Towards a New Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century French Fiction

Abstract

The following text looks back over a project in literary history that began using digital techniques in the early 1980s. Growing out of earlier work in bibliometrics, it attempted to harness computer-based techniques to the double task of harvesting and organising data on eighteenth-century novels. A retrospective discussion of the advantages and the problems of this approach over time raises questions that may well be unfamiliar to contemporary scholars in the field, but that still can be relevant today. It moves on to outline current and future perspectives in studies such as this: in particular the exponential growth of access to library records and io digitized versions of the texts themselves, together with the still often incomplete and unstable data produced and the statistical problems raised as a result, and briefly raises some of the issues around the rescuing and producing an accessible version of material collected over such a long period and then merging it with larger and more recent projects.