Literature Compass 10/10 (2013): 748–760, 10.1111/lic3.12085

Digital Humanities and Electronic Resources in the LongEighteenth Century

Paddy Bullard*University of Kent

AbstractThe field of eighteenth-century studies at its broadest extent – taking in the English Restoration, theEnlightenment, and the Romantic period – has changed significantly since the beginning of thetwenty-first century due to the impact of electronic resources on research methods and on the acces-sibility of primary research materials. Theorists of the digital humanities writing at the end of the pre-vious century argued that the computerization of humanities research would make the editing andarchiving of historical texts more subtle and fluid. This article argues that humanities computing hasin fact moved away from editing and textual criticism toward the development of larger and more in-teroperable databases. Current digital humanities in the long eighteenth century are defined by theEnlightenment virtues of pragmatism and communicability, but they have yet to attain the Enlighten-ment ideals of openness and refinement.

It was during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that historiographers developed what thephilosopher Dugald Stewart called ‘conjectural histories’ of civil society.1 The best-knownexamples posit a ‘stadial theory’ that describes the successive stages of savagery, pastoralism,feudalism, and commerce in the history of civilizations. To compare great things with small,at what ‘stage’ have we arrived in the history of the digital humanities? The hunter-gathererand pastoral stages are passed, when computers were used mainly as automated concordances,grazing through fields of digitized text.2 And the feudal stage (to stretch the analogy further)has gone as well, when theorist-barons laid down laws for the Web developers of the future.3

Sometimes they built their own digital resources in gothic style, using materials that becameobsolete almost as soon as they were made. Leaving these early stages behind, it seems we havenow entered a polite and commercial phase in humanities computing. The theorist-baronshave been elbowed aside by a new wave of projectors from the private sector. They put upvast new developments, capturing huge quantities data – in the case of EEBO and ECCO,the contents of half of the books printed in English before 1800. Their constructions arelightly engineered, but they carry their own weight, and everyone uses them. It must be said,however, that this commercial stage is in its earliest phase. Enlightenment philosophers wroteof the ‘improvements’ that advanced mercantilism brings to society: refinement, openinstitutions, and sociability.4 Comparable benefits are still some way off in humanitiescomputing. The most widely used databases contain crudely digitized information, to whichsubscribers are given partial access at best. More generally, the resources themselves are onlybeginning to talk to one another. But a number of medium-scale digital projects, producedthrough publicly funded collaborations between scholars and research institutions, are settinghigher standards. This is the point at which the digital humanities have arrived in the field towhich my analogy is most relevant: eighteenth-century studies.This article is a survey of the field of humanities computing at a particular moment, Spring

2013. It focuses on the major digital resources that serve scholars working on the long

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eighteenth century, c.1660–c.1832.5 To emphasise the needs of scholars is to ignore animportant part of what funders are asking resource developers to do these days: to increasethe impact of their research outside the academy. This is a task that digital editors (especiallythose in the UK) are obliged to take seriously, but it lies beyond the scope of this article.6

The question here is a simpler one: it regard the functionality of digital resources. Leavingthe impact agenda to one side, what has changed in the field during the decade precedingthis moment? At the beginning of the century, it was assumed that the main applicationfor computers in the humanities lay in the field of editing. Commentators imagined a newgeneration of scholarly electronic editions that would eschew the univocality of the printedbook. Instead wherever multiple states of a book exist, wherever texts are fluid, readerswould be given electronic tools to help navigate their way through whirlpools of variantreadings.7 This was the theory, but in practice very few electronic resources have pursuedthe ideal.8 The demand is not there from readers (academic or general) and hand-held readingdevices seem too modest a medium for the kind of scholarship traditionally monumentalizedin big critical editions.For the time being, the main stream of the digital humanities is moving in a different

direction. First, the ease with which computers process digital images makes the visualrepresentation of documents a natural enterprise for humanities computing, especially whenhigh-quality reproductions also help the work of conservators. Second, the most successfulresources of recent years have been analytical in function, using database software to presenttexts that are too information-rich to be readable in any straightforward way, such as diaries,registers, library catalogues, or serials published by parliaments, say, or by courts of law. Thisdevelopment has benefited social historians, greatly increasing their impact on popular history.A very high proportion of current eighteenth-century literary research is (for better or worse)focused on representations of social phenomena in the texts of the period, or with the socialconditions of their production. The use made of digitized socio-historical archives byresearchers working on novels, plays, and poems is only likely to increase. It will also becomeeasier for them to answer the often-heard question: What are the digital humanities doing thatcouldn’t be done 30 years ago? Digital editing makes certain silent documents speak. Third,developers now appreciate the importance of interoperability between resources and ofinterfaces that allow the aggregation of search results from many digital archives.9 Once again,the social historians are ahead of other humanities subjects in this respect, because they agreeabout the appropriate level of granularity for their data. The most advanced developersworking in the digital humanities today are planning resources pragmatically and designingtheir markup with specific research questions in mind.10 Joining together those independentresources is the next big problem for developers, but the process of interconnection is the bestguarantee for the broad impact and sustainability of their work.The resource that illustrates the current tendencies of eighteenth-century digital humanities

