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Shakespeare and Company Project

Built by CDH

Recreating the world of the Lost Generation in interwar Paris

Data Development
Database
Digital Research Infrastructures
English
Information Retrieval
Interface Design
View project website
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Code

Code

Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Nick Budak, Benjamin W. Hicks, et al., “Princeton-CDH/Mep-Django: V1.2” (Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, July 14, 2020)

Data

Data

Joshua Kotin, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, et al., “Shakespeare and Company Project Dataset: Lending Library Members, Books, Events” (Princeton University, January 2022)

Publications and Presentations

Publications and Presentations

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “The World of Shakespeare and Company,” Special Issue, Journal of Cultural Analytics 9, no. 2 (May 29, 2024) and Modernism/modernity 8, Cycle 3 (May 28, 2024)

Rebecca Sutton Koeser and Zoe LeBlanc, “Missing Data, Speculative Reading,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 9, no. 2 (May 29, 2024)

Fedor Karmanov and Joshua Kotin, “A Counterfactual Canon,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 9, no. 2 (May 29, 2024)

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 7, no. 1 (February 9, 2022)

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “Shakespeare and Company Project,” Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook (February 25, 2021)

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “Shakespeare and Company: Top Ten Lists,Shakespeare and Company Project, (Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, November 16, 2020)

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “The Shakespeare and Company Lending Library Cards in Context,” Shakespeare and Company Project (Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, March 9, 2020)

Nick Budak, “Representing Gender in the Shakespeare and Company Project,” Shakespeare and Company Project (Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, December 12, 2019)

Project Peer Review

Project Peer Review

Andrew Thacker, “Review: Shakespeare and Company Project,” Reviews in Digital Humanities II, no. 7 (July 12, 2021)

Awards

Awards

Finalist in the Fast Company 2021 Innovation by Design Awards (Category: Learning)

In 1919, an American named Sylvia Beach opened a bookshop and lending library in Paris. She called it Shakespeare and Company and it quickly became the meeting place for a community of expatriate writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation. In 1922, Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses under the Shakespeare and Company imprint, a feat that would make her—and her bookshop and lending library—famous.

The Shakespeare and Company Project is a digital humanities initiative that uses documents from the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton’s Firestone Library to recreate the world of the Lost Generation. The Project details what members of the lending library read and where they lived, and how expatriate life changed between the end of World War I and the German Occupation of France. The Project also illuminates the influence of Shakespeare and Company on French intellectual life.

In phase I (2015–2016), the project team focused on transcribing and encoding two sets of records from the Beach Papers: logbooks that include every library membership and renewal, and lending library cards that include addresses and borrowing histories of individual library members. In phase II (2016–2017), the project team focused on refining the encoding and developing a personography of lending library members. In phase III (2018–2019), the project team began developing a new interactive website that will allow the public to explore the the lending library membership and track the circulation of books.

The Project, which was originally called “Mapping Expatriate Paris,” was founded in 2014 by Joshua Kotin, Jesse McCarthy, and Clifford Wulfman. An overview of the project was available at mep.princeton.edu from 2016 to 2019 with a map created by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira.

Photo of Beach in Shakespeare and Company by Gisele Freund.

Related projects

Geography of Taste

Mapping borrowing patterns in the Shakespeare and Company library

Built by CDH
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Related posts

Article Cluster Illuminates “The World of Shakespeare and Company”

29 May 2024

Articles use data from the Shakespeare and Company Project to glean new insights on the celebrated bookshop and lending library, reading communities, and the modernist movement.

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Shakespeare and Company Project Releases New Exhibit, Essay

15 February 2022

As readers around the world commemorated the centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Shakespeare and Company Project team celebrated its own milestones.

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Shakespeare and Company Project Recognized for Innovative Design

27 September 2021

Fast Company named the Project a finalist in the learning category of the 2021 Innovation by Design Awards.

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On the release of the Shakespeare and Company Project 1.0

22 May 2020

Reflections on the 1.0 release of the Shakespeare and Company Project.

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See you at Shakespeare and Company

1 September 2015

Updates from the first major phase of Mapping Expatriate Paris: completing a complete diplomatic transcription of all the card faces in the Sylvia Beach lending library card catalog.

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Team

Project Director

Technical Lead

Project Alums

Carl Adair
Serena Alagappan
Oliver Browne
Harriet Calver
Jin Chow
Currie Engel
Madeleine Joelson
Carolyn Kelly
Sara Krolewski
Ellie Maag
Isabel Ruehl
Sylvie Thode
Clifford Wulfman

Grants

2020–

Long Term Support

2020–2021

Project Enhancement

2019–2020

Dataset Curation

2018–2020

Sponsored Project

2016–2017

Sponsored Project

2015–2016

Sponsored Project

2014–2015

Seed