The Digital Miscellanies Index: Mapping an Evolving Poetic Culture

The Digital Miscellanies Index, http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org, is a three-year project designed to create a freely available online database of approximately fourteen hundred poetic miscellanies published during the course of the eighteenth century. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, it is led by Dr. Abigail Williams and Dr. Jennifer Batt, and is based at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. Oxford University Computing and Library Services, in collaboration with Gnostyx Research, created and developed the database. It is due for completion in the summer of 2013. Its contents are based on a comprehensive new bibliography of eighteenth-century poetic miscellanies compiled by Michael F. Suarez, SJ.

The Value of Miscellanies

Critical trends of the past thirty or so years have seen a huge rise in interest in non-canonical, little-known, yet often highly important, areas of poetry. Many poems were published individually, but they went on to enjoy an afterlife in the miscellany culture of the period. Poetic miscellanies are vital to understanding the diversity of eighteenth-century literary culture, reflecting fashions, popular taste, and the literary market. They were the form in which many ordinary people would have read poetry, and they offer insights into readers and consumers of the past. As one of the most visible points of contact between the shaping of the literary canon and the commercial demands of print culture, they represent a particularly important and popular mediation of poetry. Yet they have been largely neglected, because of their bewildering number and variety: though there were several thousand published between 1700-1800, the contents of most of these are relatively unknown.

In his influential New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984), Roger Lonsdale asserts that "we still know very little" about "the landscape of eighteenth-century poetry" (xxxv) because of our ignorance of the innumerable poetic miscellanies of the period. Almost thirty years later, we do not know much more about the specific contents of these miscellanies, and so their significance remains untapped. Scholarship concerned with poetic reception still relies largely upon the same handful of anthologies and miscellanies for evidence of popularity of individual poems or authors, particularly with regard to well-known collections like Robert Dodsley's six-volume Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748-58) or Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719). It is impossible to map the development of the literary canon and the changing nature of eighteenth-century poetics using such a tiny sample as an index of popular taste.

The Value of a Database

The Digital Miscellanies Index will, where possible, record every poem in every surviving miscellany from 1700-80, enabling researchers to ask very precise questions about texts, readers, and publishers, and to use that information to map the often unpredictable shape of eighteenth-century poetic culture. The combination of bibliographical and statistical data it will provide will enable scholars to consider the extent to which the apparent popularity of individual poems and authors is a product of commercially driven textual transmission. It will also allow users to investigate the relationship between readership and poetic taste. Each miscellany will be categorized under fields such as format, price, place of publication, and gender of author, and the bibliographical information recorded about each compilation will enable researchers to see how the variables of gender, region, and class have an effect on the reception and consumption of literature in the period. We have recently moved the data out of a relational database, and used it to populate an eXist database, which is augmented with a full-text search index. This will enable significant flexibility in the representation of the material we have captured. User results will be readily available for future data mining and data visualization, and by capturing the data in Extensible Markup Language (XML), we anticipate the long-term affordability and sustainability of the project.

The Digital Miscellanies Index will effectively allow us to construct a data-driven reception history of British poetry in this period. It is already producing results that challenge long-held assumptions about the nature of...