most clearly is also the oldest and, in terms of its provenance, the most thoroughly technical inthe field. It is the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue), which since Autumn 2006 has beenavailable to the public through the website of the British Library.11 ESTC is a database thatcatalogues surviving printed books in English made between the 1470s to the end of theeighteenth century. It is the preeminent electronic resource for the period because of itsdynamism, its public authority (bolstered by an international institutional reach and, crucially,its free availability), and the fullness of its contents. EEBO and ECCOmay have heavier web-traffic, but the latter acknowledges straightforwardly that it is ‘based on the ESTC’.12 Inseveral respects, the ESTC is a hybrid. It is both a union catalogue and a bibliography: itmatches entries for books in the catalogues of many libraries, building a location register forgroups of copies (impressions, issues, or editions). It also describes an ‘ideal copy’, a virtual

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representative of every such group. In terms of its contents, the database is an historical hybridas well. For the first decade after its foundation in 1977, the “E” in ESTC stood for“eighteenth-century”, and the catalogue contained no entries for books printed before1700. All the entries in the current ESTC for copies dated 1700–1800 are digital natives.But since 1987, it has also incorporated the contents of A.W. Pollard and C.P. Redgrave’sShort Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books PrintedAbroad, 1475–1640, and Donald Wing’s Short Title Catalogue of Books. . . 1641–1700, theauthoritative printed bibliographies that cover the first 228 years of British printing.13 It istempting to think of the ESTC as an eighteenth-century digital resource with a pre-1700appendix tacked on to it. In fact the eighteenth-century books were catalogued slightly lesscomprehensively in the ESTC than they were in STC or Wing. Since 2006, its editors havebeen hard at work adding complete transcriptions of what were at first abbreviated titlesand imprints.14

ESTC is at the heart of the digital eighteenth century today for two reasons. First, thecharacter of ESTC is defined by its response to the central problem in digital humanities:How to balance the scholar’s need for reliable information with the natural tendency ofelectronic media to openness and on-going correction. The story of ESTC is one in whicha closed ideal of authoritativeness is being relinquished slowly for the sake of more useful andmodern qualities: evolution, accuracy, and depth. The printed versions of STC and Wingpresented themselves as definitive bibliographies of English printing for the periods that theycovered. Being native to the digital medium, by contrast, the nature of ESTC is that it isalways a work in progress. What David McKitterick calls the ‘dispersed authority’ of theESTC is represented by the existence of its daimon, a parallel database accessible only tothe editors and librarians authorized to work on it, known as the STAR file.15 This is therepository for all updates and queries, all doubts about the reliability of edition designationsand library matches, and for some time now commentators have been calling for it to bemade accessible to ordinary users.16 At the time of writing, the ESTC21 blog indicates thatthis will soon happen: the catalogue is about to be redesigned so as to ‘harness user expertizeto enrich data’.17 The database will function increasingly as an ‘electronic hub’ capable ofsearching digital reproductions of texts, and moves will be made to improve the accessibilityof ESTC data for recapture by other websites.18 This brings us to the second reason for theESTC’s preeminence. The hybridity of the resource ought to be its great weakness. Thedescription of a typical copy from an edition in the upper part of its record is really a sortof ideal generalization, a specification that in fact describes many nonidentical objects. Athousand contingencies at the warehouse or the bookseller’s stall, at the binder’s shop orthe library lead inevitably to variations within editions or impressions. So the authorityof the upper record is under constant pressure from the material particularity representedby the lower part, the copies registered in the union catalogue. In fact, it is the pragmaticyoking of these two theoretically incompatible classes of information that gives the ESTCits versatility. The balance between ideal description and material referent is successful becausethis is true to ESTC’s nature as a bibliographical workhorse, focused on the business ofpractical specification. For my own part, I would be uncomfortable seeing the ESTC movinginto the realm of content provision or text searching, because that balance and that focuswould both be lost. They are essential to the identity of this indispensible public resource.The possible development of the ESTC into a hub for digitized content corresponds with

an increased focus on the networking of data evident today in several of the most successfuldigital resources in the humanities.19 Best of all is the Connected Histories aggregator, a JISC-funded project that allows cross-searching of a range of sites that provide sources for Britishhistory in the period 1500–1900. Connected Histories is run by the team behind the Old Bailey

