The goal of the Grub Street Project is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London. This includes mapping the city's print trades, its (imagined) literary representations, and its (real) histories in order to understand their evolution and their influence upon other networks of trade, knowledge, and literature. Visualizing a network of communications now centuries past, however, presents no small challenge. In 1704 Jonathan Swift complained of the seemingly ephemeral literary productions in London where vast numbers of written works were "hurried so hastily off the scene, that they escape our memory, and delude our sight" like a topography of ever-changing clouds. Today, the obstacles to posterity that Swift condemned resurface in any attempt to study the relationships between 18th-century printed materials, texts, authors, printers, booksellers, publishers, and readers. For example, while we might be able to determine where a book was printed or "to be sold," patterns of production, selling, buying, and reading are harder to see. Moreover, the ephemeral nature of London's topography itself presents difficulties for the researcher. The notorious Grub Street is no more, and traces of the printers' temporary premises there exist today only as vague addresses such as "neere the lower pumpe" or "neer Cripple-Gate." High-resolution "zoomable" maps from 18th-century prints associated with a database of bibliographical and topographical data, trades indexes, and literary texts afford new possibilities for not only seeing the relationships between trades, book production, and dissemination of ideas, but also for seeing the topographies of literary imagination.
Presenting such research on the spatial, temporal, and material influences on literary communications is also hindered by the limitations of print. Maps are expensive to reproduce, and usually printed in low-resolution formats; the complex relationships of space, time, commerce, trades, and personal histories, not to mention the texts themselves have imposed certain limitations on visual presentation and interpretation. The length and breadth of books and articles are governed by costs of paper, ink, and distribution; printed data is static; the meta-information contained in printed books and journals is limited by the constraints of the page; automated searching and textual comparison is impossible, and so on. Networked computing presents clear advantages in augmenting and extending traditional research methods. Indeed, a profound alteration of literary texts, research activities, and scholarly publications already is taking place, and it is in this new "Grub Street" of digital publishing—itself too often critiqued as specious and ephemeral—that we can realize an exciting new medium for examining a history of literary cultures and subcultures.
Currently I am in the process of indexing place names and place name alternates in a mysql, and digitizing eighteenth-century maps of the city.
You can see some of the zoomified maps here (choose File --> Open to see Strype's or Horwood's maps): these are early experiments and will have improved user-interface and interactive components added once the database has been developed. Data to be integrated with the maps includes:
As data is added to the database, we can begin to imagine early modern networks of communications and interactions, visualize how ideas were transferred, shared, and stolen, and see how the city was represented by its citizens and its visitors. We will be able to see how the dissemination of ideas created networks of trade and commerce; we will also be able to see how the urban landscape was imagined in the eighteenth century.
I'm also experimenting with:
For more information, contact Allison Muri.