It’s always a pleasure to see one’s work appear in print, and so I’m very pleased to see the appearance of the volume of essays New directions in digital textual studies: book history, scholarly editing and curation in conversation. It is published by Bloomsbury, and available in paperback and ebook.
My own chapter combines my historical and digital interests in a very pleasing way. It investigates a century of edited collections of essays (published in the UK) in theology and religious studies, 482 volumes in all, containing 5,930 chapters. I use computational methods to characterise the changing profile of the authors who contribute to these volumes, in terms of their profession, their gender and their country of residence.
The project from the beginning encountered a problem of data. Unlike journals (or at least those that have been digitised), very few of these edited collections (from the period from 1918 until the millennium) had chapter-level data readily available, either from library systems or publisher platforms. As a result, the bulk of the data had to be collected and compiled in the old-fashioned, manual way.
Those interested in the religious history of the last century may want to dive into the substantive conclusions in the chapter, an Open Access version of which is available. But for people interested in the digital-methodological aspects of the essay, part of the conclusion reads:
“Thirdly, I want to suggest to specialist historians of the book, and to digital historians generally, the potential offered by the study of edited collections not merely as printed objects, or as individual, self-contained representations of a specific research topic at a point in time, but as objects of book historical study at a collective scale using digital methods. The analysis of these volumes as containers of groups of nodes in larger networks is largely impossible without the kind of graph visualisation applications that are now available. (To investigate some of these networks in greater detail is my next project.) Yet even the simple analysis of individual chapter contributors in terms of such characteristics as those considered in this chapter, while not strictly impossible in an analogue world, would be prohibitively laborious without the routine power of computers to filter and count. The invocation of the notion of distant reading in my title, then, is intended to be allusive rather than strict, yet meaningful nonetheless. The digital allows the conceptualisation and characterisation of groupings of texts at scale, and the analysis not (in this case) of the words on the page, but of the constellations of authors, editors and publishers that produced them.”
To find an extended summary, visit: Reading the edited collection, distantly: some trends in British theological publishing in the twentieth century
See also my earlier book, The edited collection: pasts, present and future (2020).
Webster Research and Consulting 