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Online and London Lives sites (of which more later).20 It links them to other less well-knownbut excellent public resources such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, 1540–1835and the Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera site, as well as tosubscription databases such as the British Library’s 17th and 18th-Century Burney Collectionof digitized newspapers, managed by Gale. Networking and aggregating sites like ConnectedHistories address a major difficulty in digital humanities, the problem of impact. Manyresources that consumed enormous public funding grants, as well as untold man-hours oflabor from the growing academic proletariat of postdoctoral grafters, have disastrously lowpublic profiles. There is no obvious way to catalogue this vast, amorphous field of ever-emerging, half-finished, poorly future-proofed websites. But developers can help to preservetheir work by linking it to the life support of the next generation of resources. ConnectedHistories begins to do this work for social historians.Similar attempts at unionization by literary historians have also been made, but it is difficult

to predict whether they will be adopted. 18thConnect was announced in 2008 as aneighteenth-century complement to NINES, the Jerome McGann-directed aggregator fornineteenth-century electronic scholarship.21 Like NINES, 18thConnect has a triple function:It is a finding aid for digital texts, a hub for an online ‘digital community’, and an institutionfor peer reviewing other digital resources.22 It is not yet clear whether these three activitieswill harmonize. Results from the finding aid are dominated by returns from ECCO, andGale’s data are also serviced by 18thConnect’s TypeWright tool, with which users are invitedto correct optical character recognition (OCR) scans of ECCO texts. The digital communitywill demand a lot of functionality in exchange for their work. One much-needed service is aregularly updated, peer-reviewed index of relevant humanities websites. According to itshomepage banner 18thConnect is the hub for 17 ‘federated websites’, but there is no obviousway to discover what they are. The scrolling ‘Federated Websites’ window at the bottom ofthe homepage has links to 6 sites currently, while a further ‘sites’ link at the bottom of thepage opens a pop up window listing some 120 ‘Scholarly projects participating in18thConnect/Collex’, at least three quarters of which contain no eighteenth-centurycontent. One of the guideline requirements for setups seeking accreditation by the site isinteroperability with other 18thConnect resources. To this end, every page of the candidatesite must include a permanent 18thConnect identification number in its metadata.23 This isnot much to ask of developers, but it may be enough to exclude some valuable resources.Would it be more practical to keep the reviewing process separate from that of federation,so that the widest range of websites are available for assessment?The nearest thing in eighteenth-century literary studies to a working hub is the venerable

Romantic Circles site, a much-loved collaborative project launched in 1996.24 The suite ofabout thirty electronic editions hosted by Romantic Circles includes several pioneeringresources, such as the inter-collated texts of Lyrical Ballads: a scholarly edition, and the colossalCollected Letters of Robert Southey. User interfaces date quickly, and there is something of ashanty town atmosphere to Romantic Circles at the moment, not least because the site doesso much – editions, the critical journal Praxis, pedagogical work in secondary and highereducation, and the rest. On a smaller scale, genre-focused aggregator sites such as theJISC-funded Broadside Ballads Online link together disparate digital resources to thrillingeffect.25 BBO has as its foundation the older Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads database ofabout 30,000 documents, which it connects with 4000 documents from the English BroadsideBallad Archive based at UC Santa Barbara, and with the invaluable Roud Indexes of broadsidesand folksongs based at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House,London. Unique archives are joined with authoritative bibliographical studies, making anew resource that is more than the sum of its already valuable parts.

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Several large-scale subject specific databases covering this period have a bibliographicalfunction and can be classified roughly alongside ESTC and 18thConnect. Three sites deservespecial attention, because they represent the shape of digital humanities past, future, and yetto come. My veteran example is The British Book Trade Index, based at the University ofBirmingham.26 BBTI is remarkable for its resilience. After 11 years, it still works usefully,although its Web interface needs a spring clean. As with my other two examples, theintegrity of its contents, which are clearly defined and broad of scope, compensates for itsrelative isolation from more networked sites. Yet one cannot help but imagine how muchmore valuable this information would be if absorbed by ESTC. A second example isDissentingAcademies Online, a sort of independent city-state of scholarship based at QMUL andDr Williams’s Library, London.27 In HE policy terms DAO represents the current state ofthe art in digital humanities: Its contents are strongly focused, and it links academic researchwith an independent resource-holding institution. The site is built around three encyclopaedicdatabases documenting the dissenting academies as such, the contents of their libraries, and theteachers and students who attended them. The strength of this resource is the depth of itscontents, which document the social, biographical, and intellectual activity of British dissentersbetween the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This strength is compromised somewhat byits lack of interoperability – it is not possible to click between the databases, or out to externalresources. My third example is the Digital Miscellanies Index. While Dissenting Academies Onlineand BBTI take the value and usefulness of their content to be self-evident, theDigital MiscellaniesIndex states its research questions with greater specificity.28 The scope ofDMI is defined by twodelicate distinctions of material. First, the contents of the miscellanies that it indexes arerestricted to printed poetry, excluding manuscript miscellanies and collections of prose anddrama. Second, ‘miscellanies’ are distinguished from ‘anthologies’ by the currency of theircontents: They respond to literary fashion at the moment of publication (or, more plausibly,to the contingencies of what publishers had in hand). They do not present an historical canonof poems, although DMI does allow users to trace how any given poem was recycled insuccessive miscellanies through the long eighteenth century.29 DMI recognizes that itsfunction as a selective and analytical database is far more important than any contentsprovision it might have offered – after all, most of the texts are available on ECCO. In this,it is typical of the current movement of digital humanities away from the old priorities ofeditorial theory and textual criticism.In the last few years, some digital projects have struck an elegant balance between the data-

