Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? Author2015-12-11 Tye Landels Course Supervisor Janelle Jenstad Vetter Janelle Jenstad Vetter Blaine Greteman Encoder2015-11 Tye Landels Markup Editor Katie Tanigawa Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

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 Provider: University of Victoria Database: The Map of Early Modern London Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8" TY - ELEC A1 - Landels-Gruenewald, Tye ED - Jenstad, Janelle T1 - Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? T2 - The Map of Early Modern London ET - 7.0 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/05/05 CY - Victoria PB - University of Victoria LA - English UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG18.htm UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/BLOG18.xml ER - Landels-Gruenewald, Tye. Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG18.htm. Landels-Gruenewald, Tye. Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLOG18.htm. Landels-Gruenewald, T. 2022. Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/BLOG18.htm. Joey Takeda Joey Takeda JT

Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.

 Katie Tanigawa Katie Tanigawa KT

Project Manager, 2015-2019. Katie Tanigawa was a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation focused on representations of poverty in Irish modernist literature. Her additional research interests included geospatial analyses of modernist texts and digital humanities approaches to teaching and analyzing literature.

 Tye Landels-Gruenewald Tye Landels-Gruenewald TLG

Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.

 Kim McLean-Fiander Kim McLean-Fiander KMF

Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad JJ

Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018).

 Blaine Greteman Blaine Greteman BG

Blaine Greteman is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in early modern literature, digital humanities, and nonfiction. In 2013 he published The Poetics and Politics of Youth in the Age of Milton, and he writes regularly for popular publications, including The New Republic.

 Martin D. Holmes Martin D. Holmes MDH

Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.

 Francis Coles Francis Coles

Pamphleteer and bookseller. Accused of printing scandalous material in 1643.

BBTI BBTI BHO John Rothwell John Rothwell

Bookseller.

BBTI Born digital. English Short Title Catalogue. British Library. Shakeosphere: Mapping Early Modern Social Networks. U of Iowa Libraries. http://shakeosphere.lib.uiowa.edu/index.jsp. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP. https://www.oed.com/. Vine Street

(VINE4.xml) Francis Cole’s Shop in Vine Street

(COVI1.xml) The Sun

(TSUN1.xml) London Stone

London Stone was, literally, a stone that stood on the south side of what is now Cannon Street (formerly Candlewick Street). Probably Roman in origin, it is one of London’s oldest relics. On the Agas map, it is visible as a small rectangle between Saint Swithin’s Lane and Walbrook Street, just below the nd consonant cluster in the label Londonſton.

(LOND2.xml) St. Paul’s Churchyard

Surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Paul’s Churchyard has had a multi-faceted history in use and function, being the location of burial, crime, public gathering, and celebration. Before its destruction during the civil war, St. Paul’s Cross was located in the middle of the churchyard, providing a place for preaching and the delivery of Papal edicts (Thornbury).

(STPA3.xml)

Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.

Author A person or organization chiefly responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a work, usually printed text. This term may also be used when more than one person or body bears such responsibility. MoEML uses the term author to designate a contributor who is wholly or partly responsible for the original content of either a born-digital document, such as an encyclopedia entry, or a primary source document, such as a MoEML Library text. Degree supervisor A person overseeing a higher level academic degree. MoEML uses the term degree supervisor to designate a person who has taken on the role as a supervisor for an academic project. Examples of this are Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award (JCURA), directed readings, honours theses, and graduate final projects. Data manager A person or organization responsible for managing databases or other data sources. MoEML uses the term data manager to designate contributors who maintain and manage our databases. They add and update the data sent to us by external contributors or found by MoEML team members. They also monitor journals and sources regularly to ensure that our databases are current. Markup editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. MoEML uses the code mrk both for the primary encoder(s) and for the person who edits the encoding. MoEML’s normal workflow includes a step whereby encoders check each other’s work. We use the term encoder to designate the principal encoder, and markup editor to designate the person who checks the encoding. Project director A person or organization with primary responsibility for all essential aspects of a project, or that manages a very large project that demands senior level responsibility, or that has overall responsibility for managing projects, or provides overall direction to a project manager. MoEML’s Project Director directs the intellectual and scholarly aspects of the project, consults with the Advisory and Editorial Boards, and ensures the ongoing funding of the project. Programmer A person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. MoEML uses the term programmer to designate a person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. Research team head A person who directed or managed a research project. MoEML uses the terms research term head and assistant project manager interchangeably. Vetter MoEML uses the term vetter to designate an academic or expert reviewer who reads and judges the publishability of scholarly material before it is published by MoEML. Changed calendar value from "julian" to "julianSic" using XSLT. Published document. Peer reviewed document. Peer reviewed document. Copy-edited document. Created document. Georeferencing the Early Modern London Book Trade: 3. What’s in an Imprint? 11 December 2015
Screen capture of the Shakeosphere homepage.

