WEBVTT 00:01.780 --> 00:05.510 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. 00:05.510 --> 00:24.220 [silence] 00:24.220 --> 00:26.950 >> Welcome to the Library of Congress. 00:26.950 --> 00:28.190 I'm John Cole. 00:28.190 --> 00:31.870 I'm the director for the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, 00:31.870 --> 00:36.450 which was created way back in 1976-77 -- 00:36.450 --> 00:39.050 better remember that -- by Daniel Borstein. 00:39.050 --> 00:44.180 I do remember him, who created the Center as a way for the Library 00:44.180 --> 00:47.500 of Congress to reach out, to promote books and reading, 00:47.500 --> 00:51.010 and to get involved with the world of books and reading 00:51.010 --> 00:53.700 through the public, through public libraries 00:53.700 --> 00:58.020 and through a brand new educational outreach project. 00:58.020 --> 01:02.610 We are very pleased first of all, to be among the first 01:02.610 --> 01:06.140 of the three groups and the two groups I represent in addition 01:06.140 --> 01:09.690 to the Center for the Book standing here are the European Division 01:09.690 --> 01:11.790 of the Library of Congress and the Rare Book 01:11.790 --> 01:13.350 and Special Collections Division. 01:13.350 --> 01:17.680 You will hear from representatives from each before the day is over. 01:17.680 --> 01:20.670 But the three of us, Mark, Carol and I want to welcome you 01:20.670 --> 01:25.980 to the first pre-pre conference for the SHARP Annual Conference, 01:25.980 --> 01:31.660 which indeed will be held here starting Thursday night here 01:31.660 --> 01:35.580 in Washington, and we hope to see many of you back at the Library 01:35.580 --> 01:38.430 of Congress for our full day of activities, 01:38.430 --> 01:45.530 as well as at the Smithsonian. 01:45.530 --> 01:51.020 But I also want to point out along, thinking back a little bit, 01:51.020 --> 01:56.120 that I have in my hand a historical document or at least in this pile 01:56.120 --> 02:01.220 of papers, which represents the SHARP meeting that the Center 02:01.220 --> 02:05.700 for the Book hosted at the Library of Congress 17 years ago. 02:05.700 --> 02:07.730 How many people were here? There are a couple, I see that. 02:07.730 --> 02:10.200 02:10.200 --> 02:14.580 It was quite a session, and my confession is 02:14.580 --> 02:17.620 that this was the second SHARP Conference. 02:17.620 --> 02:19.150 The Center for the Book was new. I knew we wanted to be involved. 02:19.150 --> 02:21.360 02:21.360 --> 02:22.970 I thought it might be a good idea 02:22.970 --> 02:27.340 to be involved early before things really broke loose 02:27.340 --> 02:30.620 and that I could help shape the Conference 02:30.620 --> 02:31.900 at the Library of Congress. And it was the first one, and we had 02:31.900 --> 02:34.140 02:34.140 --> 02:37.780 over 200 scholars, and we wrote it up. 02:37.780 --> 02:41.010 And I have a quotation here from Dr. James Billington, 02:41.010 --> 02:46.450 who helped greet all of our conference people in 1997 -- 02:46.450 --> 02:49.580 1994, I better get that right, too. 02:49.580 --> 02:55.170 And Dr. Billington said that he thought this was probably with more 02:55.170 --> 02:59.020 than 200 scholars, the largest scholarly conference ever held 02:59.020 --> 03:03.800 at the Library of Congress, at least in 1994, which was interesting. 03:03.800 --> 03:07.240 I know that Carol Armbruster was here. 03:07.240 --> 03:12.060 Mark wasn't here, didn't know Mark yet, but we all three 03:12.060 --> 03:15.140 of us just pleased as we can be to have you here 03:15.140 --> 03:18.150 and to get started on this special project. 03:18.150 --> 03:23.070 What has happened is of course the world has changed tremendously 03:23.070 --> 03:28.010 since 1994, and we're looking at a particular project this year 03:28.010 --> 03:31.380 that reflects books in the technological age, 03:31.380 --> 03:35.250 and I want to congratulate the organizers of the project ahead 03:35.250 --> 03:37.630 of time and tell you that we look forward to learning 03:37.630 --> 03:41.110 about the project and also to doing what we at the Library 03:41.110 --> 03:43.200 of Congress can do to forward it. 03:43.200 --> 03:46.690 The project is the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe. 03:46.690 --> 03:51.010 You will learn about the project and its accomplishments thus far 03:51.010 --> 03:53.330 from the leaders of the project. And to introduce our session, 03:53.330 --> 03:54.820 03:54.820 --> 03:58.900 I'm pleased to introduce Carol Armbruster, who is the Library 03:58.900 --> 04:03.260 of Congress's own French Area Specialist who was here 04:03.260 --> 04:06.710 on that fateful historic conference in 1994. 04:06.710 --> 04:07.610 Carol? [Applause] 04:07.610 --> 04:21.380 04:21.380 --> 04:22.010 >> Thank you. 04:22.010 --> 04:26.160 I feel like I've just been nominated for historical preservation. 04:26.160 --> 04:27.980 We do that a lot in this town 04:27.980 --> 04:32.590 and in this institution, so I'll accept gladly. 04:32.590 --> 04:34.700 I know what an honor that is. 04:34.700 --> 04:38.450 I too would like to welcome everyone to the Library of Congress 04:38.450 --> 04:41.020 and to this particular program. 04:41.020 --> 04:43.740 Today we have the program, The French Book Trade 04:43.740 --> 04:48.620 in Enlightenment Europe: A Digital Humanities Project for the study 04:48.620 --> 04:52.570 of the books and ideas of late 18th century Europe. 04:52.570 --> 04:55.900 The French Book Trade and Enlightenment Europe project is 04:55.900 --> 04:59.560 at the University of Leeds, which is in the UK 04:59.560 --> 05:01.120 for those of you who don't know. 05:01.120 --> 05:05.860 This project uses database technology to map the trade 05:05.860 --> 05:09.360 of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel, 05:09.360 --> 05:17.170 a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. 05:17.170 --> 05:21.110 Operating outside the kingdom of France, its censorship 05:21.110 --> 05:26.150 and other publishing controls, the STN as it is familiarly known, 05:26.150 --> 05:30.600 published and distributed throughout Europe and the United Kingdom some 05:30.600 --> 05:33.130 of the best titles of the time. 05:33.130 --> 05:38.170 The STN's archives can be considered a representative source 05:38.170 --> 05:42.460 for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas 05:42.460 --> 05:44.290 in late enlightenment Europe. 05:44.290 --> 05:49.170 The use of database technology with our data source as rich 05:49.170 --> 05:53.990 as the STN archives, significantly enhances the research use 05:53.990 --> 05:57.710 of the original materials and the books they involve. 05:57.710 --> 06:02.140 The Library of Congress holds a notable collection of those books, 06:02.140 --> 06:05.760 some examples of which will be on display. 06:05.760 --> 06:10.220 Professor Simon Burrows, the project's director and Mark Curran, 06:10.220 --> 06:13.270 research fellow, will lead the discussion. 06:13.270 --> 06:16.330 The program, as John mentioned, is sponsored by the Center 06:16.330 --> 06:19.550 for the Book, the European Division and the Rare Book 06:19.550 --> 06:22.200 and Special Collections Division. 06:22.200 --> 06:25.830 I would like to make one comment about we do have a display for you. 06:25.830 --> 06:27.210 I picked out those titles. 06:27.210 --> 06:30.860 It is a sampling of the holdings in the Library 06:30.860 --> 06:34.820 from this publishing house and we really hope you will stop by to look 06:34.820 --> 06:37.240 at them without water, coffee or anything else, 06:37.240 --> 06:39.460 of course -- they really are rare. 06:39.460 --> 06:44.410 But please do go over there and enjoy the books. 06:44.410 --> 06:49.030 To introduce the speakers, start first with Simon Burrows 06:49.030 --> 06:54.410 as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds 06:54.410 --> 06:57.440 and is head project director for the French Book Trade 06:57.440 --> 07:00.990 and Enlightenment Europe project, a project which is funded 07:00.990 --> 07:04.400 by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. 07:04.400 --> 07:07.770 As many of you know, this same British Council, 07:07.770 --> 07:11.050 along with the British Economic and Social Research Council, 07:11.050 --> 07:14.750 funds fellowships for a number of British researchers to come 07:14.750 --> 07:18.950 to the Library of Congress and become fellows in the Kluge Center, 07:18.950 --> 07:20.420 the Library's Research Center. 07:20.420 --> 07:23.680 So we are well familiar with your funders. 07:23.680 --> 07:27.350 Professor Burrows graduated from the University of Oxford 07:27.350 --> 07:30.190 and then spent 7 years in New Zealand prior 07:30.190 --> 07:32.810 to moving to Leeds in 2000. 07:32.810 --> 07:37.420 He's the author of several books: "French Exile Journalism" 07:37.420 --> 07:43.810 and "European Politics 1792-1814" which was published in 2000; 07:43.810 --> 07:48.040 "Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London's French Libellistes, 07:48.040 --> 07:52.940 or Libelist" published in 2006; and "A Biography 07:52.940 --> 07:58.630 of the Pamphleteer Theveneau de Morande" published in 2010. 07:58.630 --> 08:02.810 Professor Burrows has also co-edited books on the press in Europe 08:02.810 --> 08:07.310 and North America, cultural transfers, and in the 18th 08:07.310 --> 08:11.730 to early 19th century cross-dressing French diplomate The Chevalier 08:11.730 --> 08:15.000 d'Eon, a subject that might be of particular interest 08:15.000 --> 08:18.740 to those of us in Washington. 08:18.740 --> 08:23.140 Dr. Mark Curran, we've had our scandals lately. 08:23.140 --> 08:28.490 Dr. Mark Curran, you still research -- you still are -- 08:28.490 --> 08:33.380 is a research fellow in the School of History at the University 08:33.380 --> 08:39.480 of Leeds and will shortly be taking up a post-doctoral Munby Fellowship 08:39.480 --> 08:43.610 in bibliography at the University of Cambridge. 08:43.610 --> 08:48.150 Dr. Curran's debut academic article, Mettons toujours Londres, 08:48.150 --> 08:52.420 was recently awarded the 2010 article prize 08:52.420 --> 08:55.200 by the Oxford Journal French History, 08:55.200 --> 08:58.490 a cash prize, we might add, very good. 08:58.490 --> 09:02.330 The article is now freely available online. 09:02.330 --> 09:06.390 In addition to being a scholar of the 18th century French book trade, 09:06.390 --> 09:10.090 he is also a Christian Enlightenment scholar. 09:10.090 --> 09:13.970 His prize-winning article draws on both interests, the book trade 09:13.970 --> 09:19.060 and the Christian Enlightenment scholar, and is substantially based 09:19.060 --> 09:23.480 on evidence from the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel archives, 09:23.480 --> 09:28.210 the very archives we are going to be looking at very shortly. 09:28.210 --> 09:32.610 His first book "Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment 09:32.610 --> 09:35.280 in pre-Revolutionary Europe" will be published 09:35.280 --> 09:38.930 by the Royal Historical Society later this work. 09:38.930 --> 09:42.840 Simon Burrows and Mark Curran have worked together for 10 years. 09:42.840 --> 09:47.300 Since 2007 they have been creating an innovative online database 09:47.300 --> 09:51.680 of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel publishing trade. 09:51.680 --> 09:54.510 Let's see what this is and what they have to say about it. 09:54.510 --> 10:00.660 [Applause] >> Thank you very much, Carol. 10:00.660 --> 10:02.260 10:02.260 --> 10:06.570 Thank you very much, John, for very, very full introduction. 10:06.570 --> 10:11.020 Now, we set this up that we'd talk for an hour. 10:11.020 --> 10:14.050 I'm quite loquacious I speak too much, 10:14.050 --> 10:17.450 so it's going to be a pressurized hour at least for me. 10:17.450 --> 10:20.260 But before we do that, I just want to emphasize one thing 10:20.260 --> 10:22.640 about this project and digital humanities. 10:22.640 --> 10:25.260 It sometimes doesn't get voiced. 10:25.260 --> 10:28.920 And that is I think that it provides new multiples 10:28.920 --> 10:31.600 for academic partnership in the humanities. 10:31.600 --> 10:34.820 Mark and I have run this project from the beginning very much 10:34.820 --> 10:36.950 as a partnership enterprise. 