processing versatility and the presentation of new primary content. Two particularly successfulresources, both freely available to the public, demonstrate how an exact choice of material canmeet good digital mechanics to the greatest effect: first is William Godwin’s Diary:Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture 1788–1836, based at the Bodleian Library, Oxford;second is The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913, which has been joined by a massivesister site, London Lives 1690 to 1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis. Thesesites exemplify current ‘best practice’ for the digital humanities. The diary of the philosopherand Jacobin novelist William Godwin is part of the Abinger manuscript collection at theBodleian.30 It has never been published in printed form because its contents are unreadablybare, recording only Godwin’s dining, reading, and company, with perhaps a hint at whathe has written that day – seldom more than a line. But 48 years of these entries make up a richrecord of the radical, intellectual London that Godwin inhabited.31 In this resource, a finelyengineered architecture of XML tagging allows the user to trace acquaintances across thedecades, books through his library catalogues, and the author himself through the streets ofthe metropolis.32 The visualization of the information in graphs and tables is also straightforwardand really does make the site more useable. William Godwin’s Diary is very much sui generis,

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currently standing alone (like DAO) in the digital landscape. The Old Bailey Online andLondon Lives are the hubs, by contrast, for a constantly expandingWeb of interlinked sites thatincludes Locating London’s Past (a GIS-enabled resource that arranges datasets onto a ‘warped’digitization of John Rocque’s 1746 map of London), Criminal Intent (which links Old BaileyOnline with the analytical webtool Voyeur and the information management tool Zotero),and the Connected Histories aggregator.33 It is the quality of the content provided by the mainsites that is the foundation for this expanding empire. The London Lives database incorporates aquarter of a million printed and manuscript source pages all keyed, tagged, and linked to15 further databases created by older digital projects (most now deposited at the UK DataArchive). Old Bailey Online is built on a similar scale, containing about 200,000 pages of theOld Bailey Proceedings and Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts. These databases are concerned withthe life stories of named plebeian Londoners (over three million of them) during theeighteenth century, but the personal focus of the records is diversified by cross-tagging ofoccupations, locations, and dates. As may soon be the case with ESTC, the London Livesnetwork is able to function as a digital hub for social historians because it has a valuablecontent-providing resource at its center attracting regular visits from users. Neither free-standing aggregators nor social networking sites have the same power to unite.The success of William Godwin’s Diary and the London Lives network suggests that there is

an economy of scale governing what works in the digital humanities. A critical volume ofdata, or some problem of readability, is needed to justify the processing potential that comeswith electronic mediation. Plainly prepared archives of literary texts, seasoned perhaps with asprinkling of hypertext, sit unappetizingly on our desktops because we see that they do notgive our computers enough to chew on. But one class of historical literary text does givedigital editors scope for the power of their machines. The manuscript foul papers of authors,like certain kinds of half-handwritten texts (such corrected printers’ proofs or books with MSmarginalia), have always proved difficult to edit for print. Documentary transcription oftenbecomes cluttered and unreadable, diplomatic transcriptions lose too much detail, and it ishard to insert heuristic material into facsimile reproductions.34 But two distinguished digitalresources, both dealing with eighteenth-century material, have shown recently howelectronic editions can negotiate these problems: The Newton Project and Jane Austen’s FictionManuscripts. Based at the University of Sussex, The Newton Project gathers all of Sir IsaacNewton’s manuscript and printed texts, together with a generous selection of controversialand critical works by related authors, in a single electronic edition. The project still has textsto publish, but there are five million words already in its archive.35 The editors have devisedan unfussy and effective way of presenting complicated manuscript material, such as the draftof John Conduitt’s unfinished biography of Newton, which contains many struckthroughpassages and interlinings. Users can switch between a readable ‘normalized view’ of thetranscription (the text as Conduitt finally intended it to be read), and a ‘diplomatic view’(the text with all deletions, cancellations, and insertions included, and carefully labelled). Aprint edition covering this quantity of complex material (much of it on religious and alchemicalsubjects) could never have been this versatile, even if it were commercially viable. The NewtonProject collects together (among other texts) a body of manuscripts that were dispersed by salein 1936. Similarly, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts reunites what was a single collection ofmanuscripts (totalling about 1100 pages) until the death of Cassandra Austen in 1845, whenthey were shared out among surviving brothers, nephews, and nieces.36 JAFM presentsdetailed transcriptions of the manuscripts, of course, but its smaller scale allows for severalstriking advances on previous digital editions. First, each page of transcription is accompaniedby a photographic facsimile of relevant page of manuscript, which allows both ease of readingand a chance to assess the expressiveness of Austen’s hand at any particular moment.

