Translating Networks at SHARP 2016, Paris

by Sean Weidman • 26 Aug 2016

Immediately after attending the mid-July, 2016 DH conference in Kraków, Poland, Dawn hopped on a plane to Paris for the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP). There, she gave a presentation and overview of our Translating Networks project and offered a number of insights into future directions of the project.

To read the paper and view the slides, visit: http://dawnchildress.com/2016/08/13/sharp16/.

One of the more involved and interesting aspects of that future is how we plan to ultimately organize the data and make it accessible, manipulable, and analyzable. Rather than using a traditional series of networks—with their own individual lists of nodes and edges—as a visualization technique, we’ll be using an open-sourced, NoSQL development suite called Neo4j to create a graph database.

For those not familiar with the concept (as I wasn’t when I joined the project), the graph database basically reorganizes/reorients the information of the relationships between the nodes and edges of a traditional network, allowing users to locate, manipulate, and then analyze those relationships easier.

The SHARP presentation was part of a panel that considered the “Status of Translators,” with presentations from Kenneth Carpenter (Harvard) on Translators and Translations of Economic Literature before 1851 and Anthony Cordingley (U of Sydney) on Translation Archives: The Advent and the Cultural Politics of Collecting. There were a number of common threads throughout the papers, especially related to the representation of translators in the scholarly record, from archival finding aids and catalog records, to other existing datasets for discovering and studying literary history.