10:36.950 --> 10:40.060 He was with me when we first went on a pilot, 10:40.060 --> 10:41.920 and we planned the whole thing together. 10:41.920 --> 10:45.580 So though his official title is Research Fellow 10:45.580 --> 10:48.800 and I am officially director of the project, 10:48.800 --> 10:52.250 don't think there's any hierarchy called arrangements in it. 10:52.250 --> 10:57.350 And when we play Laurel and Hardy passing between us 10:57.350 --> 11:01.880 in this talk you can judge for yourself which of us is which of 11:01.880 --> 11:03.940 that particular partnership. 11:03.940 --> 11:09.350 There is, however, one thing that I did teach Mark this morning, 11:09.350 --> 11:13.880 which is ways to bring a second copy of your paper, of your script 11:13.880 --> 11:16.360 to any talk, because things can go wrong. 11:16.360 --> 11:19.830 And how right I was, because John has actually walked off, 11:19.830 --> 11:23.200 11:23.200 --> 11:24.210 11:24.210 --> 11:29.090 However, there is a second copy, John. 11:29.090 --> 11:34.420 >> My apologies. 11:34.420 --> 11:37.390 >> You can collect it again at the end as a souvenir if you'd like. 11:37.390 --> 11:40.520 >> No, there we go. Thank you. 11:40.520 --> 11:42.510 11:42.510 --> 11:48.960 >> So a Digital Humanities Pathway to the European Enlightenment, 11:48.960 --> 11:54.950 from Account Books to Banned Books via Google books. 11:54.950 --> 11:56.170 11:56.170 --> 12:05.190 Scandal, incest, marital breakdown, courtroom drama, political intrigue. 12:05.190 --> 12:07.730 Here we might think are all the ingredients 12:07.730 --> 12:10.600 for an international bestseller. 12:10.600 --> 12:15.880 Theodore Rea-d'coseur's books certainly contain every one 12:15.880 --> 12:17.520 of these ingredients. 12:17.520 --> 12:23.430 And he insisted that every detail was true. 12:23.430 --> 12:27.870 You may not be surprised then that Rea's planter, 12:27.870 --> 12:31.390 Daniel Sadi Anonotom [phonetic], heads the list 12:31.390 --> 12:35.310 of Enlightenment bestsellers compiled from our database 12:35.310 --> 12:40.470 of the Pan European trade of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel, 12:40.470 --> 12:42.950 I'll pronounce that like a Swiss man, Neuchatel, 12:42.950 --> 12:47.080 a business that I shall hence call the STM, 12:47.080 --> 12:55.580 and that list covers their books sold between 1769 and 1794. 12:55.580 --> 13:02.230 This is just what Mark and I hoped for when we began our project. 13:02.230 --> 13:05.660 Our primary aim was to uncover the popular reading 13:05.660 --> 13:10.160 of French-speaking readers across late 18th century Europe, 13:10.160 --> 13:13.610 a time and place where French was the lingua franca 13:13.610 --> 13:17.380 of the elites, as English is today. 13:17.380 --> 13:22.770 And that historians, in recent decades have increasingly sent 13:22.770 --> 13:28.620 to definitions of Enlightenment on print culture and the public sphere. 13:28.620 --> 13:32.560 We hoped that we would also be able to speak authoritatively, 13:32.560 --> 13:35.720 comparatively and originally, about the contours 13:35.720 --> 13:38.180 of the Enlightenment across Europe. 13:38.180 --> 13:42.410 When we first saw our bestseller list about a year ago, 13:42.410 --> 13:50.070 it seems that our prayers had been answered, an unknown illegal work 13:50.070 --> 13:54.450 by an little-known author heading our bestseller's chart. 13:54.450 --> 13:58.860 Here indeed was a long-awaited award for our attempts to trace a root 13:58.860 --> 14:01.340 from 18th century book trade archives 14:01.340 --> 14:04.330 to the Enlightenment via publisher's account books 14:04.330 --> 14:07.700 and digital humanities methods. 14:07.700 --> 14:10.890 Better still, this work didn't even feature 14:10.890 --> 14:15.590 in the most celebrated previous study of the STN's illegal trade, 14:15.590 --> 14:19.050 Robert Darnton's groundbreaking Forbidden bestsellers 14:19.050 --> 14:24.570 of Pre-revolutionary France," first published in 1996. 14:24.570 --> 14:29.800 Darnton was drawn to the STN archives for several reasons. 14:29.800 --> 14:31.790 They were the best available archive. 14:31.790 --> 14:35.490 He believed that they were broadly representative as a source 14:35.490 --> 14:39.810 for his purposes and because he was documenting popular demand, 14:39.810 --> 14:44.270 it fell into his long-term project, very groundbreaking project, 14:44.270 --> 14:48.470 of studying literary history from below; indeed that was the theme 14:48.470 --> 14:52.670 of the last Shark Conference, so influential as his idea 14:52.670 --> 14:55.370 of literary history from below the beam. 14:55.370 --> 15:01.180 In "Forbidden Bestsellers," Darnton offered tables 15:01.180 --> 15:04.210 of bestselling authors and illegal works -- 15:04.210 --> 15:07.190 the map on the screen is our own -- drawing on a sampling of orders 15:07.190 --> 15:09.720 15:09.720 --> 15:14.200 in French booksellers' letters to the STN. 15:14.200 --> 15:17.940 These tables then underpinned his argument that liberty, 15:17.940 --> 15:20.250 that is free-thinking banned books, 15:20.250 --> 15:24.490 had desacrilized the French monarchy, so that at the outbreak 15:24.490 --> 15:30.480 of the Revolution in 1789, it had lost its legitimacy. 15:30.480 --> 15:33.920 Darnton's unashamedly bibliocentric 15:33.920 --> 15:38.540 and statistical approach was the inspiration for our own project. 15:38.540 --> 15:40.590 Let there be no bones about that. 15:40.590 --> 15:43.780 But there are some significant differences. 15:43.780 --> 15:46.530 Where Darnton studied demand from booksellers, 15:46.530 --> 15:51.170 we have documented what the STN actually supplied. 15:51.170 --> 15:56.870 And these, as the Rio case shows, are often strikingly different. 15:56.870 --> 15:58.350 Where Darnton's study was limited 15:58.350 --> 16:03.020 to sampling the French illegal book market, we have been able 16:03.020 --> 16:08.390 through our database, to document the STN's entire trade. 16:08.390 --> 16:12.530 And where Darnton's was a traditional pen and paper study, 16:12.530 --> 16:15.260 probably much to his regret as he'd been an innovator 16:15.260 --> 16:19.080 in using digital methods in book history, 16:19.080 --> 16:25.310 ours was a heavily funded digital humanities database project. 16:25.310 --> 16:28.860 Nevertheless, underlying our endeavors was a set 16:28.860 --> 16:33.550 of common assumptions, first mooted by Darnton and widely accepted 16:33.550 --> 16:37.410 by us and other STN scholars. 16:37.410 --> 16:40.900 Darnton claimed that his bestseller lists were as accurate 16:40.900 --> 16:45.410 as any modern bestsellers lists, and such an assertion is based on a set 16:45.410 --> 16:49.550 of shared assumptions, that the STN was a representative source 16:49.550 --> 16:51.540 for French and European trade, 16:51.540 --> 16:54.920 selling cheap editions for the popular market. 16:54.920 --> 16:59.640 But it and other book dealers tended to be ideologically neutral, 16:59.640 --> 17:02.130 profit-maxing entrepreneurs, 17:02.130 --> 17:06.970 good Americans selling whatever they could; that it specialized 17:06.970 --> 17:11.250 in banned books due to safe geopolitical location 17:11.250 --> 17:16.060 in the Prussian-ruled Swiss principality of Neuchatel. 17:16.060 --> 17:19.960 But because 18th century publishers exchange works among themselves, 17:19.960 --> 17:24.160 they sought to attract clients by offering as many titles as possible, 17:24.160 --> 17:27.750 drawing on a free-floating general stock of books 17:27.750 --> 17:31.050 from other publishers around Europe. 17:31.050 --> 17:34.890 There was the added no system of returns, and therefore booksellers 17:34.890 --> 17:40.020 across Europe were highly responsive to demand or they'd go bust, 17:40.020 --> 17:43.870 ordering only what they believe they could sell in expectation 17:43.870 --> 17:49.400 that the STN could supply them with anything from anywhere; thus, 17:49.400 --> 17:54.140 supply broadly equaled demand. 17:54.140 --> 17:56.940 When we embarked upon our project, it is fair to say 17:56.940 --> 18:01.980 that with minor caveats, we subscribed to all these assumptions. 18:01.980 --> 18:06.500 This talk explains how many of these assumptions broke down and how 18:06.500 --> 18:09.270 through the power of a digital humanities approach, 18:09.270 --> 18:12.240 we came up with new tools to compensate. 18:12.240 --> 18:16.220 We feel we put Humpty Dumpty back together again as well 18:16.220 --> 18:19.080 as cracking him in the first place. In retrospect, alarm bells ought 18:19.080 --> 18:21.670 18:21.670 --> 18:24.310 to have run before we even embarked on the project. 18:24.310 --> 18:28.620 For my own first major foray into the STN's accounting documents, 18:28.620 --> 18:31.850 I'd been to investigate the company's rolling stocking ventures, 18:31.850 --> 18:34.590 Iran Contra de magazin [phonetic], in order to prove 18:34.590 --> 18:36.960 that the STN did not deal 18:36.960 --> 18:41.230 in pornographic works attacking Marie-Antoinette before the 18:41.230 --> 18:43.000 French Revolution. 18:43.000 --> 18:47.950 These works, it has been argued, were the key desacrilizing works, 18:47.950 --> 18:51.150 though that's not Darnton's argument, to be fair. 18:51.150 --> 18:53.130 My work challenged this assertion, 18:53.130 --> 18:55.470 suggesting that such works were not available 18:55.470 --> 18:58.110 to the general public before the French Revolution. 18:58.110 --> 19:02.840 The few works printed of this sort had all been suppressed or seized 19:02.840 --> 19:07.590 by the French authorities and locked safely in the Bastille -- ha-ha. 19:07.590 --> 19:11.520 They were then liberated, and the anniversary 19:11.520 --> 19:14.320 of that liberation is of course tomorrow. 19:14.320 --> 19:17.910 This apparently flew in the face of Darnton's revelation that some 19:17.910 --> 19:21.510 of these pornographic political libels had been ordered 19:21.510 --> 19:23.300 from the STN, notably 19:23.300 --> 19:27.980 by a fly-by-night bookseller named Bissou Mouvelan [phonetic]. 19:27.980 --> 19:33.000 Darnton has Mouvelan's trait in detail, but our database suggests 19:33.000 --> 19:36.380 that he was atypical in numerous ways. 19:36.380 --> 19:39.130 Yet, even before the database was dreamed up, 19:39.130 --> 19:42.660 I was able to demonstrate where and how Mouvelan had heard rumors 19:42.660 --> 19:46.720 of the pamphlet's existence prior to placing his orders. 19:46.720 --> 19:49.450 Thus, attempts to purchase the pamphlets were no proof 19:49.450 --> 19:53.480 that they were in actual circulation before 1789. 19:53.480 --> 19:57.880 Mouvelan's case appeared to uncouple supply and demand, 19:57.880 --> 20:06.090 but only slowly did we realize that this was not an isolated case. 20:06.090 --> 20:08.660 It was Iran Contra that first made me wonder 20:08.660 --> 20:12.080 about creating a database at the STN's trade. 20:12.080 --> 20:14.810 However because the surviving Iran Contra cover 20:14.810 --> 20:18.210 about seven scattered years of the STN's history, 20:18.210 --> 20:21.080 I wondered whether it would be possible to include data from other, 20:21.080 --> 20:24.030 more challenging STN accounting documents, 20:24.030 --> 20:29.560 which bore mysterious enticing names -- journaux, copie des compt, 20:29.560 --> 20:34.560 mainker hunt, life commission, and the forebodingly impenetrable 20:34.560 --> 20:39.020 and aptly named brouillard, which means "fog." 20:39.020 --> 20:40.340 20:40.340 --> 20:45.620 So in early 2006, I invited Mark to accompany me on a pilot study. 20:45.620 --> 20:48.870 We soon established that brouilard, journaux, copie des compt 20:48.870 --> 20:50.920 and mainker hunt, were just different names 20:50.920 --> 20:54.350 for the firm's day books and that they gave detailed breakdowns 20:54.350 --> 20:57.660 of capital flows, including all book sales. 20:57.660 --> 21:00.450 Thus they could indeed surrender up all the same data 21:00.450 --> 21:04.180 as Iran Contra, and in more detail. Armed with this insight, 21:04.180 --> 21:05.840 21:05.840 --> 21:08.770 we set about designing our project together. 