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Second, the fastidious accuracy with which the manuscripts are reproduced opens the way to anew purpose for digital editions: as a multidimensional guide for the conservation of the(now very frail) manuscripts themselves in future years. Third, newXML tagging was developedto describe every detail, both structural and inscribed, of Austen’s manuscript booklets. JAFMnow sets the standard for the electronic coding of digitized manuscript documents.37

One of the common features of these resources is that the texts they publish have neverbeen viable as printed books. They have remained as manuscripts on account of their length,their obscurity, or their complexity. The originals are unique, and the digital resourcesderived from them tend to be one-offs. At another extreme, the microfilm-derived facsimilespresented by Google Books, ECCO and EEBO – like the electronic texts prepared for e-bookreaders – reproduce photographs (or imitations) of pages that were themselves made by aprocess of mechanical reproduction, printing. Their originals need not be rare: many antiquarianbooks are common on the second-hand market. Somewhere between the single witnessing ofa manuscript-based resource like Godwin’s Diary and the prolific reproductions of GoogleBooks lie the sphere of the digitized periodical. Electronic editions of eighteenth-centuryperiodicals contain printed texts that circulated widely and perished on the day of publication.Even the greatest collections of pre-nineteenth-century periodicals have discontinuities, andreading the complete run of a journal may involve visits to several libraries. Here then isanother opportunity for digital editors to unite dispersed collections of materials into acoherent archive, like that of The Newton Project. But the ephemerality of periodicals, togetherwith the volume of material (however discontinuous) that has survived, makes a keyed-in,marked-up electronic text impracticable.This is where commercial publishers have stepped in. There are three major digital editions

of early periodicals: Proquest’s British Periodicals resource, the Eighteenth-Century Journals portalrun by AdamMatthew Digital, and the 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers hostedby the British Library, but run Gale Cengage Learning.38 They share a common format: allthree provide images scanned largely from microfilm, and then processed by OCR so thatthey are searchable. All three are by equal measures flawed and indispensible. British Periodicalsseems to have the most focused dataset, covering about 18 titles first published in theseventeenth century and about 134 from the eighteenth century. Texts are not easy to countbecause the only way of viewing the list of titles covered is by a downloadable MicroSoftExcel file.39 Shabby as this is, at least the file is there. Despite its bibliographical inconveniencies,British Periodicals presents its search results perspicuously and (crucially) includes metadata on thetitles of articles. It makes a good first port of call for literary investigations. Eighteenth-CenturyJournals has a less intuitive search engine, but the 400 or so eighteenth-century titles that ithandles have been transcribed much more accurately. Real editorial selection has been atwork here, usually with the needs of social historians in mind. Finally, the Burney Collectioncovers the largest number of titles (about 1270), but deploys the least useful of the three searchengines,and offers inadequate bibliographical machinery for assessing the titles that it covers.40

The prevailing format for digitized periodicals – text from microfilm scan, minimalmetadata based on hidden OCR files – derives from that of the most widely-usedeighteenth-century digital edition. For the majority of researchers working in this period,Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database has become an indispensibleresource, always open on the desktop, the oracle to which every research question is firstreferred. If the economics of digital media tend naturally towards expansion and monopolythen ECCO has the potential to be aGoogle of our sector. It is already a dominating influenceand has changed profoundly the way we go about the business of historical research since itslaunch in 2003. Academic commentators have dwelt upon its limitations, but their criticismacknowledges implicitly the success with which this commercial resource has created an

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illusion of comprehensiveness – that anything ECCO does not know about the eighteenthcentury is not really knowledge.41 The 180,000 ‘image sets’ of books that it provides onlinerepresent the contents of more than half of the 347,745 eighteenth-century titles listed on theESTC. Gale’s decision to leave the database at this size after adding 50,000 new titles to ECCOpart II in 2009 reflects the tacit opinion of most customers that its coverage is adequate.But despite ECCO’s heroic scale, despite its ubiquity and its wonderful usefulness, the

habits of scholars suggest that it is not yet entirely respectable. References to ECCO in thefootnotes of scholarly articles are still rare, although everyone uses it to find contextualizingillustrations. One often finds reviewers chastising academic authors for dressing up evidencethat they have gleaned from ECCO and pretending that it is the harvest of real, extensivereading. This is a very eighteenth-century scruple – Augustan satirists greatly resented thecheap, self-recycling learning generated by indexes, technical manuals and dictionaries.42

And there is justice to it. The early prophets of digital revolution in the humanities(the theorist-barons) predicted that computers would bring us more immediately to thematerial truth about books and would help readers to appreciate the instability of literary textsin all the detail of their various instantiations. But the new searchability of eighteenth-centuryprint culture has in fact distanced scholars from these documents and has accelerated atendency towards information-grabbing, antiquarian reading practices, or (more positively)toward the new ‘conditions of knowledge’ about texts that Franco Moretti associates with‘distant reading’.43 That having been said, we must be cautious about identifying EEBO orECCO as the necessary causes of this trend, since theorists had become concerned aboutthe ‘postmodern’ fragmentation of historical discourse some time before they arrived.44

