Shakespeare and Company Project

Summary

A digital project, a public resource, and a data design challenge, Shakespeare and Company is one of the CDH’s most successful legacy projects. Frequently cited by scholars in literary and historical disciplines, the project enables programmatic access to the rich and complex archival materials of the Sylvia Beach collection at Princeton University.

Research Challenge

Archival materials, such as the lending cards from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop and lending library, have the potential to reveal rich details of the lived experience of the past and enable transformational scholarship. However, the themes and patterns are notoriously difficult to access because the materials are unstructured, sporadic, and inconsistent. Transforming the complex information within the library lending card into structured data for analysis is the challenge the CDH team undertook in the Shakespeare and Company project.

CDH's Technical Innovation

The CDH developed the data model for capturing the information within the lending cards, such as books and how they circulated, as well as members of the lending library, what they read and where they lived. Notably, the CDH also created the widely used public website to make that data accessible to a wide audience. The team developed or enhanced the following open source software libraries in conjunction with the project: viapy for integration with VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File); djiffy for displaying IIIF Manifests for books; parasolr for Apache Solr indexing; and Django-pucas for managing users with a CAS (Central Authentication Service) system. The project also inspired the creation of the undate library, which enables programmatic access to incomplete dates, such as those found within the library lending cards.

Collaborative Origins

Shakespeare and Company is the result of the aligning of the research interests of Princeton faculty, the holdings of Princeton’s Special Collections, and the methodological expertise of the CDH. Founded in 2014 by Joshua Kotin (Associate Professor, English), Jesse McCarthy (PhD, English), and Clifford Wulfman (CDH) as “Mapping Expatriate Paris,” the project began with an effort to transcribe and encode the logbooks and lending cards from the Sylvia Beach collections. CDH developed the website and datasets, enabling users to explore the reading histories of the members of the lending library (including Ernest Hemingway) and to track the circulation of books.

Implications for the Humanities

The data contained within the lending library cards offers insights into a range of topics of interest to scholars of the early twentieth century, from reading habits of Lost Generation authors to the physical contours of US expatriate life in Paris. Beyond Kotin’s scholarship, the project and data have been cited in more than numerous scholarly articles in Modernist studies.

How to use

The CDH provides access to the resulting data for browsing through an online database (powered by Django), and for computational analysis through published datasets.

Photo of Beach in Shakespeare and Company by Gisele Freund.