Division of Labour and Reflection on Learning

Elisa – My contribution to this project involved conducting a comprehensive literature review on publishers of 18th-century literature and their history. This was my first Digital Humanities course, so initially, I spent a great amount of time understanding some key topics for this project. In this case, decorative initials and factotums were unfamiliar subjects to me. After DI comparison was done, I was part of the Bowyer group in which our task was to compare DIs from the book about W. Bowyer with DIs that we had in our data. After examining Bowyer’s DIs I gained a good understanding of his printing style. As a next step I began to research information about the publisher William Bowyer and the Bowyer Ledgers. After that I began to search for information on Bowyer’s connections to Dublin, as well as information about printers Oliver Nelson and George Grierson. This project was a good experience for me, working with such a good team and learning a lot about 18th-century publishers.

Kärt – I often acted as our team’s communication and files manager. When we split into smaller groups, I was in the one which researched William Bowyer’s DIs. This project offered me first-hand experience of a Digital Humanities project. It was interesting and somewhat challenging in the sense that usually people from the computational or Data Science background also take part in this course, which wasn’t the case this semester. But I believe that thanks to the support from our supervisors and the COMHIS researchers, not to mention the activeness of our team, we managed to find a suitable angle for our research relatively quickly and in the end everything worked out well for the project. Gaining such experiences is useful, because it helps with learning to grapple challenges in stride as they come in the settings of a bigger team project, this skill can be used in either academic or corporate environments.

Kate – I participated in cluster annotation and analysing the dataset with a focus on typographic trends. This involved detailing the dataset’s characteristics, ranking modules based on the diversity of DIs, and employing heatmaps to illustrate typographic specialisation. I also examined temporal trends in DI usage and conducted an analysis of printer diversity within the ECCO printing circle, culminating in a comparative study of the typographic practices of printers such as Bowyer and Richardson. This project significantly enhanced my skills in data analysis and visualisation, providing a deeper understanding of historical printing practices. Working with a great team enriched the experience, fostering collaboration and diverse perspectives in our research.

Liisa – Like everyone else, I took part in the annotation process. After that I found a couple of interesting DIs that I wanted to dig deeper into as well as Samuel Richardson’s ornaments. Thus, I stumbled upon the case about the “The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands” which I mainly focused on later in the project. I also wrote about Samuel Richardson in the Printers part of the blog. Thelma and I created the structure for the blog and wrote part of the introduction. I was also in charge of uploading everything to this blog.

I felt a bit lost at the start of the course but in the end, I feel the project course has taught me a lot. The ECCO dataset seemed quite intimidating at first and trying to understand its mechanisms kept me busy at the start. I am quite happy with our project and our work as a group, and I feel that there should definitely be more research done about the decorative initials. Hopefully someone will pick up where we left off!

Thelma – During the project I was in the Richardson group, but researching the material led me to Bowyer more than once. During the intense research stage, I spent time manually leafing through the books. I spent most of my time researching the two similar DIs, Richardson and Original. At the end of the writing process, I was in charge of editing the blog for more cohesive style and presentation of content. It has been a great experience seeing the project form and gradually develop as our curiosity for research kicked in. It was also a great exercise in team work, as we were effective by splitting into teams and managing tasks separately. As an English major, the ECCO database was an interesting resource, and I hope to be able to use the 18th century books for linguistic study later.

Next section: References

University of Helsinki

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