21:08.770 --> 21:14.040 In technical terms, although we little understood it then, 21:14.040 --> 21:18.500 we were planning a relational database of extreme complexity, 21:18.500 --> 21:22.150 as shown diagrammatically here. It would have several parts. 21:22.150 --> 21:24.350 21:24.350 --> 21:28.610 At its simplest, all the data concerned books and you can see 21:28.610 --> 21:34.280 that in green, clients or transactions; that is to say series 21:34.280 --> 21:38.290 of books against other books or cache instruments. 21:38.290 --> 21:41.840 But each section had several subsections. 21:41.840 --> 21:46.810 Books data for example which comprised basic bibliographic data 21:46.810 --> 21:53.350 as shown up here: title, author, publisher, language of publication, 21:53.350 --> 21:58.640 et cetera; empirical measures of the book's legality or illegality, 21:58.640 --> 22:02.830 not actually show on the slide; taxonomic data about subject matter, 22:02.830 --> 22:05.640 and we introduced our own keyword system -- 22:05.640 --> 22:09.950 sorry, the Library of Congress system was too complex to apply 22:09.950 --> 22:13.260 and didn't quite fit 18th century material we felt; 22:13.260 --> 22:17.600 it was the second best on the market after our own, 22:17.600 --> 22:20.920 and the Parisian system of book categorization developed 22:20.920 --> 22:23.890 by Parisian booksellers in the early 18th century 22:23.890 --> 22:27.530 for 18th century purposes. 22:27.530 --> 22:32.160 Client data would include primarily: names and places of residence, 22:32.160 --> 22:36.130 incorporating town, province and nation 22:36.130 --> 22:41.130 in all their ancien regime complexity; client professions, 22:41.130 --> 22:45.310 some of the data for which is still to be enriched in the database 22:45.310 --> 22:47.620 for those of you planning to take a look at it; 22:47.620 --> 22:51.280 details of the client's correspondence in the STN's archive, 22:51.280 --> 22:54.050 which we have effectively cataloged electronically 22:54.050 --> 22:58.440 for the very first time; and finally, transactions data, 22:58.440 --> 23:02.230 which would link books to clients, places and the dates 23:02.230 --> 23:04.330 on which they were accounted for. 23:04.330 --> 23:12.790 The scale of this undertaking was, we think in retrospect, impressive. 23:12.790 --> 23:15.940 Indeed, at times, it has nearly overwhelmed us. 23:15.940 --> 23:20.460 Together, Mark and I have recorded, researched, cataloged 23:20.460 --> 23:24.920 and categorized at last count -- the numbers may change slightly -- 23:24.920 --> 23:32.880 4,064 editions of 3,613 works written by 3,177 authors, 23:32.880 --> 23:37.240 using both collective catalogs, WorldCat, the catalog of Porter 23:37.240 --> 23:40.200 and Raro, the catalog of the Suisse Romande -- 23:40.200 --> 23:41.830 and new digital repositories, 23:41.830 --> 23:46.330 particularly Google Books and Gallica. 23:46.330 --> 23:52.490 In addition, we've cataloged 2,922 clients living in 516 towns 23:52.490 --> 23:55.620 across Europe and recorded 23:55.620 --> 24:03.220 over 70,000 transactions involving exchanges of 766,000 books. 24:03.220 --> 24:05.700 Now, finally having done, we are checking 24:05.700 --> 24:08.860 and revising much of our work. 24:08.860 --> 24:11.390 Nevertheless, the studies we intended to write 24:11.390 --> 24:14.190 from the project remain predicated on the assumption 24:14.190 --> 24:18.440 that the STN archive is essentially representative. 24:18.440 --> 24:20.900 But how far is this the case? 24:20.900 --> 24:23.920 Perhaps the best case to begin answering this question is 24:23.920 --> 24:27.870 at the summit of our bestsellers chart with Theodore Rea. 24:27.870 --> 24:30.590 And here our troubles really begin. 24:30.590 --> 24:35.620 But when applied to Rea's pamphlet planter Daniel Cevie and antitom, 24:35.620 --> 24:37.810 the work which heads our bestseller list, 24:37.810 --> 24:41.880 the very term bestseller is in fact a misnomer. 24:41.880 --> 24:47.290 The STN actually sold very few copies of this work to the public. 24:47.290 --> 24:50.950 Instead it was a propaganda piece, commissioned and paid for by Rea 24:50.950 --> 24:53.640 for use of a vendetta with his brother-in-law, 24:53.640 --> 24:56.270 the Baron de Planter, and his own struggle 24:56.270 --> 24:58.810 to restore his civic status. 24:58.810 --> 25:00.910 The following had devastating court judgment, 25:00.910 --> 25:04.200 stemming from his allegations of incest against his wife, 25:04.200 --> 25:08.590 Ursula von Planter, and the Baron, Rea had been stripped 25:08.590 --> 25:11.500 of his Genevan citizenship. 25:11.500 --> 25:16.220 To maximize its impact while minimizing costs, Rea asked the STN 25:16.220 --> 25:17.680 to reprint the pamphlet 25:17.680 --> 25:21.230 in a six-page tabloid newspaper-style format 25:21.230 --> 25:23.050 in tiny print. 25:23.050 --> 25:26.390 This condensed what was originally a 72-page pamphlet 25:26.390 --> 25:30.140 into a cheap six-side broad-side sheet. 25:30.140 --> 25:33.600 Rea probably helped distribute it free of charge possibly 25:33.600 --> 25:39.290 to every household in Geneva, for he asked the STN to print 18,000 copies 25:39.290 --> 25:42.230 of it, an enormous print run for the day. 25:42.230 --> 25:46.460 Unfortunately, the STN had no sooner dispatched the first consignment 25:46.460 --> 25:49.400 to the pamphlet, then Rea dropped dead, 25:49.400 --> 25:51.780 presumably from a stress-related illness. 25:51.780 --> 25:56.330 The pamphlets probably never reached their intended audience. 25:56.330 --> 26:00.350 We've been unable to trace a single copy of the tabloid edition, 26:00.350 --> 26:04.680 which was presumably destroyed by Rea's heirs or the Baron's agents. 26:04.680 --> 26:07.360 Thus, Rea proves to be something of a Trojan horse, 26:07.360 --> 26:11.970 a dish find concealing a mortal threat to our project. 26:11.970 --> 26:14.170 His presence distorts our bestseller list 26:14.170 --> 26:15.840 and our bestselling author list, 26:15.840 --> 26:19.080 while the unlikely keyword combination, Geneva, 26:19.080 --> 26:23.160 incest and politics, hardly represents the richness 26:23.160 --> 26:26.910 and sophistication of Enlightenment political discourse. 26:26.910 --> 26:30.390 This keyword combination also highlights the local dimension 26:30.390 --> 26:31.640 of our archive. 26:31.640 --> 26:34.290 Although the Baron de Planter was to achieve Europe wide fame 26:34.290 --> 26:36.410 as a minor player in another scandal, 26:36.410 --> 26:37.990 the Diamond Necklace Affair, 26:37.990 --> 26:40.780 the Rea case was essentially a marital dispute 26:40.780 --> 26:43.340 with a Genevan political dimension. 26:43.340 --> 26:46.170 Rea certainly sent copies of these pamphlets into France, 26:46.170 --> 26:48.580 hoping to discredit the Baron with his princely patron, 26:48.580 --> 26:52.190 Cardinal de Rohan, and the STN sent others to business contacts 26:52.190 --> 26:55.550 across Europe but they had little impact. 26:55.550 --> 26:58.960 Indignant booksellers returned most copies unsold 26:58.960 --> 27:01.840 and Rohan stood by his client. 27:01.840 --> 27:04.970 Thus, the Rea case highlights the problem of commissioned works 27:04.970 --> 27:09.060 within our dataset and raises worrying questions of localism. 27:09.060 --> 27:11.720 Both issues challenge the assumption that we're dealing 27:11.720 --> 27:14.390 with a representative archive. 27:14.390 --> 27:17.370 This may come as a relief to the good Calvinist burghers of Geneva, 27:17.370 --> 27:19.530 horrified at the sight of the striking correlation 27:19.530 --> 27:24.300 of our database keywords, "Geneva, incest and scandal," but for us, 27:24.300 --> 27:30.040 the Rea case was a mere harbinger of the devastating conceptual problems 27:30.040 --> 27:34.510 that would arise once we began to analyze our data on the structure 27:34.510 --> 27:37.120 of the bookcase in earnest. 27:37.120 --> 27:40.270 But that part of the story is to be told in Mark's book, 27:40.270 --> 27:43.000 so I'm now going to hand over to him. 27:43.000 --> 27:44.490 27:44.490 --> 27:47.160 27:47.160 --> 27:49.510 >> Thanks, Simon. [Background noise] 27:49.510 --> 27:59.040 27:59.040 --> 28:02.970 >> Say it afterward, the graphics do get better. 28:02.970 --> 28:11.750 But I wanted to begin by showing you this today, because it means a lot 28:11.750 --> 28:15.340 to me because it was our first attempt at mapping. 28:15.340 --> 28:23.210 I've created it back in 2007, so on the wall of my Neuchatel office. 28:23.210 --> 28:31.570 The orange stickers represent the towns that the STN corresponded 28:31.570 --> 28:35.120 and the lines are unknown trade routes. 28:35.120 --> 28:38.690 So it's very much the beginnings of our thinking 28:38.690 --> 28:42.950 about the STN's trade networks. 28:42.950 --> 28:47.500 And I think looking at it and thinking about it over a period 28:47.500 --> 28:51.940 of time helped me to really think deeper 28:51.940 --> 28:56.740 about the 18th century book market. 28:56.740 --> 29:03.500 So as Simon has explained, the grant application that we drafted back 29:03.500 --> 29:09.660 in late 2006 was rather optimistic. 29:09.660 --> 29:13.290 How far we expected to reveal that patterns of demand 29:13.290 --> 29:17.570 for Enlightenment text differ across time, over time 29:17.570 --> 29:20.720 and across territorial space. 29:20.720 --> 29:26.420 Which author's books and subjects sold best were throughout Europe? 29:26.420 --> 29:30.830 What proportion of titles sent by the STN could be associated 29:30.830 --> 29:33.930 with the Enlightenment, with the high Enlightenment, 29:33.930 --> 29:35.070 with the Christian Enlightenment, 29:35.070 --> 29:38.270 with the Grub Street Enlightenment, et cetera. 29:38.270 --> 29:45.350 So many ambitious questions that we had back then. 29:45.350 --> 29:49.720 Now, five years later, we think that we can begin to answer some 29:49.720 --> 29:53.070 of these questions, or at least get closer 29:53.070 --> 29:56.550 than other scholars have managed. 29:56.550 --> 29:59.900 But it proved more difficult to get there than we imagined. 29:59.900 --> 30:07.880 So for me today my role is to talk about the flies in the ointment, 30:07.880 --> 30:12.180 and especially how we decided to deal with them. 30:12.180 --> 30:13.190 30:13.190 --> 30:18.050 The biggest problem, the one that changed our project from top 30:18.050 --> 30:21.900 to bottom, as Simon has just alluded to, 30:21.900 --> 30:26.400 is that it quickly became obvious to us as we were looking for the data 30:26.400 --> 30:31.560 that the STN archives are not representative 30:31.560 --> 30:35.460 as previously thought. Bookselling from Neuchatel -- 30:35.460 --> 30:38.170 30:38.170 --> 30:42.270 I don't know if everyone knows where Neuchatel is; 30:42.270 --> 30:45.670 I'm not sure I can point, but just under the left-hand side 30:45.670 --> 30:48.920 of Switzerland, west of Switzerland -- 30:48.920 --> 30:54.870 is different, was a different affair from bookselling 30:54.870 --> 31:00.390 in London or Paris, Amsterdam. 31:00.390 --> 31:04.930 Now, to the uninitiated this may hardly surprise. 31:04.930 --> 31:10.420 Nonetheless, it was the standard interpretation to see the opposite, 31:10.420 --> 31:13.730 certainly dancers' interpretation. 31:13.730 --> 31:18.600 The reason for seeing this network is relatively homogenous. 31:18.600 --> 31:21.660 Putting such faith in the STN archives 31:21.660 --> 31:27.400 as a representative source was as follows. 31:27.400 --> 31:32.460 First, because a large part of the print rooms 31:32.460 --> 31:37.960 of new additions were immediately swapped amongst publishers, 31:37.960 --> 31:44.130 wholesalers from London to Geneva, all across Europe, quickly ended up, 31:44.130 --> 31:46.940 it was thought, with pretty much the same stock. 31:46.940 --> 31:50.220 And because booksellers, 31:50.220 --> 31:54.340 because these wholesalers didn't allow returns, booksellers all 31:54.340 --> 31:59.520 across Europe tended to just order what they thought they could 31:59.520 --> 32:01.230 32:01.230 --> 32:04.600 32:04.600 --> 32:09.700 In other words, the STN stopped or could get hold of almost anything, 32:09.700 --> 32:12.140 and its Europe-wide clientele, 32:12.140 --> 32:14.800 only ordered what they thought they could shift. 