Project blog
The END (Early Novels Database) Project creates super-rich metadata about fiction in English in order to help researchers imagine new histories for the novel. By uniting twenty-first-century database and search technologies with the sensibility of eighteenth-century indexing practices, END creates several innovative access points to our collection of controlled-term and descriptive metadata about novels published between 1660-1830. Our project team of trained undergraduate researchers pages through each novel in our expanding corpus to describe - using both controlled terms and more discursive vocabularies - all of the ways that early novels organize themselves. We record and encode information about how early novels instruct readers about themselves, carefully describing prefaces, introductions, and dedications; tables of contents, indexes; title-page genre terms and footnotes buried deep within the text. Each record includes both discursive descriptions of copy-specific information and codified languages that enable nimble search.
END gives users access to our data in three basic ways. First, a set of flat TEI-encoded text files containing our records will be openly available within the year. Clear, extensive documentation will allow researchers to extract exactly the files they need. Second, database users will be able to interact with visualizations of END’s metadata, as well as create their own create data visualizations. Finally, our in-progress website will soon include a library-style keyword and faceted search of our records containing edition-specific and copy-specific information about each novel.
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4 September 2017
On Wednesday, July 5 we took a tour of the Common Press at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and had the opportunity to print our own broadsheets. An article written by Jacquie...
Reflection: Reading Will Never Be the Same
27 August 2017
I used to go to the library every week as a child. Specifically, my parents and I would frequent the Northeast Regional branch of the Free Library. As suggested in its name it was free,...
Reflection: On the Physical Presence of Books
27 August 2017
It is easy to forget the physicality of a modern trade paperback. You throw it in your bag to take to the beach. You put your drink on it when you don’t have a coaster, confident...
Reflection: On Media and the Common Press
26 August 2017
One of the most memorable parts of our visit to the Common Press was the opportunity to operate the printing press itself—the process seemed very sudden, and almost magical, in...