In my previous blog post, I proposed a model TEI-XML tree for encoding and geocoding bibliographic datasets. In the conclusion of that piece, I suggested that, in order to implement such a model, print historians must pool their resources and expertise through collaborative data mining and sharing. Over the past year (2014-2015), Janelle Jenstad and I have been working with David Eichmann and Blaine Greteman of the University of Iowa to extract precise geographic data points from the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Dr. Eichmann and Dr. Greteman have developed some groundbreaking methods to datamine the ESTC as part of the Shakeosphere project, which enables researchers and students to search, analyze, and contribute to a visualization of the early modern print and manuscript network. As I suggested in my first blog post, print historians have hitherto been unable to extract meaningful geographic data points from the ESTC because book imprints (data field 260 in MARC-tagged database entries) remain unparsed. Record number 006182591 served as my former example: 260 |a London : |b Printed by Thomas Creede, for Tho. Millington, and Iohn Busby. And are to be sold at his house in Carter Lane, next the Powle head, |c 1600.ESTC 006182591 Note that field 260|b contains the printer’s name, the booksellers’ names, and the bookshop location, each undemarcated. To surmount this technical barrier and realize the full potential of ESTC data, David Eichmann has developed a name-entity recognition algorithm that recognizes and parses the various data points contained within field 260|b of ESTC entries based on linguistic patterns. Dr. Eichmann’s algorithm parses an entry and wraps custom tags around the individual pieces of information in the imprint. For example, his algorithm transforms record number 006182591 into the following XML code: <location>London</location> : Printed by <stationer><forename>Thomas</forename> Creede</stationer>, for <stationer>Tho. Millington</stationer>, and <stationer>Iohn Busby</stationer>. And are to be sold <locational>at</locational> <location>his house</location> <locational>in</locational> <location>Carter Lane</location>, <locational>next</locational> <location>the Powle head</location>, <date>1600</date>.

From this initial mark-up, it becomes apparent that book imprints, though pointing to one location of print activity (i.e., a single set of supposed geo-coordinates), contain multiple toponyms. Each toponym expresses a different level of spatial precision (e.g., his house is more precise than Carter Lane). Moreover, the spatial hierarchies between toponyms are expressed by way of locational prepositions. Insofar as geography may be described as the depiction or analysis of the way the constituent parts of something interact, or of their arrangement in relation to one another (OED geography n.5), the geography of the book emerges from the intersection of relations between toponyms and names associated with a book, expressed in a book imprint.

Dr. Eichmann has been kind enough to share his parsed imprint data with Dr. Jenstad and me. Using XSLT, I was able to transform his data into a set of five TEI-XML databases: A listBibl database of sources (i.e., ESTC entries), each identified by its Shakeosphere ID number and date. A listPers database of identified stationers, containing each stationer’s forename, surname, and floruit dates. A listPlace database of identified locations, containing the various toponyms used to refer to each location across imprints. A listRelation database of relations between identified locations, expressed by locational prepositions. A listRelation database of relations between identified stationers and identified locations expressed by locational prepositions.

I would like to suggest that the fifth and final database, which cross-references data contained in the other databases, holds enormous potential for early modern print historians interested in the geography of the book. As I mentioned in my first blog post, in order to interact meaningfully with the burgeoning field of geohumanities, print historians need to be able to make large-scale queries about locations of print activity. What is meant by this term is a matter of precision: a location of print activity may be a continent, a country, a county, a city, a ward, a street, or a building. For some print historians, it may suffice to georeference data according to broader categories such as country or city; however, for print historians interested in the early modern London booktrade, high precision is critically important. The ESTC, for example, contains almost 66,000 entries of books published in London between 1475 and 1666. By situating stationers in relation to locations, the fifth database enables print historians to make queries about individual stalls, stands, and shops occupied by individual stationers in London. Consider the following entries taken from the prototype database: <relation name="in" active="16665" passive="8762" notBefore-custom="1624" notAfter-custom="1679" datingMethod="mol:julian" source="109143; 141029; 149836; 154172; 165144; 165554"/> <relation name="at" active="14575" passive="7562" notBefore-custom="1633" notAfter-custom="1641" datingMethod="mol:julian" source="89376; 188336"/>

This first XML element essentially states that, according to Shakeosphere entries 109143 141029, etc., stationer 16665 in the listPers database (i.e., Francis Coles) worked in location 1624 in the listPlace database (i.e., Vine Street) from 1624 to 1679. From this relation we can infer a location of print activity, namely Francis Cole’s Shop in Vine Street. Further research would then be required to match this qualitative description of a place with the quantitative coordinates of its geographic space, for example, on the Agas map or another georeferenced surface.

The second XML element similarly suggests that, according to Shakeosphere entries 89376 and 188336, stationer 14575 in the listPers database (i.e., John Rothwell) worked at location 7562 in the listPlace database (i.e.,The Sun) from 1633 to 1641. From this relation we can infer a location of print activity, namely John Rothwell’s Shop at the Sign of the Sun, or simply The Sign of the Sun. Because there were many places in early modern London demarcated by the sign of the sun, one would need to consult the fourth database, which contains relations among location identities, to determine that this sign of the Sun was located in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Further research could then determine the spatial coordinates that correlated with this qualitative description of a place.

A wealth of information is embedded in the syntax of book imprints. My research suggests that, in its simplest form, a book imprint expresses three data points in prose: (1) a stationer, (2) a toponym referring to a location of print activity, and (3) a preposition describing the relationship between 1 and 2.Further research might consider the way that different prepositions signify different geographic relationships. Based on my rudimentary work in this area, I believe that it may be possible to develop a taxonomy of prepositions used in book imprints, describing the different types of relationships stationers had with locations of print activity. However, until recently, the resources (i.e., software, knowhow, funding, etc.) required to retrieve and cross-reference these three data points has not been available to print historians. Collaboration has provided Dr. Jenstad and me with an innovative and effective way to transcend this barrier. Working with the Shakeosphere team in Iowa, we have successfully developed prototype methods for parsing the relational data contained in early modern book imprints.