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BY JACQUELINE SMALL

In print | Published November 4, 2010

Assistant Professor of English Rachel Buurma’s newest project, the Early Novel Database, is “sort of like a library catalog on steroids,” according to Buurma ’99. Thanks in part to a nomination from College Librarian Peggy Seiden, the database has been awarded the Community Contribution Award by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education.

The award will provide the database with a small honorarium and an opportunity to publish case studies with Academic Commons. The case studies will be published in April 2011, under the theme “Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate.”

Buurma said the Early Novel Database is still in its infancy, but will eventually allow users to create groups of novels based on information gleaned from the title page, biographical information about the author and even marginalia in specific copies of each book. It draws from novels in both French and English from before the year 1830.

“This will make possible the writing of new histories of the novel. Usually we rely on a very small number of … canonical, well-known examples, though some novel critics try to make big generalizations … This is going to offer something in between,” Buurma said.

Currently, the database contains over 3,000 novels, though several are different editions of a novel or even different copies of the same edition. Buurma pointed out that they are no more interested in earlier versions of a text than in later versions, since later editions offer more information about the book, its popularity and sometimes its author.

Unlike other online literary databases, such as Project Gutenberg and Google books, the Early Novel Database is not going to offer full texts of novels, but data about or describing the books. Instead, it is about the meta-data of books. “It emphasizes the way the novel describes itself [on the title page and in the preface] and information that can be gathered by looking at the novel as opposed to information about it,” Buurma said.

The professor first worked on an incarnation of this project when she was still in graduate school, at the University of Pennsylvania. That project came to a halt after their application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities was denied. She left Philadelphia after graduate school, but when she returned to work at Swarthmore, she “realized [she] was still interested and picked it up again.”

Now, two Swarthmore students, Anna Levine ’12 and Richard Li ’11, as well as students at Bryn Mawr help contribute to the database. Two years ago, the first summer they were involved with the project, Li and Levine learned how to analyze and then catalog rare books at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

Levine, Li and Buurma also discussed conceptual issues relating to the project, and they kept a blog about their progress. The next summer, Li and Levine mostly worked on cleaning up records they had already created, but they continued to catalog books, too.

“I got involved with the Early Novels Database as a freshman. Rachel asked me if I had any interest working on the project over the summer, and it seemed like a great opportunity–– not very many undergraduates majoring in the humanities get to do research,” Levine said in an e-mail.

Seiden pointed out that although there are several ways for students to gain research experience in the sciences, it is very difficult to find such work in the humanities. This is partly because humanities work is rarely collaborative. “I think in the humanities the notion of the ‘lone scholar’ still prevails …, particularly in literary analysis,” Seiden said.

Working on a project like this is a rare chance for college students, she said. She described once meeting a professor from the University of Chicago who was opposed to working even with graduate students, on the grounds that they did not offer the same knowledge and experience as senior researchers.

“I think [the fact] that she’s bringing in undergraduates is really wonderful,” Seiden said.

Buurma said the people who work on the project do not have any sort of hierarchy. “I am the faculty director, so I’m in charge of content, you could say. But we’re non-hierarchical, we think of ourselves as collaborators.”

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