To the Reader: User Guide
Gentle Reader: Now that you have read the Preface and understand a bit more about the general arc of this site and its contents, you may be curious to know more about the data protocol scaffolding of the Preface Project. For your edification and entertainment, I present you with this User Guide. It touches on the methodological, the conceptual, and the basic definitional.
How did you compile the sample?
I completed a ‘Command F’ search through END’s 1760s records for the word “reader.” I hand checked records to rule out those that were only found because of an irrelevant “reader” (ie: “reader markings” noted in the 595 marginalia field). I further refined the sample to include only those records for which a direct address of the reader occurred in prefatory remarks (introduction, preface, to the reader), and excluded records that only contained direct address of the reader in a non-prefatory form of paratext (footnote, table of contents, etc). I also excluded those records for which the catalogers’ terms include “reader” when the original prefatory texts themselves do not use that term.
How did you photograph the sample?
I photographed the novels in the reading room of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library with a digital camera. I named the resulting image files according to the books’ bib ids, their standard END abbreviated titles, the type of paratext captured, and the page numbers featured in the images. At this time, no editing has been done, although image straightening and sharpening may be done in the future.
How did you transcribe the sample?
I maintained the punctuation and spelling of the original texts, but removed all particular, page-related spacing (including paragraph indentations and line divisions). I ignored other forms of textual emphasis (non-standardized capitalized words, italics) and followed standard modern English capitalization practices. Footnotes are marked where they occur in the original texts, with the footnotes themselves transcribed, bracketed, preceded by the word “Footnote”, and appended to the end of the block of transcribed text. I and other END team members later reviewed and corrected transcriptions, so that each transcription has been checked against the original text at least twice. All transcriptions include the bib id and standard END abbreviated title as part of their filename.
How did you create audio recordings of the sample?
I recorded readings I and other END team members made of the reviewed preface transcriptions using University of Pennsylvania’s Glossberg Recording Room and edited using Audacity. Each audio record includes the bib id and standard END abbreviated title as part of its filename and as part of the audio itself. While none of us are professional voice actors, we enjoyed bringing the voices of the paratexts to life and hope it enriches the exhibition’s exploration of relationality between reader and author in 1760s prefaces.
What are the limitations of your sample?
First and foremost, the novels I drew from were those cataloged by the Early Novels Database (END). END’s collection comes from the British and American Fiction Collection of the University of Pennsylvania and includes those texts we consider to be broadly definable as “novels.” For our purposes, this means all extended works of English-language, prose fiction, including anthological collections. We acknowledge that this is a controversial definition, but it is functional, and intentionally capacious and flexible. The term “sample”, used throughout this document, is thus quite apt: this project provides a sliver of the 1760s prefatory materials that likely include direct address of the reader. Providing figures that demonstrate how this sample relates to larger pools of 1760s prefaces is challenging, is it begins with determining just what a list of all 1760s novels, let alone prefatory texts, let alone prefatory texts addressing the reader, would look like. This number is not likely forthcoming, but at END we estimate we have cataloged around twenty percent of all known, unique copies of novels printed in the 1760s.
Moreover, this sample’s limitations reflect those of the cataloging process. An excerpt from each paratextual element of a novel is included in the records as part of END’s standard process; often, the excerpt is the first sentence. As a result, invocations of the reader may occur in more novels than I was able to find, simply because they were not caught by our cataloging process. This preface digitization project is both an acknowledgment of the impossibility of ever fully replicating a copy of a novel through code, text, audio, or image--and a simultaneous attempt to provide as complete a simulation as possible, within the practical limitations of object cataloging and archiving.
Additionally, because I relied on the word “reader” to form the basis of my sample, this project does not include works that use other, equally intriguing terms to directly address the reader. “The public” is one such term that I noticed as I cataloged and as I narrowed my sample. A future avenue of project expansion would be gathering a sample and creating a digital archive of prefatory texts that use the word “public”, and comparing it to those that use the word “reader.” I would especially be interested to know if the idea of a novel as a “performance” (another popular preface word) is correlated to the conception of a “public”, while perhaps “reader” is more closely correlated to the idea of textuality.
What strange words/numbers form the XML file and Collection names?
The assortment of numbers is the bib id of the novel from which the project’s digital material was created. The words are the abbreviated title of the novel from which the project’s digitizal material was created.
What is a bib id?
The bib id is an identifier assigned by the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library to the works in its collection. It helps differentiate different copies of the same texts.
Why did you choose to use the bib ids and abbreviated titles in your data?
The bib id is located in the description of each book at the Omeka collection level. The number is copy unique: so if you would like to visit the reading room in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library to the physical, print copy of a given novel, you can give them that bib id and be sure that you are seeing the exact copy I photographed (and not, say, a later edition, or one printed in Dublin). You can also use the bib id to search for the catalog record which END has made for that novel and which Penn has made for that novel (see Penn's records here.) The abbreviated novel titles I have used throughout are more human-readable and can you give you a reference point for the prefatory materials. (Full 1760s novel titles can be exceedingly long and are therefore less user friendly.)
Why would I want to access the catalog records?
The catalog records help put the digital materials and prefaces themselves in context. Reading a catalog record of a book is most definitely not the same as seeing the book. The record is an interpretation of the book, one that represents the interests of the cataloger and the institution that owns the book, as much as the it represents the book itself. Yet the rich, careful detail the records provide may help you find out, among other things, who the author of a novel was, what other types of paratext are printed in the book, etc. This is useful for analyzing the prefaces as individual texts and as constellations of relationships between and among different types of texts and different works containing those texts.