Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 795.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2020-04-22 08:45:22+00:00
        From: Justin Tonra 
        Subject: Special Issue on Book History and Digital Humanities: Eighteenth-Century Studies journal

Eighteenth-Century Studies
Special Issue on Book History and Digital Humanities

In their 2014 Book History review essay on the state of the discipline of
digital scholarship and digital studies, Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner
commented that "[w]hile popular imagination has 'the digital' opposed to 'the
book,' the two are now inextricably linked." [1] Scholars of the long eighteenth
century have long been cognizant of the ways in which media and technologies of
publication and circulation have shaped and conveyed texts, both within the
period and in subsequent times. Compared to other periods, the long eighteenth
century has had the advantage of large portions of its printed cultural record
being made available in facsimile format-first microfilm, then digital-for many
decades. Have the familiarity and benefits of Eighteenth Century Collections
Online obscured the mediated nature of our encounters with those texts? Is the
importance of digital media for our work concealed in the course of our
immaterial engagement with surrogate images of the period's books? This special
issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies invites new work which investigates some of
the many intersections between book history, digital humanities, and the long
eighteenth century.

Since 2014, the prevalence of these intersections within the field has become
more apparent, with increasing numbers of papers and panels addressing these
topics at the annual meetings of societies such as ACECS, BSECS, and SHARP. The
Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison dedicated a conference-"BH and DH"-to this area in 2017, and
holds a Book History and Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Rare Book Schools
in Charlottesville and London offer a growing suite of courses that address the
junctures between book history and digital humanities, while Texas Tech offers a
graduate certificate in the joint fields. In our libraries, classrooms, and
scholarly publications, an increasing connection between these areas is evident.

A broad view of recent work reveals a number of significant projects and trends
that are unimaginable without a purview that accommodates both the book and the
digital. Digital catalogues that employ and exploit the rich bibliographical
metadata of the analogue cultural record: Stationers' Register Online,
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker, and the development of legacy projects like the
English Short Title Catalogue. Spatially-oriented projects which map the terrain
of the period in diverse ways: Mapping the Republic of Letters, Atlas of Early
Printing, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794, Mapping
Colonial Americas Publishing Project. Digital archives and editions devoted to
the work of William Blake, the Shelley-Godwin Circle, Thomas Gray, Hannah More,
James Macpherson, Anne Finch, and many more. Significant means and methods of
scholarly communication including Eighteenth Century Questions, The 18th-Century
Common, and-yes-Twitter.

Contributions to this special issue may consider a wide range of digital and
bookish interventions in the scholarship of the long eighteenth century. How has
the digital age facilitated a long-standing desire to enumerate and analyze
books? What can we learn from digital facsimiles of eighteenth-century books;
what do we lose? What opportunities does distant reading offer to understanding
the cultural record of the century at scale? How can digitization help us to
visualize and analyze the materiality and structure of books? Where can book
history and digital humanities pedagogies aid us in teaching the literature,
history, and culture of the period?

This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies provides an opportunity to
consider the status of this nexus within scholarship of the long eighteenth
century: where and how the book and the digital meet in our study of the
literature, history, and culture of the period; how the two media blend and
clash in the accounts that we forge; how their affordances enable us to view the
period afresh.

Topics should address the literature, history, and/or culture of the long
eighteenth century (1660-1830), and may include, but are not limited to:

* Histories of mediation and/or digitization
* Quantitative methods in book history and digital humanities
* Studies of reading in book history and digital humanities
* Physicality and materiality of the book
* Creation and exploitation of metadata
* Digital scholarly editing and editions
* Book history and digital humanities pedagogies
* Distant reading the long eighteenth century
* Creating and using databases and archives
* Historical datasets and information structures
* Libraries, archives, and technology
* Differences between "analogue" and "digital" book history

The journal welcomes new research in papers of 7,500-9,000 words by November 1,
2020. Please submit to ec.studies@unh.edu, and feel free to contact special
issue editor, Justin Tonra (justin.tonra@nuigalway.ie) and journal editor, Sean
Moore (sean.moore@unh.edu) about your ideas for this issue. A detailed list of
submission guidelines can be found on the journal's website:
https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century-studies/author-guidelines

[1] Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, "Digital Scholarship and Digital
Studies: The State of the Discipline," Book History 17, no. 1 (2014): 406-58.
doi:10.1353/bh.2014.0005.

CfP also posted at: https://www.asecs.org/single-post/2020/04/20/Call-for-
Papers-Eighteenth-Century-Studies-Special-Issue

--
Dr Justin Tonra
Lecturer in English
School of English & Creative Arts
National University of Ireland Galway





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