The short-focus antiquarianism that ECCO seems to encourage is reflected (by an obscurecultural logic) in the fussiness with which the resource is presented. In various different ways,ECCO is less open with its users than is usual in academia. It likes to tidy away noisy information.The microfilms on which it is based reproduce images of the openings of books, but ECCOchops each opening into two single-page images and dispenses with all the detail (the rulersplaced against type, the blank pages, and the indicators of physical structure) that is so preciousto bibliographers. Since 2009, ECCO documents have been supported by MARC descriptions,drawn (presumably) from the ESTC and supplemented by Gale’s own ‘Subject’ entries. Userscan search by subject, and yet the MARC files are not directly accessible for checking by readersusing ordinary institutional subscriptions. Similarly, there is still no accurate way to identify byclass- or shelf-mark the actual copy of a book that ECCO reproduces. An indication of thesource collection is always given, but the larger libraries that the original microfilm photographerstended to favor often keep multiple copies of editions, and it is seldom possible to discoverwhich copy has been used without a personal visit to the archive. This omission has severalconsequences: readers are further distanced from experience of the original material object;local features (such as MS annotations on the original) are inadequately documented; andthe widespread phenomenon of stop-press variants within editions of hand-press era booksis forgotten. Most frustratingly of all, ECCO does not allow users access to the scanned opticalcharacter recognition (OCR) documents that its full-text searches run on.This secretiveness inevitably arouses suspicions about the accuracy of the scans. For anyone

who has the patience, the quality of data capture is easy to assess. I made a very small sampleof five ECCO ‘image sets’, representing books dating from 1710, 1724, 1759, 1780, and1792. I chose three pages at random from each book and put the words on the chosen pagesthrough the ‘Search this work’ function, clicking through to the relevant page images toensure that they were highlighted, as they are when the engine has matched the word onthe page. I did not search for the ‘stop words’ that ECCO ignores and chose cleanly inked,well-scanned pages. The two pre-1750 texts (the crucial fifth edition of Swift’s Tale of a Tub

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and the second edition of Eliza Haywood’s play The Fair Captive) posed problems. ECCOrecognized 2.7 words for every word it missed in the Tub and only 1.3 words for everyone missed in The Fair Captive. These are not ratios that inspire confident searching. Bycontrast the OCR scans for the later texts were impressively accurate. ECCO recognized10.2 words for every one it missed in the second edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry(getting ‘confusion’ and ‘interesting’, but stumbling over ‘sollicitous’); for Seward’s Elegy toCook and for J.B. Mercier’s translation of Zimmerman’s Solitude Considered (2nd edn.) itfound 12.5 and 6.7 words, respectively for each one missed. It is perhaps the inconsistency ofthe OCR readings, obvious from this rough assessment, that makes Gale bashful about therestricted files. The editors of the ESTC confess to their public resource being a constructionsite in a way that the proprietors of private, commercial websites like ECCO prefer not to.But few really mind these days, especially if improvements are seen to be ongoing. Gale shouldbe more relaxed about the incompleteness of their work, though perhaps not quite so relaxed asthey are with the Burney Collection.Viewing the field of eighteenth-century digital humanities as a single prospect, it is the

contrast between publicly funded, open-access sites, and privately owned, subscription-access resources that is most striking. Each side of the divide has much to learn from theother. Publicly funded academic projects must acquire the pragmatism and ambitiousnessof scale that commercial developers have always shown. Commercial developers must adaptthemselves more generously to the principles of scholarly openness and accuracy. Theymight also imitate the inventiveness of the open sector, its adaptability to the demands raisedby different kinds of primary media. Both sides recognize the desirability of making theirresources interoperable across the divide, and the business of interconnectivity will preoccupyall kinds of digital humanist in the coming decade. Another set of players likely to step furtherforward in future years is the university presses. Their digital products are sometimes hard toplace in the electronic landscape. One of the most useful, ambitious, and puzzling resources toappear in the eighteenth-century sector is Electronic Enlightenment, the correspondencedatabase run as a subscription site by Oxford University Press. This large resource, currentlyoffering around 60,000 items, provides the contents (keyed in, not photographed) of about40 major library editions of eighteenth-century correspondences, mainly anglo- andfrancophone, the majority of them published originally by OUP.45 The value added to thisinherited material is that of internal and external connectivity, particularly to the OxfordDictionary of National Biography online. But the footnoting and hyper-linking of texts isuneven, an inevitable consequence of the secondary nature of the research work involved.There are signs, however, that Electronic Enlightenment will evolve into a publishing platformfor editors of new scholarly correspondences. The Voltaire Foundation at Oxford has alreadycontributed natively digital editions of the correspondences of the economist André Morellet,the novelist Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and of Voltaire himself. This developmentmakes sense of the material already in place – it faces Electronic Enlightenment towards the future.But Electronic Enlightenment is a heavily funded project with major institutional backing. Howcan medium-sized projects engaged in primary editing and new scholarship – such as JaneAusten’s Fiction Manuscript – best position themselves in relation to the commercial sector?Openness to interoperability will only become more important as the open sector seeks toconsolidate itself. One thing that the private sector is unlikely ever to provide for its customersis thorough and reliable bibliographical scholarship. It is tending, however, to avail itself ofresources like the ESTC when they are there. The establishment of independent butinteroperable resources that describe, organize, and analyze the mountains of raw primarymaterial appearing elsewhere in digital media will be of the greatest importance toeighteenth-century scholars in the future.

