ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Extrapolating Hidden Histories of Reading: The Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830 Database

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-2

English Abstract

This presentation will discuss the recently completed first phase of the Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830 Database, which brings together surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century borrowing registers from eighteen Scottish libraries and interprets over 160,000 line entries to provide detailed information on the books, authors and genres that circulated in the period. It will briefly discuss pilot projects on records from the Library of Innerpeffray and the University of Glasgow before considering the design and conduct of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that underpinned the database's creation. It will then explore the conclusions that can be drawn from the complex linked data the project has produced, with a particular emphasis on what this can tell us about the emergence of modern science, the interactions of different forms of knowledge, institutional practices and specialisms, the transcultural flow of books and information, and the character of Enlightenment in Scotland. It will close by considering how digital technologies allow us to unlock invariant archival data to grant new perspectives on the hidden histories of reading, while also reflecting on the difficulties and implications of representing historical information systems in digital spaces.

Authors

• Katie Halsey, University of Stirling

• Matthew Sangster, University of Glasgow