking about how long she took,
but what she produced was a Rolls Royce that had everything.
If she hadn't done that, we'd have fallen flat on our faces
in this project and we wouldn't be looking
at doing things moving forward.
She was just the right person at the right moment,
but sometimes it didn't feel like that early on, did it.
>> No.   >> One more question?
Cindy?
[Inaudible question from the audience]
>> Why Google Books?
It's Simon who came up with the title.
Certainly Google Books made an enormous difference to our project,
and I was supposed to spend 9 months in Paris categorizing these books.
And because I preferred to live in Neuchatel, I managed to get Simon
to categorize them from his living room and from his study in Leeds,
and I got to go deeper into the archives in Neuchatel.
So Google Books did save our bacon,
as well as also we have rather available
in the database they have Google Books links free
to all the actual exact editions where they're available,
as well as Gallic and a couple of other sources where it's possible.
So if you find any -- if the editions are online and we know
about them, the link is there.
And as a next step we would like another direction rather
than just expanding the data, that we might go in with this, is to try
and get this better integrated into library catalogs.
There's nothing saying the Library of Congress catalog
or in Google Books or --
these editions couldn't visualize the dissemination of a certain book
within the catalog, within the services
that various institutions want to add now.
So that's the Google Books question.
The second one was booksellers archives.
It would be lovely if we have some.
I'm not -- yeah, I'm not aware of any that would interact
with our personal dataset.
Obviously it's a question of limited -- of --
because it's potentially so expandable it's a question
of linking things in with stuff we've already got.
There are other printer's archives that we know of for this period.
Booksellers archives would be very interesting,
so if we have any that overlap.
And the other point, everything we're doing is we're trying to make
as open source as possible and for others to use, so if people want
to use this technology, if they have a booksellers archive they know of
and they think it would be appropriate,
then it's available for others to use.
>> Well, we will conclude now.   I'll give everybody some time
to absorb everything we have just heard, and an opportunity also
to take advantage of this access, the access to explore on your own,
to manipulate the database yourself,
and to look forward to your final product.
And thank you very much
in eliminating abducir into the Enlightenment.
Thank you very much.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.