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Short Biography

Paddy Bullard has taught at the School of English, University of Kent, since 2009. He cameto Kent from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he was an AHRC Research Fellowworking on the Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift. His research interests cover the ‘long’eighteenth century and focus on conjunctions between literary, political and intellectualhistory. In Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011), he tracesthe origins of Burke’s thinking about political deliberation in seventeenth-century debatesabout moral knowledge and in the ‘patriot’ political culture of eighteenth-century Ireland.This research has also yielded a recently completed handbook and catalogue, The Libraryand Reading of Edmund Burke, and he is working on a new critical edition of Burke’sPhilosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. These two projects connect his work onBurke with a second set of research interests, in the history of the book, library history,textual criticism, and digital editing. A volume of essays (coedited with James McLaverty)titled Swift, the Text and the Book (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013) drawstogether new work on Swift from a range of bibliographical disciplines. He is coeditor andcurrent manager of www.jonathanswiftarchive.org.uk, a major digital resource funded bythe AHRC, designed as an electronic supplement to the forthcoming Cambridge Works ofJonathan Swift. His new monograph project has roots in book history, although it is growingin a different direction. Its subject is the early-modern ideas about personal or ‘tacit knowledge’and particularly, the efforts of eighteenth-century printers and authors to embody suchknowledge in the form of the codex.

Notes

* Correspondence: School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NZ, UK. Email: psb20@kent.ac.uk1 Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith. . . Read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1811), 49.2 For a history of digital ‘concordance-making’ see the series of articles by Dolores Burton in Computers and the Humanities,15 (1981), 1–14, 83–100, 139–45, and 16 (1982), 195–281; see also Thomas Rommel, ‘Literary Studies’, in A Companion toDigital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).Blackwell Reference Online. DOI: 10.1111/b.9781405103213.2004.00011.x; all electronic resources referred to inthese footnotes were accessed through the internet on 17 April 2012, unless otherwise stated.3 Key works by the theorist-barons include Jerome McGann, ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’, Text: An lnterdisciplinaryAnnual of Textual Studies, 9 (1996), 11–32; Peter Robinson, Where We Are With Editing Scholarly Editions, and WhereWe Want To Be’, Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, 5 (2003), 125–64; Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google:Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially 80–125; for a recentrestatement of their vision see ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’, special issue, Literature Compass, 7 (2010),33–144, DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00672.x; for a historical perspective see Amy E. Earhart ‘The Digital Editionand the Digital Humanities’, Textual Cultures, 7 (2012), 18–28.4 David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 21–84;Laurence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 34–47.5 The canon of resources discussed here is highly selective, restricted to the publications of large collaborative projects,and favoring recently completed or updated examples in the English language; for a wider survey see Peter Damian-Grant, ‘Eighteenth-Century Literature in English and Other Languages: Image, Text, and Hypertext’, in A Companionto Digital Literary Studies, eds. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). BlackwellReference Online. DOI: 10.1111/b.9781405148641.2007.00007.x6 For a survey from the impact agenda perspective seeMatthewReisz, ‘Surfdom’,THES, 8 December 2011, 34–9; for a North-American site that addresses equivalent issues see The Eighteenth-Century Common, at <http://www.18thcenturycommon.org>7 Paul Eggert, ‘Text-encoding, Theories of the Text, and the “Work-Site”’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 20 (2005),425–35; Shillingsburg, Gutenberg to Google, 100–2; for a critique of these theories see Marilyn Deegan and KathrynSutherland, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 64–79; see also J. StephenMurphy, ‘The Death of the Editor’, Essays in Criticism, 58 (2008), 289–309.