32:14.800 --> 32:17.520 So the story went. The archive, the STN's archive, 32:17.520 --> 32:20.470 32:20.470 --> 32:23.020 was thus considered an exceptional source 32:23.020 --> 32:27.220 for general European book trade inquiries. 32:27.220 --> 32:28.340 32:28.340 --> 32:33.500 So pretend the paper not there and sort of Google mockup 32:33.500 --> 32:39.000 and for a little bit of precision it's still a very basic affair. 32:39.000 --> 32:43.140 But it sort of confirmed this initial thinking. 32:43.140 --> 32:47.960 All of the points on this network here, the towns where correspondents 32:47.960 --> 32:51.790 of the STN lived in, they're all equally weighted. 32:51.790 --> 32:57.720 And the possibilities for the Neuchatel booksellers 32:57.720 --> 33:05.330 to source books, to send them, seem very extensive from this. 33:05.330 --> 33:10.810 Distant markets seem extremely accessible. 33:10.810 --> 33:17.680 Resembles in that manner a sort of London tube map. 33:17.680 --> 33:20.740 Nothing is prioritized in a map like that. 33:20.740 --> 33:26.580 We can see the Queen's part is linked to Battle Green. 33:26.580 --> 33:29.140 We know people could make the trip. 33:29.140 --> 33:34.140 We can see exactly how they would do it, but we don't know is if they do. 33:34.140 --> 33:35.230 33:35.230 --> 33:42.750 And I think that's indicative of a lot of work 33:42.750 --> 33:46.830 into 18th century networks, certainly from the historian side. 33:46.830 --> 33:49.590 We tend to get extremely excited about the possibilities 33:49.590 --> 33:51.870 of this network, what could happen, 33:51.870 --> 33:56.940 and overlook occasionally the realities. 33:56.940 --> 33:59.020 And we were as guilty as anyone as that 33:59.020 --> 34:03.440 when we initially designed the project. 34:03.440 --> 34:08.240 Our idea was to flood this sort of static network 34:08.240 --> 34:10.400 with the STN's real sales. 34:10.400 --> 34:15.760 As Simon, Darnton had only used a sample of orders, 34:15.760 --> 34:18.430 of the legal books, and he'd only looked at France. 34:18.430 --> 34:21.190 So our idea was to flood this huge network 34:21.190 --> 34:23.460 with the whole sales of the STN. 34:23.460 --> 34:30.850 We then compared the popularity of Rousseau in northern Germany 34:30.850 --> 34:35.180 to southern France, asked whether the American Revolution was a more 34:35.180 --> 34:40.010 important topic in Paris or Marseilles. 34:40.010 --> 34:44.090 Alas, it's not as simple as that. 34:44.090 --> 34:49.670 And these static networks and discourses of book trade uniformity, 34:49.670 --> 34:52.510 are fatally misleading, and I'll show you why. 34:52.510 --> 35:03.050 [Background noise] 35:03.050 --> 35:09.760 >> So this is the current task bed for our online interface. 35:09.760 --> 35:12.970 It'll be available to SHARP delegates and to yourselves 35:12.970 --> 35:16.660 to play around with next week. 35:16.660 --> 35:24.090 And the address, the Web site address is here 35:24.090 --> 35:26.290 with the user name and the password. 35:26.290 --> 35:29.560 I believe it'll be put online tomorrow, 35:29.560 --> 35:34.360 and it will be available until next Monday. 35:34.360 --> 35:39.390 After then, it will be taken offline temporarily 35:39.390 --> 35:43.070 until it's finally ready, but you can find any details 35:43.070 --> 35:47.520 about the project at c18booktrade dot com. 35:47.520 --> 35:49.970 Just a word of warning, it isn't finished. 35:49.970 --> 35:52.700 Everything isn't fully checked, so I wouldn't use it 35:52.700 --> 35:57.390 for academic purposes yet, the dates or the structures, 35:57.390 --> 35:59.300 but it will give you a very good impression. 35:59.300 --> 36:01.320 We're getting there slowly. >> And please be back to that. 36:01.320 --> 36:04.710 36:04.710 --> 36:05.770 >> Yes, absolutely. The book has common sections. 36:05.770 --> 36:07.750 36:07.750 --> 36:14.970 If you could feed that, that would be fantastic. 36:14.970 --> 36:17.290 So yeah, this question of representativeness. 36:17.290 --> 36:23.720 We're going to start on our database by ranking sounds. 36:23.720 --> 36:33.350 So if we turn this into a map, I'm going to rank the sales, 36:33.350 --> 36:39.020 the whole [inaudible] sales between 1769 and 1794. 36:39.020 --> 36:43.500 36:43.500 --> 36:52.060 So visualize here about 60,000 separate transactions, 36:52.060 --> 36:57.560 around 400,000 copies of 4,000 different books. 36:57.560 --> 37:02.100 Essentially it's the same as those previous maps I've been showing you. 37:02.100 --> 37:08.620 But now it's actually weighted by the actual books clients received. 37:08.620 --> 37:11.910 To some extent producing this was one 37:11.910 --> 37:15.570 of the major goals of the project. 37:15.570 --> 37:19.050 And already we can see some significant changes 37:19.050 --> 37:22.370 from a static mockup. The tight concentration of sales 37:22.370 --> 37:24.350 37:24.350 --> 37:28.340 around the Suisse Romande is noticeable, as is the lack 37:28.340 --> 37:32.500 of real sales to western France. 37:32.500 --> 37:36.910 But nonetheless, it has a relatively wide coverage. 37:36.910 --> 37:39.510 Paris and Versailles are well represented, 37:39.510 --> 37:43.770 so we're relatively happy with that. Gave us food for thought. 37:43.770 --> 37:45.060 37:45.060 --> 37:50.470 It was different, but it wasn't enough for us to totally break 37:50.470 --> 37:54.480 with the idea of the STN as a representative archive. 37:54.480 --> 37:58.060 Let me just switch to purchases. 37:58.060 --> 38:00.710 So this is where the STN purchased their books 38:00.710 --> 38:05.010 38:05.010 --> 38:10.570 38:10.570 --> 38:16.280 This one's a bit more surprising. So yes, they started networks, 38:16.280 --> 38:20.440 38:20.440 --> 38:23.440 show that STN could source works from anywhere. 38:23.440 --> 38:26.500 They had the context to, but they didn't use them. 38:26.500 --> 38:29.410 It's too expensive, too much hassle. 38:29.410 --> 38:35.180 They almost exclusively traded in Neuchatel, printed books, 38:35.180 --> 38:41.280 all those that they source locally from L'Usine, Geneva, Evadone, 38:41.280 --> 38:47.390 and to some extent Lyon you can see there in France. 38:47.390 --> 38:49.680 Remember, the majority of 18th century books 38:49.680 --> 38:51.410 in this period was still printed, 38:51.410 --> 38:55.110 French language books were still printed in Paris 38:55.110 --> 38:59.220 or the low countries, Amsterdam and the likes, London. 38:59.220 --> 39:05.160 And the STN are not sourcing these books in any significant numbers. 39:05.160 --> 39:08.930 To gives us a scale of the problem, in Darnston's "Corpse 39:08.930 --> 39:19.420 of Clandestine Literature," 144 of the 457 STN works 39:19.420 --> 39:24.940 that he has listed there were never touched once by the STN. 39:24.940 --> 39:29.510 They applauded titles like "The Dog after the Monks," or its sequel, 39:29.510 --> 39:31.920 39:31.920 --> 39:33.540 39:33.540 --> 39:37.440 But they took the order and they said, never heard of it; 39:37.440 --> 39:40.090 you'll have to go to Amsterdam for that. 39:40.090 --> 39:42.030 39:42.030 --> 39:45.280 So for our purposes this was both fascinating 39:45.280 --> 39:46.730 and potentially catastrophic. 39:46.730 --> 39:52.910 We clearly had a massive book history story to tell, 39:52.910 --> 39:58.330 the reimagining of the 18th century book trade on polycentric grounds, 39:58.330 --> 40:05.510 et cetera, with Neuchatel just one unrepresentative piece 40:05.510 --> 40:06.090 of the puzzle. 40:06.090 --> 40:09.240 But our But our Enlightenment ambitions looked 40:09.240 --> 40:11.120 on rather dubious grounds. Perhaps they still do, we'll see. 40:11.120 --> 40:13.440 40:13.440 --> 40:15.990 And it gets worse. And we switch back to sales. 40:15.990 --> 40:20.240 40:20.240 --> 40:23.330 40:23.330 --> 40:26.410 What we have here is the whole 25 years -- 40:26.410 --> 40:27.850 this is the map I showed previously -- 40:27.850 --> 40:32.160 the whole 25 years of the STN's trade being representative. 40:32.160 --> 40:38.330 Now, we want to just keep an eye on Paris as I changed this 40:38.330 --> 40:43.510 to give just the 1770s, Paris and Versailles, northern France. 40:43.510 --> 40:55.040 [Background noise] 40:55.040 --> 40:58.700 >> So Paris drops in the 1770s to a small. 40:58.700 --> 41:01.650 It represents about 2 percent. 41:01.650 --> 41:06.730 In this detail box it says "Paris, 1.85 percent, 41:06.730 --> 41:10.490 and Versailles is point 1 percent. That's the 1770s. 41:10.490 --> 41:12.040 41:12.040 --> 41:14.510 If we this to the 1780s-- [Background noise] 41:14.510 --> 41:24.530 41:24.530 --> 41:28.590 >> -- Paris and Versailles become massive players. 41:28.590 --> 41:31.790 41:31.790 --> 41:38.330 Paris, there are 13.9 percent of the STN sales, Versailles, 7.9. 41:38.330 --> 41:39.540 41:39.540 --> 41:43.200 So we evidently have big variations in spatial distribution 41:43.200 --> 41:46.010 over time to contend with, too. 41:46.010 --> 41:49.950 Paris did not become the center of the Enlightenment in 1780 41:49.950 --> 41:53.490 41:53.490 --> 41:56.220 41:56.220 --> 42:00.450 And I can show you this in another way by comparing towns. 42:00.450 --> 42:01.510 If we compare-- [Background noise] 42:01.510 --> 42:11.120 42:11.120 --> 42:12.510 >> -- Paris here-- 42:12.510 --> 42:17.040 [Background noise] >> -- to La Chaux near Neuchatel-- 42:17.040 --> 42:21.140 42:21.140 --> 42:22.510 42:22.510 --> 42:30.040 [Background noise] >> -- this is the Paris spike. 42:30.040 --> 42:31.160 42:31.160 --> 42:37.780 That's why our 1780 graph is giving us a radically different one. 42:37.780 --> 42:40.900 In general, the STN sold almost nothing to Paris 42:40.900 --> 42:44.220 through their whole history, the capital of Enlightenment, 42:44.220 --> 42:47.960 apart from this huge spike. 42:47.960 --> 42:56.290 I can explain very briefly why that is, by comparing some authors. 42:56.290 --> 42:57.510 So if we compare-- [Background noise] 42:57.510 --> 43:06.050 43:06.050 --> 43:15.510 >> -- famous Breso, Voltaire. [Background noise] 43:15.510 --> 43:32.190 43:32.190 --> 43:37.030 >> This is Voltaire's sales in red and Breso's in blue. 43:37.030 --> 43:41.290 Voltaire's red line is actually representing 43:41.290 --> 43:43.390 about 100 different works of his, 43:43.390 --> 43:50.680 selling modestly throughout the 1770s and slightly decreasing, 43:50.680 --> 43:55.010 or significantly decreasing in the 1780s after his death. 43:55.010 --> 44:01.210 Rousseau's is a huge job printing, sent to Paris in the early 1780s; 44:01.210 --> 44:04.080 the same with the works of Louis Sebastian Mercier. 44:04.080 --> 44:10.270 It's the same with the works of Rea, through Geneva. 44:10.270 --> 44:16.390 And I could go on, pulling apart dissemination maps 44:16.390 --> 44:23.220 in 1,000 different ways, revealing discrepancies across the board. 44:23.220 --> 44:27.780 Instead, I'll try and just tell you briefly how we're dealing 44:27.780 --> 44:28.840 with the issues. So to recap, we can't quite get 44:28.840 --> 44:31.070 44:31.070 --> 44:33.880 to the Enlightenment for several reasons. 44:33.880 --> 44:38.140 First, the STN predominantly traded Swiss editions. 44:38.140 --> 44:41.420 Second, aside from job printing and commissions, 44:41.420 --> 44:43.560 the work hardly reached Paris. 44:43.560 --> 44:47.500 The same was true for London, Amsterdam, Brussels, 44:47.500 --> 44:51.150 all of that northern book-producing region. 44:51.150 --> 44:56.880 Third, because the actor is redistributors of books 44:56.880 --> 45:03.630 and a publisher, often with large commissioned orders, 45:03.630 --> 45:08.290 we're sometimes comparing apples with oranges, Breso with Voltaire. 45:08.290 --> 45:13.010 Fourth, and finally, the data shows huge variations 45:13.010 --> 45:17.500 about how they operated their own business over time. 45:17.500 --> 45:21.940 So if you imagine that this 20-year block we're trying to discuss, 45:21.940 --> 45:24.620 they began the business in 1769. 45:24.620 --> 45:28.030 Two years later in 1771, they've got ten books in stock, 45:28.030 --> 45:29.820 all of which they printed. By 1785, they have 1,500. 45:29.820 --> 45:34.870 45:34.870 --> 45:37.060 So time is a huge problem. 45:37.060 --> 45:39.240 Obviously, any books that were published 45:39.240 --> 45:42.610 in the early 1770s they're likely to be selling less of than 45:42.610 --> 45:44.960 at the height of their own business. 