About

Background and Working Thesis:

This project seeks to understand how the use of data-driven visualizations of sixteenth and seventeenth-century title page imprint information can illuminate aspects of the recusant printer network in the era of high-recusancy (c.1558-1640). This is largely a project of remediation with the goal of investigating whether new insight into an established field can be gained by collating, analyzing, and graphically displaying like information —in this case Recusant literature— that is distinct from traditional forms of scholarship. I argue that by removing the impediments of shelf-bound and geographically separated volumes and by quantifying elements of their creation, the network and nature of recusant literature is made more immediate by illustrating trends and anomalies at the same level of access and visibility and thereby potentially opening new avenues of research.

Additionally, the aim is to combine methodological approaches of traditional book history — in this case merging bibliographic studies with quantitative history— and also utilizing new methods of corpus mining and data visualization to help make the obscure known. While much has been written about recusancy, there are still new stories to be told by investigating new forms of evidence made available through newer methods of humanities scholarship. New methods can potentially lead to new evidence to help settle old historiographical debates such as the lingering tails of the John Bossy and Christopher Haigh debate that still consumes much of the scholarship on recusancy.

Technical Information and Data Sources:

Data Sources:

D.M. Rogers, English Recusant Literature 1558-1640. Facsimile series available via Hathi Trust to member libraries, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010174592.

EEBO-TCP metadata records culled from the ESTC. A tremendous debt of graditude is owed to Anupam Basu for help with this data. Please see his valuable project here: “Early Print.”

Visualization software:

Gelphi, https://gephi.org/

Tableau Public, https://public.tableau.com/s/

TRPNP People:

Jordan S. Sly: Librarian and Graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Email: jsly@umd.edu, Twitter: @jordanssly Web: jordansly.com; trpnp.org