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8 A rare example is Lyrical Ballads: an Electronic Scholarly Edition, eds. Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, Romantic CirclesEletronic Editions, http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/; for a new model see Paddy Bullard, ‘Digital Editing and theEighteenth-Century Text: Works, Archives, and Miscellanies’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 36 (2012), 57–80.9 See the JISC’s statement on interoperability at <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/interoperability.aspx>10 For a critique of such pragmatic attitudes, however, see Tom Scheinfeldt, ‘Where’s the Beef? Does Digital HumanitiesHave to Answer Questions?’ in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis, MN: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2012), 56–8.11 See ‘ESTC – History’, <http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/catblhold/estchistory/estchistory.html>; for itsearlier history see Robin Alston, ‘The History of ESTC’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 15 (2004), 269–329.12 Mark Holland, ‘The Origins of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (‘ECCO’)’,<http://gale.cengage.co.uk/images/ECCO%20background.doc>13 For the dating of STC 15375 to 1473 (rather than 1475, the date given by Pollard and Redgrave in their title) seeLotte Hellinga, Caxton in Focus: The Beginning of Printing in England (London: The British Library, 1982), 48.14 Stephen Tabor, ‘ESTC and the Bibliographical Community’, The Library 8.4 (2007), 367–86, at 370–1; therelationship between STC, Wing and the original ESTC is summarized by Ian Gadd, ‘The Use and Misuse of EarlyEnglish Books Online’, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 680–92, at 685–6, DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00632.x.15 David McKitterick, “Not in STC’: Opportunities and Challenges in the ESTC’, The Library, 6:2 (2005), 178–194, at179–80; for STAR see Tabor, ‘ESTC’, 373–4.16 Tabor, ‘ESTC’, 376, 384.17 ‘The ESTC as a Twenty-First Century Research Tool’, <http://estc21.wordpress.com/>18 ‘Overview’, <http://estc21.wordpress.com/collecting-data/>19 For a discussion of the need of cross-collection analysis development in the digital humanities see Julia Flanders andJohn Ottenhoff, ‘Renaissance Women, Text Encoding, and the Digital Humanities: An Interview’, 8 February 2007,<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/flanders>, cited by Deegan and Sutherland, TransferredIllusions, 76.20 ‘Connection Histories: About this Project’, <http://www.connectedhistories.org/About.aspx>21 Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez’G, ‘The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing:18thConnect’, 24 November 2008,<http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2008-11-24/the_next_big_thing_in_humanities_arts_and_social_science_computing_18thconnect.html>22 ‘What is 18thConnect?’, <http://www.18thconnect.org/about/>23 ‘Peer Review’, <http://www.18thconnect.org/about/scholarship/peer-review/>24 ‘Romantic Circles: History of the Site’, <http://www.rc.umd.edu/about/history.html>25 ‘Broadside Ballads Online: About the Project’, at <http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about.html>26 ‘The British Book Trade Index’, <http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/>; see Peter Isaac, ‘British Book Trade Index:Development and Progress", Library Review, (1995), 17–23.27 ‘Dissenting Academies Online’, <http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html>28 ‘Digital Miscellanies Index: About the Project’, <http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/about/>29 Its power as a research resource is demonstrated by Jennifer Batt, ‘“It Ought Not to Be Lost to the World”:The Transmission and Consumption of Eighteenth-Century Lyric Verse’, Review of English Studies, 62.255(2011), 414–32.30 See Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin’s Diary, 1788–1836: An Annotated List of Volumes and Their Dates’, BodleianLibrary Record, 18 (2005), 675–81.31 Its power as a research resource is demonstrated by James Grande, ‘Looking at the Lambs’ London through WilliamGodwin’s Diary’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 152 (2010), 105–115.32 ‘William Godwin’s Diary: Technical Documentation’, <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/tech.html>33 ‘Old Bailey Online: About this Project’, <http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Project.jsp>; ‘London Lives: Aboutthis Project’ <http://www.londonlives.org/static/Project.jsp>; ‘Locating London’s Past: About this Project’, <http://www.locatinglondon.org/static/Project.html>; ‘With Criminal Intent: Getting Started’, <http://criminalintent.org/getting-started/>.34 David L. Vander Meulen and G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘A System of Manuscript Transcription’, Studies in Bibliography,52 (1999), 201–12; Michael Hunter, Editing Early-Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Houndmills:Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 72–85.35 ‘About the Newton Project’, <http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=26>36 ‘Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: Overview’,<http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/about/overview.html>; see KathrynSutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 118–197.37 See Elena Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions: the Encoding of Time in Manuscript Transcription’, in (eds.) MarilynDeegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Text Editing, Print and the Digital World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 169–186.38 ‘British Periodicals’ is described at <http://www.proquest.co.uk/en-UK/catalogs/databases/detail/british_periodicals.shtml>; ‘Eighteenth-Century Journals’ at <http://www.amedu.com/Collections/Eighteenth-Century-Journals-Portal.

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aspx>; ‘Burney Collection Newspapers’ at <http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/17th--18th-century-burney-collection-newspapers-.aspx>.39 The file can be downloaded by nonsubscribers at <http://britishperiodicals.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/titles.jsp>40 See Ashley Marshall and Robert D. Hume, ‘The Joys, Possibilities, and Perils of the British Library’s Digital BurneyNewspapers Collection’, PBSA, 104 (2010), 5–52.41 William Proctor Williams and William Baker, ‘Caveat Lector: English Books 1475–1700 and the Electronic Age’,Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 12 (2001), 1–29; Patrick Spedding, ‘“The NewMachine”: Discovering the Limitsof ECCO’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44 (2011), 437–53.42 See Roger D. Lund, ‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture’,Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), 18–42.43 See Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), 54–68, at 56–8; see also hisGraphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2005), passim.44 For a general statement see F.R. Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’,History and Theory, (1989), 137–53; andPerez Zagorin’s reply, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations’, History and Theory, 29 (1990), 263–274,especially 273.45 ‘About Electronic Enlightenment’, <http://www.e-enlightenment.com/info/about/>

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