An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance

Cristina Dondi, (Modern Languages, University of Oxford) gives a
talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. The
five-year ERC-funded 15cBOOKTRADE Project has developed digital
tools to investigate, on solid and extensive evidence, the impact
of the introduction of printing on early modern society. The
Material Evidence in Incunabula is a database specifically designed
to record and search the material evidence of 15th-century printed
books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations,
stamps, prices, etc. Locating and dating any of these elements
enables the movement of books across Europe and the US to be
tracked throughout the centuries, from place of production to the
books’ present locations. The TEXT-inc database describes the
content of 15th-century editions in great detail and systematically
– main and secondary texts, and paratexts. It also identifies the
various people involved in the preparation of the editions, to
understand the social network surrounding the introduction of
printing in Early Modern Europe, and to study the transmission of
texts in print. The project is also experimenting with
image-matching software applied to 15th-century Venetian
illustration, and with the scientific visualisation of data to
display the movement of these books over the five-hundred year
period of their existence.