45:44.960 --> 45:56.090 So our ability to deal with these issues lies 45:56.090 --> 45:59.020 in how we constructed the database. 45:59.020 --> 46:05.010 This is a typical page of the manuscripts we're using. 46:05.010 --> 46:07.310 46:07.310 --> 46:17.810 So you can see here, folio 280, 20th of August 1772, G.C. Walter. 46:17.810 --> 46:19.670 We know that's George Conrad Walter. 46:19.670 --> 46:22.380 From other sources we can give you his street address, 46:22.380 --> 46:27.100 lots of biographical detail about him. 46:27.100 --> 46:33.380 He owes the following accounts for Ballow, a box of books marked W, 46:33.380 --> 46:39.020 number 59, sent via John, J.J. Habistock in Moiter, 46:39.020 --> 46:43.640 which is a little town just bit across the lake from Neuchatel. 46:43.640 --> 46:46.550 And he's bought all these books, so the first one is Kesetiaan, 46:46.550 --> 46:50.400 and the second one is also Kesetiaan, 46:50.400 --> 46:54.190 just volumes 6, 7, 8, and 9. Now, we know from other sources 46:54.190 --> 46:56.120 46:56.120 --> 47:00.100 that this is Voltez Kesetiaan salon cyclic BEDI. 47:00.100 --> 47:05.200 Addison, the next one, is Addison's [inaudible], et cetera. 47:05.200 --> 47:13.320 So from the manuscript data, we have the basic sales, 47:13.320 --> 47:17.860 and from elsewhere we can fill in all the addition details. 47:17.860 --> 47:25.180 This, as Simon has demonstrated, all goes in here. 47:25.180 --> 47:26.420 47:26.420 --> 47:29.280 And this hyperanalytical approach, 47:29.280 --> 47:32.800 once we've got it all, comes into the database. 47:32.800 --> 47:45.310 So if we browse a client, we're going to look at Walter, 47:45.310 --> 47:47.070 47:47.070 --> 48:00.360 George Conrad, here, not just that page, but we can visualize 48:00.360 --> 48:04.960 and analyze his whole trade with the STN throughout the whole period. 48:04.960 --> 48:10.550 So this was Walter's data stream, if you like, what was going in and out. 48:10.550 --> 48:15.070 Each one of these, we can get the full bibliographic details. 48:15.070 --> 48:18.890 And because it's so structured, well, these queries would allow us 48:18.890 --> 48:27.830 to query any of this information by anything else, so we can query 48:27.830 --> 48:32.740 by publication place or by number of sheets, or everything is 48:32.740 --> 48:36.150 so structured in that way. 48:36.150 --> 48:41.480 So as you can see, these are STN editions he's actually ordering 48:41.480 --> 48:45.420 at this time. 48:45.420 --> 48:51.060 My book, my second book that I'm currently in the process of writing 48:51.060 --> 48:57.350 with Simon, is going to try and rewrite the history of the STN 48:57.350 --> 49:01.730 and to some extent make a contribution 49:01.730 --> 49:04.590 to the European book trade using all of this data. 49:04.590 --> 49:13.160 So it should act both as a guide to the database, 49:13.160 --> 49:17.350 to understanding how it's put together and its facts and aim 49:17.350 --> 49:24.310 to explain this conception of two different markets, where the STN fit 49:24.310 --> 49:29.660 in the European book market, using my book, 49:29.660 --> 49:34.390 using this hyperanalytical approach. 49:34.390 --> 49:36.760 We're still a long way from the Enlightenment, 49:36.760 --> 49:41.970 which is the subject of today's talk. 49:41.970 --> 49:44.680 We've got two strategies to get there. 49:44.680 --> 49:48.810 First, we, potentially others as well, 49:48.810 --> 49:52.070 can add more data to this database. 49:52.070 --> 49:56.420 We have Neuchatel now, but there's plenty of other archives 49:56.420 --> 49:58.860 around in Europe if you look hard enough. 49:58.860 --> 50:03.470 There's also a lot of other bibliometric sources we can use 50:03.470 --> 50:05.580 and add. 50:05.580 --> 50:10.640 Hundreds of extant booksellers catalogs give us a lot of this sort 50:10.640 --> 50:14.970 of information, journals, newspaper reviews, 50:14.970 --> 50:19.570 all sorts of book trade-related events that we can pin in time 50:19.570 --> 50:23.360 and space and out to the same system to try and compensate 50:23.360 --> 50:25.610 from this Neuchatel bias we have. 50:25.610 --> 50:30.370 I'll be speaking about these plans in a shop on Sunday. 50:30.370 --> 50:34.510 And second, in the meantime, we've introduced the whole series 50:34.510 --> 50:38.570 of tools we've got in the options menu here, 50:38.570 --> 50:44.290 that allow us to compensate for the biases in the Neuchatel source. 50:44.290 --> 50:45.720 50:45.720 --> 50:51.290 So queries here, these affect the global database. 50:51.290 --> 50:56.720 So queries can be restricted by time to minimalize corruptions resulting 50:56.720 --> 51:02.110 from changing market conditions, by space to gauge variation 51:02.110 --> 51:07.330 in regional trade patterns from national averages, by source data 51:07.330 --> 51:14.510 to compensate for the small holes in the archive, by publication place, 51:14.510 --> 51:19.890 to address the overrepresentation of Neuchatel and Swiss-printed works, 51:19.890 --> 51:26.040 by work type, to eliminate anomalous commissioned editions, like Breso's. 51:26.040 --> 51:28.580 And finally, client type 51:28.580 --> 51:32.700 to distinguish the wholesale from the retail trades. 51:32.700 --> 51:35.840 So let's examine this but I'll just show you how it works in briefly. 51:35.840 --> 51:43.040 If we wanted to do any of those searches I've done before, 51:43.040 --> 51:45.470 51:45.470 --> 51:50.090 we could for example, eliminate STN editions 51:50.090 --> 51:53.990 or eliminate commissioned editions, which help us deal 51:53.990 --> 51:54.670 with that question 51:54.670 --> 51:59.040 of representativeness a little bit while we're waiting 51:59.040 --> 52:01.710 for further data from other sources. 52:01.710 --> 52:04.640 And at that point I'll hand you back to Simon briefly. 52:04.640 --> 52:06.820 52:06.820 --> 52:09.300 >> Thank you very much, Mark. 52:09.300 --> 52:11.590 Those of you who are going to use the database, 52:11.590 --> 52:15.190 we strongly encourage you to look at these options menus. 52:15.190 --> 52:17.670 The first two are about data integrity 52:17.670 --> 52:22.650 because of the sources we've used, and they all have definitions 52:22.650 --> 52:24.950 and details about why you might want to turn them off 52:24.950 --> 52:27.160 in many cases or leave them on. 52:27.160 --> 52:31.440 So you've got edition types, but you can also look in terms of clients, 52:31.440 --> 52:36.250 commissioning clients, say you cut out people like Breso and Rea, 52:36.250 --> 52:39.780 wholesale clients, Swiss and otherwise. 52:39.780 --> 52:42.900 We might have broken that one down further I've begun feel 52:42.900 --> 52:46.270 to feel in the last week. 52:46.270 --> 52:50.460 And we've also have a few women in the database, far less than men, 52:50.460 --> 52:54.410 but we decided that we'd allow some sort of analysis of the trade. 52:54.410 --> 52:57.900 Women in the book trade were said to be more free than women elsewhere 52:57.900 --> 53:01.240 to conduct their businesses, and I think our data bears that out, 53:01.240 --> 53:04.150 but the data says so little it is a problem. 53:04.150 --> 53:07.800 But we hope that someone will find that one particularly useful. 53:07.800 --> 53:10.320 It's not something we've investigated greatly, 53:10.320 --> 53:12.050 and I think we need more data. 53:12.050 --> 53:15.710 And then, one can also look at things such as works, 53:15.710 --> 53:20.520 markers of illegality, so you could look at your searches to work 53:20.520 --> 53:24.690 in Darnton's illegal corpus or on the papal index 53:24.690 --> 53:29.570 or Joseph's index and so for the search. 53:29.570 --> 53:33.130 In a sense, this is our way with dealing with the key problem, 53:33.130 --> 53:37.940 the problem I want to say thank you, Mark, for so destroying our faith 53:37.940 --> 53:39.490 in the representativeness. 53:39.490 --> 53:41.300 It's a forge of discovery for both of us, 53:41.300 --> 53:43.960 but in a sense Mark was entering the data and he got onto some 53:43.960 --> 53:46.930 of these problems; therefore, sooner than I did. 53:46.930 --> 53:50.510 And that's really why we decided to write the books we originally did 53:50.510 --> 53:52.380 because he started out as the Enlightenment scholar 53:52.380 --> 53:54.300 and I started a book scholar. 53:54.300 --> 53:57.650 But I was categorizing all these works and looking at them, 53:57.650 --> 54:03.600 so now the big problem even more for me than him, is what do we do 54:03.600 --> 54:06.050 in the light of our shattered faith 54:06.050 --> 54:10.200 in the representativeness of the STN archives? 54:10.200 --> 54:12.010 We've revolutionized our understanding 54:12.010 --> 54:13.720 of the European book trade, 54:13.720 --> 54:16.710 and I think that will carry my book forward as well as Mark's, 54:16.710 --> 54:21.860 but there is a real problem in getting beyond the local. 54:21.860 --> 54:22.940 And it's important I guess, 54:22.940 --> 54:27.640 that I do that to make Mark's work get the attention it deserves more 54:27.640 --> 54:31.430 broadly so people don't pigeonhole it as just another STN book, 54:31.430 --> 54:35.610 because I don't think it is for a minute. 54:35.610 --> 54:39.680 So in other words, if the STN was a distantly Swiss printing house, 54:39.680 --> 54:43.100 how much can it tell us about wider Enlightenment culture? 54:43.100 --> 54:45.420 Now, some of these options have only been available for a week, 54:45.420 --> 54:49.230 and I've been grappling, sweating, blogged over this question. 54:49.230 --> 54:54.390 It had been bothering me for many months since we reversed the books, 54:54.390 --> 54:55.670 particularly as I began to hear 54:55.670 --> 54:57.390 about what Mark was putting into his drafts. 54:57.390 --> 55:02.670 Our first part of the answer was to develop the new options, 55:02.670 --> 55:06.720 compensating the problems in our data to enable us and other scholars 55:06.720 --> 55:09.860 to better interpret it, and we hope that that will lead us 55:09.860 --> 55:13.460 to draw wider representative, and comparative insights. 55:13.460 --> 55:15.340 To illustrate that point, 55:15.340 --> 55:20.350 I now intend to examine how our option menus can give us a more 55:20.350 --> 55:23.710 nuanced and we hope more representative view of two things 55:23.710 --> 55:26.510 that we promised in our title today. [Mumbling voice] 55:26.510 --> 55:38.090 55:38.090 --> 55:40.230 >> So banned books in Enlightenment. 55:40.230 --> 55:44.110 Let us start with the contours of the illegal trade. 55:44.110 --> 55:46.750 But how is this to be defined? 55:46.750 --> 55:51.690 The database as you've just seen, offers us a number of measures. 55:51.690 --> 55:53.340 But we could do worse than concentrate 55:53.340 --> 55:57.380 on Darnton's corpus of highly illegal works. 55:57.380 --> 55:59.750 We might also be tempted if we do this, 55:59.750 --> 56:04.220 to compare his bestsellers lists based on booksellers orders, 56:04.220 --> 56:08.050 with our own table of what the STN actually supplied, 56:08.050 --> 56:11.570 and if we do this -- I am going to need to move back to the slide show 56:11.570 --> 56:20.660 that somehow has been taking out, so we'll just push that forward. 56:20.660 --> 56:25.850 You can see our top 10 versus Darnton's top 10. 56:25.850 --> 56:29.230 The two lists, as it is I think immediately apparent, 56:29.230 --> 56:30.700 are very different. 56:30.700 --> 56:34.450 Indeed, they have only two works in common. 56:34.450 --> 56:39.070 In contrast to Darnton's top 10, ours consist primarily of works 56:39.070 --> 56:44.230 by serious and often philosophic writers, whereas Darnton's is headed 56:44.230 --> 56:49.370 by a variety of things, but one associates his work partly 56:49.370 --> 56:53.920 with discovering scandalous works and pornographic works, 56:53.920 --> 56:57.280 but we also have clearly have some important philosopher, 56:57.280 --> 57:00.210 Dolbach, Reynaud, and so forth. Why are the two so different? 57:00.210 --> 57:02.980 57:02.980 --> 57:07.720 Primarily, it's because ours is chock-full of commissioned editions, 57:07.720 --> 57:13.200 such as l'asin d'maison's contract conjugal, a work with no sales 57:13.200 --> 57:16.870 at all in Darnton's corpus, and the works of the young philosophe 57:16.870 --> 57:19.890 and future revolutionary, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. 