Simon Burrows

Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows 1. The cosmopolitan press, 1760-1815 Simon Burrows 2. The Netherlands, 1750-1813 Nicolaas van Sas 3. Germany, 1760-1815 Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth 4. England, 1760-1815 Hannah Barker 5. Ireland, 1760-1820 Douglas Simes 6. America, 1750-1820 David Copeland 7. France, 1750-89 Jack Censer 8. The French revolutionary press Hugh Gough 9. Italy, 1760-1815 Maurizio Isabella 10. Russia, 1790-1830 Miranda Beaven Remnek Index.

Locating the Minister’s Looted Books: From Provenance and Library History to the Digital Reconstruction of Print Culture

Abstract This article is a think-piece, exploring the potential for developing inter-operable systems or unitary databases for collecting, storing, analysing, and cross-referencing various historical bibliometric data. It particularly focuses on the conceptual development, use, and benefits of such a database or databases in library history. The author surveys a range of leading digital library history and book history projects, establishing their uses and commonalities, before exploring how far the tools for developing a common database system are already being developed out of his ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) project by a team centred on the University of Western Sydney. In the process he also outlines much of the current work being done in library history by members of an international research network devoted to community libraries, and lays out a vision and hypothetical case study of how, and with what results, this work could be applied.

Mapping print, connecting cultures

This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding past cultures and offers a vision for how historical bibliometric research might be conducted on a comparative and global scale. Drawing on conceptual work being undertaken at the Western Sydney University in order to further develop and extend the widely respected ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) database project, it explores how historians might proceed to correlate, map, and analyse multiple spatially referenced data sets pertaining to the creation, publication, dissemination, ownership, consumption, reception, policing, and geographic setting of texts. While the authors recognise the many dangers and limitations inherent in reducing the cultural history of text to a set of statistical data, they observe that historians frequently use the production and circulation of texts as a useful proxy for understanding the circulation of ideas. Hence historical bibliometrics can provide measurable indicators of cultural resonance. The challenge, then, is to meaningfully integrate algorithmic abstractions with qualitative-based humanities research. This paper and the suite of projects it discusses seek to provide a way forward.