Deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work: this is the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be. (57)
The sentence above is lifted from the "Maps" chapter of Graphs, Maps, Trees and I quite like this definition of "literary sociology." But I do have a problem with some of Moretti's data, particularly his data regarding the life cycle of genres and some of his map data. It seems to me he is working with highly subjective categories. While he admits the imperfection of his methods, it strikes me that there is plenty of work to be done that doesn't involve so much subjective data gathering.
Bibliography and book history are all about examining the forces that shape the form of any work or text. Forces such as printing technology, paper making, trends in graphic design, advertising, mass production, mass consumption, and many others. Think of the ways railroads altered the physical distribution of books, reading habits of travelers, and the contents of the books themselves, for example.
Try to imagine a map that displays all known printing establishments in North America in 1700. There's a nice chunk of quantitative data. Juxtapose that with a map of the same industry in 1800, 1850 and so on. Add to these maps details of roads, canals, and (eventually) railroads.
I keep coming back to the works of the great Edward Tufte
Like this one:
Tufte clearly demonstrates the insights to be gained through creative and intelligent displays of information. Here is a relatively simple, but very illuminating graph from Peter Garside:
This graph represents the number of novels written by men, women, and persons of unknown gender in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Moretti quotes it, but here's a link directly to Garside's work: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc03_n02.html
This graph has valuable information for both a student approaching Jane Austen for the first time and a senior academic of the Romantic period. The challenge for the library is how to empower users to manipulate the data that exists in our collections. Fales holds close to 200,000 books, many of them novels ranging from 1700 to the present. What patterns might emerge were we able to sort and graph and map them with flexibility and ease? What would such images reveal about the forces that shaped the form of these literary artifacts?