57:19.890 --> 57:25.080 Such works were frequently unique in their STN editions, and hence they 57:25.080 --> 57:28.980 and their authors are overrepresented in our statistics 57:28.980 --> 57:31.880 as a proportion of the wider trade. 57:31.880 --> 57:34.950 We might, therefore, decide to exclude 57:34.950 --> 57:39.640 such commissioned works using our options menu, and if we do that, 57:39.640 --> 57:43.780 we get a somewhat different bestsellers table. 57:43.780 --> 57:48.510 The works in blue are also in Darnton's top ones, 57:48.510 --> 57:53.240 so now we have six of them in common and I've also recorded 57:53.240 --> 57:55.960 which ones appeared in our previous table 57:55.960 --> 58:00.850 58:00.850 --> 58:02.770 58:02.770 --> 58:07.250 Among the heavyweight works of Raynal, Voltaire and Linguet 58:07.250 --> 58:10.870 in our table, we now see some of Darnton's bestsellers then, 58:10.870 --> 58:12.870 including a scandalous political biography, 58:12.870 --> 58:16.920 the scandalous political biography, the anecdotes du Madame du Barry, 58:16.920 --> 58:21.070 his futuristic fantasy, [titling in French], "The Year 2440," 58:21.070 --> 58:22.490 and pornography [titling in French]. 58:22.490 --> 58:30.240 But we still have STN editions dominating the topmost Stratter, 58:30.240 --> 58:33.510 albeit works more genuinely popular and better known 58:33.510 --> 58:35.490 than the Contract Conjugal. 58:35.490 --> 58:39.990 Perhaps then, we should exclude STN editions altogether, 58:39.990 --> 58:44.780 and this would produce a list like this, actually slightly less 58:44.780 --> 58:48.090 of parallel to Darnton's top 10. 58:48.090 --> 58:54.230 So this list is much closer, despite that, to Darnton's bestseller table, 58:54.230 --> 58:57.260 at least in tone, hated by a scandalous biography 58:57.260 --> 59:00.330 of Louis XV's mistress and including a French translation 59:00.330 --> 59:04.890 of Moll Flanders alongside three further licentious works. 59:04.890 --> 59:08.740 In fact, it's actually more pornographically inclined 59:08.740 --> 59:10.970 than Darnton's top 10. 59:10.970 --> 59:14.870 And this is arguably, our most representative list 59:14.870 --> 59:17.340 of illegal bestsellers. 59:17.340 --> 59:23.290 But how significant was this illegal sector and how was it structured? 59:23.290 --> 59:25.870 Well, here is my chance to name drop -- 59:25.870 --> 59:29.930 Carol Armbruster, and thank her once more for inviting us -- 59:29.930 --> 59:33.800 because she edited a book that contains an essay 59:33.800 --> 59:38.530 by the French cultural historical Roger Chartier, who was brave enough 59:38.530 --> 59:42.060 to estimate the illegal sector at 50 percent 59:42.060 --> 59:45.860 of the entire 18th century French book trade. 59:45.860 --> 59:50.110 This, when combined with Darnton's and indeed now our own statistics, 59:50.110 --> 59:54.830 might lead the unwary to assume that 18th century France was awash 59:54.830 --> 59:59.980 with pornography and graphic accounts of the royal sex life. 59:59.980 --> 1:00:03.390 But illegal covers a multitude of sins. 1:00:03.390 --> 1:00:07.500 It includes many innocuous titles published outside the formal 1:00:07.500 --> 1:00:11.340 channels of censorship, as well as pirated foreign editions 1:00:11.340 --> 1:00:14.730 of works whose publishing rights, tre delage, 1:00:14.730 --> 1:00:17.030 were held by French booksellers. 1:00:17.030 --> 1:00:20.690 This latter group includes a large proportion 1:00:20.690 --> 1:00:23.930 of Swiss editions sold by the STN. 1:00:23.930 --> 1:00:27.670 Nonetheless, a striking 28 percent of the STN's trade 1:00:27.670 --> 1:00:29.050 with France was composed 1:00:29.050 --> 1:00:34.300 of seriously illegal libertine works listed in Darnton's corpus. 1:00:34.300 --> 1:00:38.120 Illegality clearly matters. 1:00:38.120 --> 1:00:42.570 Perhaps then we should interrogate this illegal sector in the round. 1:00:42.570 --> 1:00:46.800 Here, keyword analysis, using our taxonomies that we've developed, 1:00:46.800 --> 1:00:48.520 is our most useful tool, 1:00:48.520 --> 1:00:52.880 and it produces some slightly unexpected results. 1:00:52.880 --> 1:00:54.610 Here is our keyword rankings. 1:00:54.610 --> 1:00:56.710 I hope they're visible on the screen, 1:00:56.710 --> 1:01:02.890 for works in Darnton's corpus and their sales by the STN. 1:01:02.890 --> 1:01:09.270 At the top of this list is philosophe, our catchall term 1:01:09.270 --> 1:01:13.350 for a traditional Peter Gazda Enlightenment. 1:01:13.350 --> 1:01:17.220 Philosophe under our definition, is characterized 1:01:17.220 --> 1:01:22.270 by religious skepticism, demands for toleration in religion, and humanity 1:01:22.270 --> 1:01:24.930 and often also a representative element 1:01:24.930 --> 1:01:28.790 in the political sphere and criminal punishment. 1:01:28.790 --> 1:01:31.370 Such works comprise two-fifths 1:01:31.370 --> 1:01:35.790 of the illegal sectors sales, 41 percent. 1:01:35.790 --> 1:01:38.840 Clearly, the traditional High Enlightened philosophers 1:01:38.840 --> 1:01:41.190 were important. 1:01:41.190 --> 1:01:46.460 After philosophe on our list comes law, with 24 percent of sales, 1:01:46.460 --> 1:01:51.620 politics at just over 20 percent, religion, a similar level, 1:01:51.620 --> 1:01:56.920 and history, 15.75 percent of sales, and that doesn't include works 1:01:56.920 --> 1:02:00.810 of contemporary politics which we categorized under politics. 1:02:00.810 --> 1:02:05.760 These categories outscore erotic works of 15 and a half percent, 1:02:05.760 --> 1:02:10.450 anticlerical work at just under 11 percent, pornography at 10 percent 1:02:10.450 --> 1:02:13.090 of illegal sales, scandal at 6 percent 1:02:13.090 --> 1:02:18.070 or scandalous works concerning King Louis XV, at 5 percent. 1:02:18.070 --> 1:02:20.750 Of course, if we think it more representative to get rid 1:02:20.750 --> 1:02:23.490 of commissioned words, these figures would change. 1:02:23.490 --> 1:02:26.440 The big loser in this case is law, 1:02:26.440 --> 1:02:29.300 with all of Rousseau's jurist provincial works, 1:02:29.300 --> 1:02:33.560 which tumbles crashing down the table to a mere 8.5 percent 1:02:33.560 --> 1:02:37.280 of sales while numbers for other keywords rise, 1:02:37.280 --> 1:02:39.830 but their order stays much the same. 1:02:39.830 --> 1:02:42.860 Anticlerical and pornographic works now hover either side 1:02:42.860 --> 1:02:44.910 of the 15 percent barrier. 1:02:44.910 --> 1:02:49.160 Religiously sketched coworks account for 19 percent of illegal sales, 1:02:49.160 --> 1:02:54.170 and philosophe for a whopping 45 percent. 1:02:54.170 --> 1:02:59.030 Or we might decide to cut out STN editions altogether. 1:02:59.030 --> 1:03:02.290 This makes considerable sense, for the STN's published output 1:03:02.290 --> 1:03:05.910 of illegal works reveals some marked preferences. 1:03:05.910 --> 1:03:10.510 The STN in fact, printed very little erotica, which accounts 1:03:10.510 --> 1:03:13.480 for just 2 percent of sales of their own editions, 1:03:13.480 --> 1:03:19.600 and not a single work meeting our strict definition of pornography. 1:03:19.600 --> 1:03:23.480 That definition formulated by celebrated French Revolutionary 1:03:23.480 --> 1:03:27.060 and gender historian Lynn Hunt, is limited to works designed 1:03:27.060 --> 1:03:30.600 to cause sexual arousal through the explicit description 1:03:30.600 --> 1:03:33.240 of genitalia or sexual acts. I'm not going to show any pictures. 1:03:33.240 --> 1:03:36.510 1:03:36.510 --> 1:03:42.580 And if we exclude the STN editions to take account of this, 1:03:42.580 --> 1:03:46.500 we get a keyword table that looks like this. 1:03:46.500 --> 1:03:49.040 We now seem to be in territory much more familiar 1:03:49.040 --> 1:03:51.140 to students of the illegal sector. 1:03:51.140 --> 1:03:56.060 Erotic works now account for over one-third of our sample, 35 percent; 1:03:56.060 --> 1:03:59.700 pornography for 22 percent; anticlerical 1:03:59.700 --> 1:04:04.370 and anti-Christian skeptical works, also around 22 percent. 1:04:04.370 --> 1:04:07.550 Obviously there's an overlap between categories. 1:04:07.550 --> 1:04:10.840 Nevertheless, serious philosophe still outsells all 1:04:10.840 --> 1:04:14.150 of these categories at almost 40 percent of these sales, 1:04:14.150 --> 1:04:17.490 and politics, which contains subcategories covering both 1:04:17.490 --> 1:04:21.780 political theory and public affairs, accounts for 30 percent. 1:04:21.780 --> 1:04:25.100 Against this backdrop, perhaps the most surprising discovery is 1:04:25.100 --> 1:04:30.130 that biographical text at 13 percent, denunciations of despotism 1:04:30.130 --> 1:04:33.540 at 12 and three-quarter percent and works on scandal at 12 1:04:33.540 --> 1:04:37.120 and a half percent, are less prevalent 1:04:37.120 --> 1:04:40.270 than we might have imagined. This seamy underbelly 1:04:40.270 --> 1:04:41.680 1:04:41.680 --> 1:04:46.060 of 18th century illegal literature remains worthy of study, 1:04:46.060 --> 1:04:49.780 but it also needs to be kept in a proper perspective. 1:04:49.780 --> 1:04:52.930 Even in the STN archive, pornographic 1:04:52.930 --> 1:04:55.640 and scandalous biographies of the French king 1:04:55.640 --> 1:05:01.450 and his consort only account for at the end of the day, around 3 percent 1:05:01.450 --> 1:05:06.280 and 1.5 percent of total French sales respectively. 1:05:06.280 --> 1:05:12.190 And prior to 1789, the STN sold no works combining the keywords 1:05:12.190 --> 1:05:15.610 1:05:15.610 --> 1:05:16.810 1:05:16.810 --> 1:05:19.390 Moreover, the majority of publishers 1:05:19.390 --> 1:05:22.610 who supplied the French book trade were based inside France 1:05:22.610 --> 1:05:25.170 and probably dealt far less heavily 1:05:25.170 --> 1:05:28.860 in seriously illegal works than the STN. 1:05:28.860 --> 1:05:33.600 The STN figures undoubtedly exaggerate the illegal traffic 1:05:33.600 --> 1:05:38.240 several times over, thus French ancien regime decided he was not 1:05:38.240 --> 1:05:41.990 saturated in pornography and desacrilizing works, 1:05:41.990 --> 1:05:46.400 although obviously we ignore their existence at our peril. 1:05:46.400 --> 1:05:46.800 [comments]. So much for the illegal sector. 1:05:46.800 --> 1:05:48.830 1:05:48.830 --> 1:05:57.790 How then can keyword analysis 1:05:57.790 --> 1:06:02.510 of the entire STN archive aid our understanding of the shape 1:06:02.510 --> 1:06:04.700 of popular reading and print culture 1:06:04.700 --> 1:06:08.110 in the Francophone Enlightenment more generally? 1:06:08.110 --> 1:06:10.210 Obviously we need to remember Mark's caveats 1:06:10.210 --> 1:06:12.270 about the Swiss nature of the archive. 1:06:12.270 --> 1:06:14.030 For example, we look in vain 1:06:14.030 --> 1:06:17.970 for Lyonnais among the scientific writers in the database, 1:06:17.970 --> 1:06:22.660 in contrast relatively minor, Swiss luminaries, except if you're 1:06:22.660 --> 1:06:27.020 in Switzerland, of course, such as Charles Bonnet, Albrecht Haller, 1:06:27.020 --> 1:06:29.930 and Tisza are ubiquitous, 1:06:29.930 --> 1:06:33.000 We thus need to establish whether our keyword data is broadly 1:06:33.000 --> 1:06:36.660 representative and reflects more general trends. 1:06:36.660 --> 1:06:38.730 This presents us with a problem. 1:06:38.730 --> 1:06:41.530 Previous studies of reading taste, such as those based 1:06:41.530 --> 1:06:46.030 on library records, have biases significant to the STN data. 1:06:46.030 --> 1:06:48.890 They may be geared towards the richest sections of society. 1:06:48.890 --> 1:06:51.630 The illegal may be concealed, and so on. 1:06:51.630 --> 1:06:56.270 They do not, therefore, provide a reliable standard for comparison. 1:06:56.270 --> 1:06:58.080 Eventually we hope to address this problem 1:06:58.080 --> 1:07:00.960 by incorporating the new datasets Mark mentioned. 1:07:00.960 --> 1:07:06.170 For now, we believe, we can find complementary data 1:07:06.170 --> 1:07:08.330 in the database itself. 1:07:08.330 --> 1:07:11.710 By dividing up the STN's import trade, the books they bought, 1:07:11.710 --> 1:07:15.730 we can determine whether the French language book market addressed 1:07:15.730 --> 1:07:18.410 broadly the same concerns across Europe. 