Lines from the Library

I have been reading this little book:

Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (2005) by Franco Moretti.
It's pretty short -- three essays that fill just over 100 pages -- but it's sparking some big ideas.

I'll just quote from the opening pages:

To begin with, this is an essay on literary history: literature, the old territory (more or less), unlike the drift towards other discourses so typical of recent years. But within that old territory, a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs -- graphs, maps, and trees -- in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction.

... But their consequences are on the other hand extremely concrete: graphs, maps, and trees place the literary field literally in front of our eyes--and show us how little we still know about it. It is a double lesson, of humility and euphoria at the same time: humility for what literary history has accomplished so far (not enough), and euphoria for what still remains to be done (a lot). Here, the methodology of the book reveals its pragmatic ambition: for me, abstraction is not an end in itself, but a way to widen the domain of the literary historian, and enrich its internal problematic. How this may be done is what I will try to explain. (1-2)

Ever since I started working in Fales I have felt that same combination of humility and euphoria when I confront the very concrete books on our shelves. There are just too many for even the most dedicated reader to consume in a lifetime, let alone digest and interpret.

I intend to chip away at this Big Idea here in the coming weeks, but the nub of my gist is that there is a role for the library/librarian in presenting our holdings to our users in entirely new ways. What if our users don't want to read our books but do something entirely else? What if they just want to graph them? What if they want to build charts and maps?

These are certainly things I want to do, and I know the technology to do it is out there. Stay tuned while I try to figure it all out.

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?