1:07:18.410 --> 1:07:22.130 And we believe that our database dataset, is large enough 1:07:22.130 --> 1:07:25.600 to support some general conclusions here. 1:07:25.600 --> 1:07:27.760 An examination of the volume of keywords sold 1:07:27.760 --> 1:07:30.670 by putative edition type suggests 1:07:30.670 --> 1:07:33.870 that the Swiss output differed little from the rest of Europe 1:07:33.870 --> 1:07:35.530 in terms of subject matter and that 1:07:35.530 --> 1:07:39.160 within Switzerland the STN output did not deviate greatly 1:07:39.160 --> 1:07:40.860 from the norm. A very complex table here. 1:07:40.860 --> 1:07:43.490 1:07:43.490 --> 1:07:49.420 It ranks the top 12 keywords for the STN sales of Swiss works 1:07:49.420 --> 1:07:58.250 by other publishers, the second column, and then contrasts them 1:07:58.250 --> 1:08:00.110 with other edition types, 1:08:00.110 --> 1:08:03.580 both in terms of absolute ranking and percentage sales. 1:08:03.580 --> 1:08:06.770 It's color-coded, according to a rainbow pattern, 1:08:06.770 --> 1:08:09.670 with red for the highest selling keyword in each column 1:08:09.670 --> 1:08:13.230 to show more effectively which words sold best. 1:08:13.230 --> 1:08:17.170 Gray is anything in the top 20 but outside the top 12 1:08:17.170 --> 1:08:23.760 on the Swiss non-STN editions list. So what does it reveal? 1:08:23.760 --> 1:08:25.490 1:08:25.490 --> 1:08:33.060 Broadly, that the top dozen non-STN keywords and those 1:08:33.060 --> 1:08:37.090 for all non-Swiss editions were broadly similar. 1:08:37.090 --> 1:08:40.880 The top 3 keywords appear in identical order on both tables, 1:08:40.880 --> 1:08:43.380 and 9 keywords appear on both lists. 1:08:43.380 --> 1:08:45.890 This is the third and the fourth column. 1:08:45.890 --> 1:08:48.040 In the non-Swiss rankings, the lowest ranked 1:08:48.040 --> 1:08:54.040 at the top 12 Swiss keywords is science, which appears at number 18. 1:08:54.040 --> 1:08:56.180 Works of religiosity, our catchall term 1:08:56.180 --> 1:08:58.850 for works expressing a Christian purpose and works 1:08:58.850 --> 1:09:00.700 with the keyword Christianity, 1:09:00.700 --> 1:09:04.570 are also outside the non-Swiss top dozen but for a clear reason. 1:09:04.570 --> 1:09:08.570 The STN were a Protestant publishing house in a Protestant state. 1:09:08.570 --> 1:09:11.570 They did not tend to import religious books from Catholic states 1:09:11.570 --> 1:09:17.010 such as France, Belgium, Avion, Italy, and much of southern Germany. 1:09:17.010 --> 1:09:19.600 The fifth column, listing sales of STN editions 1:09:19.600 --> 1:09:21.770 by keyword, is also revealing. 1:09:21.770 --> 1:09:26.030 It suggests that the STN tended to publish across a broad front. 1:09:26.030 --> 1:09:29.730 This helps to explain the lower sales percentages 1:09:29.730 --> 1:09:33.150 on almost every row of the STN editions column. 1:09:33.150 --> 1:09:34.530 The personal preferences 1:09:34.530 --> 1:09:39.140 of the publishers may also have been involved here. 1:09:39.140 --> 1:09:42.980 After some early run-ins with the local clergy, for example, 1:09:42.980 --> 1:09:46.410 the STN apparently decided to produce less philosophe 1:09:46.410 --> 1:09:48.810 than the general run of Swiss publishers. 1:09:48.810 --> 1:09:51.720 They also appear to have printed less copies of scientific 1:09:51.720 --> 1:09:54.560 and biographical works than their compatriots. 1:09:54.560 --> 1:09:57.940 I'm sorry, we're going to finish in about four minutes, I should think. 1:09:57.940 --> 1:10:00.950 Finally, the STN seems to have printed less works 1:10:00.950 --> 1:10:04.060 of creative literature than other publishers. 1:10:04.060 --> 1:10:06.510 However, they dealt rather more heavily in drama, 1:10:06.510 --> 1:10:10.780 not least because during the 1780s, they became the pet publishers 1:10:10.780 --> 1:10:13.980 of Louis Sebastian Mercier, one of the most prominent 1:10:13.980 --> 1:10:17.070 and creative forces in the popular literary market, 1:10:17.070 --> 1:10:20.470 who gave them several important plays. 1:10:20.470 --> 1:10:23.460 The phenomenal success of Mercier's Tabloid de Paris, 1:10:23.460 --> 1:10:28.310 which markedly wasn't a play, of which the STN sold 13 1:10:28.310 --> 1:10:33.350 to 15,000 copies of each volume, also helps to explain the prominence 1:10:33.350 --> 1:10:38.230 of the keyword France among sales of STN editions. 1:10:38.230 --> 1:10:41.880 Yet despite such divergences the overwhelming impression 1:10:41.880 --> 1:10:44.820 of the keyword table is that the same subjects, 1:10:44.820 --> 1:10:49.480 genres and ideological tendencies predominate in every column, 1:10:49.480 --> 1:10:53.690 often with remarkably similar percentage scores, too. 1:10:53.690 --> 1:10:59.020 Occasionally significant divergences exist but they're usually explicable 1:10:59.020 --> 1:11:03.550 by regional religious or cultural differences or as the outcome 1:11:03.550 --> 1:11:08.170 of very small datasets such as the international editions, 1:11:08.170 --> 1:11:11.470 as books published by publishers in more than one country. 1:11:11.470 --> 1:11:16.050 So our statistical evidence suggests to us 1:11:16.050 --> 1:11:19.280 that we can use the STN archive to take the pulse 1:11:19.280 --> 1:11:21.920 of the late Enlightenment within limits, 1:11:21.920 --> 1:11:25.300 despite its Franco-Swiss orientation. 1:11:25.300 --> 1:11:28.040 Dorinda Outram has conceived of the Enlightenment 1:11:28.040 --> 1:11:31.150 as a set of capsules of debate. 1:11:31.150 --> 1:11:34.960 Our database allows us to track the lifeblood of many, 1:11:34.960 --> 1:11:36.830 if not all of those debates, 1:11:36.830 --> 1:11:41.640 as well as some wider intellectual and reading trends. 1:11:41.640 --> 1:11:45.480 It permits us to trace the waning sales and presumable influence 1:11:45.480 --> 1:11:50.390 of Voltaire after his death in 1778 or to measure the failing demand 1:11:50.390 --> 1:11:53.570 of both scandalous libel and the religiously skeptical works 1:11:53.570 --> 1:11:56.260 of the Dulbach corpus in the 15 years prior 1:11:56.260 --> 1:12:02.060 to the French Revolution; to track the rise of a new wave of writers 1:12:02.060 --> 1:12:07.350 in the 1780s, shown in this slide and measure their shifting concerns; 1:12:07.350 --> 1:12:10.770 to trace the dissemination of English and German novels 1:12:10.770 --> 1:12:14.920 in French translation; or to explore the colonization 1:12:14.920 --> 1:12:18.950 of new literary genres by Christian writers in their struggles 1:12:18.950 --> 1:12:23.200 against atheism and irreligion as Mark has already plugged his book, 1:12:23.200 --> 1:12:30.080 I won't do so again there; to witness the heat and excitement 1:12:30.080 --> 1:12:32.530 in this next set of graphs, 1:12:32.530 --> 1:12:35.660 generated by Necker's sensational publication 1:12:35.660 --> 1:12:37.480 of the French government accounts, 1:12:37.480 --> 1:12:40.610 discussions of which dominate our bestseller tables; 1:12:40.610 --> 1:12:44.850 in fact the top six words on the 1781 bestseller list relate 1:12:44.850 --> 1:12:47.320 to Necker and French finances. 1:12:47.320 --> 1:12:53.360 Or we can reconstruct the market for, popular market 1:12:53.360 --> 1:12:56.590 for medical books, encountering the wonderful 1:12:56.590 --> 1:13:02.040 and still topical sounding anarchie medicinal, medical anarchy, 1:13:02.040 --> 1:13:05.690 with all its calls for more regulation 1:13:05.690 --> 1:13:07.480 of the medical profession. 1:13:07.480 --> 1:13:13.680 Ortisos' ave la purpos le sonte, or celebrated treatise as well 1:13:13.680 --> 1:13:17.490 on onanism, which were rejecting traditional Christian arguments, 1:13:17.490 --> 1:13:22.580 still concludes that masturbation is destructive of human health. 1:13:22.580 --> 1:13:26.800 Finally, without even proceeding beyond his sensational title, 1:13:26.800 --> 1:13:29.810 which I have translated here for you to read for yourselves, 1:13:29.810 --> 1:13:32.700 we can revel in Theodore Rea's struggles 1:13:32.700 --> 1:13:35.380 with his once beloved Ursula. 1:13:35.380 --> 1:13:42.580 Thus, the French book trade database offers a digital pathway 1:13:42.580 --> 1:13:45.500 through the cultural life and fluctuating tastes 1:13:45.500 --> 1:13:48.340 and preoccupations of the final decades 1:13:48.340 --> 1:13:52.240 of the European Enlightenment, while imparting fresh insights 1:13:52.240 --> 1:13:55.840 into its heroism, novelty, complexity, 1:13:55.840 --> 1:13:59.850 ambiguity, folly and human color. 1:13:59.850 --> 1:14:03.290 And its failed statistics may sometimes be seen as a crude 1:14:03.290 --> 1:14:06.540 and reductive means of measuring the influence of a test, 1:14:06.540 --> 1:14:09.560 they remain a useful indicator nonetheless, 1:14:09.560 --> 1:14:13.830 and sometimes the best tool at our disposal. 1:14:13.830 --> 1:14:17.050 In an age when books were an expensive commodity 1:14:17.050 --> 1:14:20.310 and cheap editions like those pedaled by the STN were bought 1:14:20.310 --> 1:14:25.520 for use, sales statistics can help us to recapture the concerns, 1:14:25.520 --> 1:14:29.920 ideas and priorities of ordinary readers. 1:14:29.920 --> 1:14:33.220 Such readers became important historical actors 1:14:33.220 --> 1:14:37.170 in the emerging public sphere and age of revolutions 1:14:37.170 --> 1:14:39.450 but remain a problem for the historian 1:14:39.450 --> 1:14:43.840 because they usually left little trace of how their opinions changed 1:14:43.840 --> 1:14:47.520 in the intellectual maelstrom of the Enlightenment. 1:14:47.520 --> 1:14:50.120 We hope our database provides new 1:14:50.120 --> 1:14:54.530 and powerful digital means to address this problem. 1:14:54.530 --> 1:14:56.510 Thank you all very much. [Applause] 1:14:56.510 --> 1:15:10.300 1:15:10.300 --> 1:15:13.060 >> Well, thank you, both Simon and Mark 1:15:13.060 --> 1:15:17.270 for a truly thundering presentation. 1:15:17.270 --> 1:15:22.510 Before I forget, Mark Dimunation who had to leave, 1:15:22.510 --> 1:15:24.410 wanted to remind all SHARP participants 1:15:24.410 --> 1:15:29.880 that there is an open house tomorrow between 11 and 1, 1:15:29.880 --> 1:15:31.340 and he encourages you to come. 1:15:31.340 --> 1:15:35.390 There is additional room available, and he hopes to see you. 1:15:35.390 --> 1:15:39.610 So that is 11 to 1 on Thursday, tomorrow, 1:15:39.610 --> 1:15:46.920 and that's in the Jefferson Building, Room 239. 1:15:46.920 --> 1:15:49.970 We've had a very nice, with lots of details, 1:15:49.970 --> 1:15:52.750 very nice presentation with lots of details. 1:15:52.750 --> 1:15:56.490 Again, I encourage you to take a look at the books 1:15:56.490 --> 1:15:58.030 that we've brought from Rare Book. 1:15:58.030 --> 1:16:01.430 This is a very small sampling but they are titles 1:16:01.430 --> 1:16:02.910 that you've just heard about, 1:16:02.910 --> 1:16:05.490 and so you'll see what those books actually like, 1:16:05.490 --> 1:16:09.900 and you can imagination all that dissemination and popular reading 1:16:09.900 --> 1:16:13.240 of materials that are here. 1:16:13.240 --> 1:16:16.150 We've had a rather lengthy presentation, 1:16:16.150 --> 1:16:19.370 but I think our speakers might be able to take a couple questions. 1:16:19.370 --> 1:16:21.410 Is that right? >> Yeah. 1:16:21.410 --> 1:16:21.810 1:16:21.810 --> 1:16:22.730 >> Good, good. Tom? 1:16:22.730 --> 1:16:23.630 1:16:23.630 --> 1:16:34.350 [Inaudible question from the audience] 1:16:34.350 --> 1:16:36.100 >> So the question was what are the beginning 1:16:36.100 --> 1:16:37.810 and ending years of the dataset? 1:16:37.810 --> 1:16:48.910 The STN began trading in 1769, and ended trading in 1794. 1:16:48.910 --> 1:16:55.190 Although there are some complications after about 1787, 1:16:55.190 --> 1:17:00.250 the sources are less complete than before. 1:17:00.250 --> 1:17:03.680 So we have completed the entire account books 1:17:03.680 --> 1:17:09.170 but after 1787 it's certainly a less complete dataset, 1:17:09.170 --> 1:17:11.320 and therefore the pre-revolutionary crisis, 1:17:11.320 --> 1:17:13.510 French Revolutionary books aren't included. 1:17:13.510 --> 1:17:25.040 [Inaudible question from the audience] 1:17:25.040 --> 1:17:27.460 >> The question is-- 1:17:27.460 --> 1:17:30.490 >> There are some interesting thoughts about Rousseau, 1:17:30.490 --> 1:17:34.590 and that's one issue we've got, because previous studies based 1:17:34.590 --> 1:17:39.450 on library records and so forth, found Rousseau rather missing. 1:17:39.450 --> 1:17:44.210 He dies early in the piece and he's not producing big works 1:17:44.210 --> 1:17:48.460 in such a way, so it's possible that some of the demand has disappeared. 1:17:48.460 --> 1:17:53.780 The STN volumes of Rousseau are almost entirely literary volumes, 1:17:53.780 --> 1:17:56.250 his great political works on there. 1:17:56.250 --> 1:17:58.800 Presumably demand was saturated earlier, 1:17:58.800 --> 1:18:03.400 and maybe demand was much lower than we think at the time, 1:18:03.400 --> 1:18:08.980 although there are phantoms editions around. 1:18:08.980 --> 1:18:12.570 What we have also found is the profit doesn't seem 1:18:12.570 --> 1:18:17.280 to be welcome in his own country. 1:18:17.280 --> 1:18:20.750 I've done quite a bit of working looking at the Enlightenment authors 1:18:20.750 --> 1:18:24.300 and themes and where they sold, usually. 1:18:24.300 --> 1:18:28.790 I just use a tripartite, France, Switzerland, rest of Europe, 1:18:28.790 --> 1:18:32.780 way of dividing that up, because the individual countries in the reset 1:18:32.780 --> 1:18:34.800 of Europe the figures are a bit small, 1:18:34.800 --> 1:18:38.340 unfortunately to be representative on that level. 1:18:38.340 --> 1:18:42.480 And what we find in the STN dataset is 1:18:42.480 --> 1:18:47.870 that the Swiss are buying very little Rousseau. 1:18:47.870 --> 1:18:50.490 Presumably he's still persona non grata, 1:18:50.490 --> 1:18:54.640 even that the Swiss are buying very little, you'd expect the French 1:18:54.640 --> 1:18:56.980 to be buying a bit more of their share, but they're not. 1:18:56.980 --> 1:18:59.040 The French are also buying less Rousseau 1:18:59.040 --> 1:19:02.260 than other philosophy, other philosophe. 1:19:02.260 --> 1:19:05.190 Although I stress that this isn't Rousseau's literary work. 1:19:05.190 --> 1:19:11.260 The rest of Europe is buying them in quite large numbers, comparatively. 1:19:11.260 --> 1:19:18.110 So I think that the answer is either that the French and Swiss are not 1:19:18.110 --> 1:19:25.670 as key on Rousseau as the rest of Europe, or that we're looking 1:19:25.670 --> 1:19:27.870 at a dissemination pattern and we may need to do this 1:19:27.870 --> 1:19:31.640 with other authors, whereby the vogue type begins in France 1:19:31.640 --> 1:19:36.080 and Switzerland, and because Rousseau dies in 1778, 1:19:36.080 --> 1:19:38.920 because he's not publishing his great works in the 1770s, 1:19:38.920 --> 1:19:42.110 French and Swiss demand has already been sated. 1:19:42.110 --> 1:19:44.650 So there's two possibilities there and I don't know if we're going 1:19:44.650 --> 1:19:46.670 to be able to get to the bottom of that 1:19:46.670 --> 1:19:48.910 in the short term unfortunately. 1:19:48.910 --> 1:19:50.750 There's is a blip in Rousseau's sales. 1:19:50.750 --> 1:19:55.780 They do go up massively in about 1791, too, 1:19:55.780 --> 1:20:00.310 and our dataset is very small, but that's suggestive that it is moment 1:20:00.310 --> 1:20:02.660 in the Revolution and there's more of them, and I'd like -- 1:20:02.660 --> 1:20:04.530 I've not actually done the number crunching and see 1:20:04.530 --> 1:20:08.510 which works they are yet, but it's clearly something for investigation. 1:20:08.510 --> 1:20:11.510 And I'm sure we're always going to get asked about Rousseau. 1:20:11.510 --> 1:20:35.260 [Inaudible audience question and inaudible background voices] 1:20:35.260 --> 1:20:42.070 >> Feedback to CAT book trade dot com would be exceptionally welcome. 1:20:42.070 --> 1:20:44.100 1:20:44.100 --> 1:20:45.500 1:20:45.500 --> 1:20:46.560 1:20:46.560 --> 1:20:52.310 >> Do you see your methodology [inaudible] and I'm thinking 1:20:52.310 --> 1:20:57.870 of 19th century British archives, since I've worked with this, 1:20:57.870 --> 1:21:02.130 your methodology being able to be spread, to be used 1:21:02.130 --> 1:21:04.740 but in other places, other times. Would your database be a model? 1:21:04.740 --> 1:21:09.180 1:21:09.180 --> 1:21:10.640 >> We believe that it's a model. We believe -- our initial -- 1:21:10.640 --> 1:21:12.190 1:21:12.190 --> 1:21:16.130 Mark's going to talk about it in much more detail in the plenary, 1:21:16.130 --> 1:21:18.620 which is why I've grabbed the microphone here. 1:21:18.620 --> 1:21:21.730 Thanks for letting me do it. 1:21:21.730 --> 1:21:24.930 Basically from the very beginning we've wanted to expand our dataset 1:21:24.930 --> 1:21:26.800 and think about what else could be used. 1:21:26.800 --> 1:21:31.520 In principle, the methodologies and the structures we've got we think, 1:21:31.520 --> 1:21:35.730 are very, very applicable to other periods. 1:21:35.730 --> 1:21:37.640 Obviously the explosion, 1:21:37.640 --> 1:21:41.170 particularly after mechanized printing in the 19th century, 1:21:41.170 --> 1:21:44.550 begins to mean there's so much material out there, it's difficult. 1:21:44.550 --> 1:21:48.020 And the 18th and 17th centuries you've got more limited books 1:21:48.020 --> 1:21:51.240 and we dream of being able to import say 1:21:51.240 --> 1:21:56.190 if you're doing British things you can import the 18th century 1:21:56.190 --> 1:22:01.410 collections online and the English or titled catalog metadata to try 1:22:01.410 --> 1:22:03.810 to identify books, where we've had to work -- 1:22:03.810 --> 1:22:06.340 we don't have the equivalent in France, 1:22:06.340 --> 1:22:07.580 in the French-speaking world. 1:22:07.580 --> 1:22:12.000 So some things we've had to do very long hand with great difficulty. 1:22:12.000 --> 1:22:15.430 And as you've seen, sometimes we've had -- we didn't -- 1:22:15.430 --> 1:22:19.220 we thought that the archive, our initial investigation 1:22:19.220 --> 1:22:21.540 into the Iran Contra, made you think 1:22:21.540 --> 1:22:24.770 that we'd find books relatively easily 1:22:24.770 --> 1:22:26.640 and that they'd be recorded in a standard way. 1:22:26.640 --> 1:22:29.330 But once you get into the broulliards, they're not. 1:22:29.330 --> 1:22:32.760 So in some cases Mark's had to look at 20 or -- 1:22:32.760 --> 1:22:35.180 sometimes I think 20 ways of recording the same book, 1:22:35.180 --> 1:22:37.120 some of them not immediately apparent. 1:22:37.120 --> 1:22:39.910 We've had to marry them up, and that's taken us an extra year 1:22:39.910 --> 1:22:43.680 and a half of hard work over what we expected. 1:22:43.680 --> 1:22:46.250 I mean, it's remarkable that we're both sane 1:22:46.250 --> 1:22:48.440 after what we've done the last few years. 1:22:48.440 --> 1:22:51.990 So always allow extra time in your project. 1:22:51.990 --> 1:22:55.670 But yes, we think it's transferable. 1:22:55.670 --> 1:22:58.470 We certainly are looking and thinking about other archives. 1:22:58.470 --> 1:23:03.960 We think Britain may be a test bed case because of these good sources, 1:23:03.960 --> 1:23:08.030 and one of the things we've got to address ourselves is do we want 1:23:08.030 --> 1:23:11.700 to keep working up our dataset on France, do we want to bring 1:23:11.700 --> 1:23:14.350 in the English-speaking world, how many collaborators 1:23:14.350 --> 1:23:18.370 across plays do we do, how do we make these things accessible 1:23:18.370 --> 1:23:22.480 but also try to integrate everyone who's doing things into a network. 1:23:22.480 --> 1:23:25.650 We're immodest about the work. It wasn't us. 1:23:25.650 --> 1:23:26.720 1:23:26.720 --> 1:23:30.650 We were grilled for many, many hours by our original database designer. 1:23:30.650 --> 1:23:34.000 She took a very long time to do the project, get the thing to us. 1:23:34.000 --> 1:23:35.780 We were panicking about how long she took, 1:23:35.780 --> 1:23:38.510 but what she produced was a Rolls Royce that had everything. 1:23:38.510 --> 1:23:41.370 If she hadn't done that, we'd have fallen flat on our faces 1:23:41.370 --> 1:23:43.000 in this project and we wouldn't be looking 1:23:43.000 --> 1:23:44.760 at doing things moving forward. 1:23:44.760 --> 1:23:47.350 She was just the right person at the right moment, 1:23:47.350 --> 1:23:52.010 but sometimes it didn't feel like that early on, did it. 1:23:52.010 --> 1:23:54.570 1:23:54.570 --> 1:23:57.370 1:23:57.370 --> 1:23:58.910 >> No. >> One more question? 1:23:58.910 --> 1:23:59.540 1:23:59.540 --> 1:24:00.510 Cindy? 1:24:00.510 --> 1:24:40.040 [Inaudible question from the audience] 1:24:40.040 --> 1:24:41.210 >> Why Google Books? 1:24:41.210 --> 1:24:46.210 It's Simon who came up with the title. 1:24:46.210 --> 1:24:50.960 Certainly Google Books made an enormous difference to our project, 1:24:50.960 --> 1:24:56.900 and I was supposed to spend 9 months in Paris categorizing these books. 1:24:56.900 --> 1:25:02.420 And because I preferred to live in Neuchatel, I managed to get Simon 1:25:02.420 --> 1:25:08.200 to categorize them from his living room and from his study in Leeds, 1:25:08.200 --> 1:25:12.830 and I got to go deeper into the archives in Neuchatel. 1:25:12.830 --> 1:25:17.750 So Google Books did save our bacon, 1:25:17.750 --> 1:25:22.160 as well as also we have rather available 1:25:22.160 --> 1:25:24.150 in the database they have Google Books links free 1:25:24.150 --> 1:25:28.800 to all the actual exact editions where they're available, 1:25:28.800 --> 1:25:36.540 as well as Gallic and a couple of other sources where it's possible. 1:25:36.540 --> 1:25:42.560 So if you find any -- if the editions are online and we know 1:25:42.560 --> 1:25:44.430 about them, the link is there. 1:25:44.430 --> 1:25:49.480 And as a next step we would like another direction rather 1:25:49.480 --> 1:25:54.140 than just expanding the data, that we might go in with this, is to try 1:25:54.140 --> 1:25:57.330 and get this better integrated into library catalogs. 1:25:57.330 --> 1:26:01.230 There's nothing saying the Library of Congress catalog 1:26:01.230 --> 1:26:02.890 or in Google Books or -- 1:26:02.890 --> 1:26:07.770 these editions couldn't visualize the dissemination of a certain book 1:26:07.770 --> 1:26:10.610 within the catalog, within the services 1:26:10.610 --> 1:26:13.990 that various institutions want to add now. 1:26:13.990 --> 1:26:15.490 So that's the Google Books question. 1:26:15.490 --> 1:26:19.190 The second one was booksellers archives. 1:26:19.190 --> 1:26:21.880 It would be lovely if we have some. 1:26:21.880 --> 1:26:27.610 I'm not -- yeah, I'm not aware of any that would interact 1:26:27.610 --> 1:26:30.690 with our personal dataset. 1:26:30.690 --> 1:26:35.220 Obviously it's a question of limited -- of -- 1:26:35.220 --> 1:26:38.740 because it's potentially so expandable it's a question 1:26:38.740 --> 1:26:41.090 of linking things in with stuff we've already got. 1:26:41.090 --> 1:26:47.540 There are other printer's archives that we know of for this period. 1:26:47.540 --> 1:26:49.730 Booksellers archives would be very interesting, 1:26:49.730 --> 1:26:51.990 so if we have any that overlap. 1:26:51.990 --> 1:26:55.950 And the other point, everything we're doing is we're trying to make 1:26:55.950 --> 1:26:59.650 as open source as possible and for others to use, so if people want 1:26:59.650 --> 1:27:05.080 to use this technology, if they have a booksellers archive they know of 1:27:05.080 --> 1:27:06.520 and they think it would be appropriate, 1:27:06.520 --> 1:27:10.680 then it's available for others to use. 1:27:10.680 --> 1:27:16.570 >> Well, we will conclude now. I'll give everybody some time 1:27:16.570 --> 1:27:18.240 1:27:18.240 --> 1:27:22.380 to absorb everything we have just heard, and an opportunity also 1:27:22.380 --> 1:27:26.860 to take advantage of this access, the access to explore on your own, 1:27:26.860 --> 1:27:29.640 to manipulate the database yourself, 1:27:29.640 --> 1:27:33.890 and to look forward to your final product. 1:27:33.890 --> 1:27:35.270 And thank you very much 1:27:35.270 --> 1:27:40.170 in eliminating abducir into the Enlightenment. 1:27:40.170 --> 1:27:50.220 Thank you very much. 1:27:50.220 --> 1:27:53.870 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. 1:27:53.870 --> 1:27:56.210 1:27:56.210 --> 1:28:01.210