Traditional bibliographies present highly coded language in a cramped format, making it hard to absorb any of the information being presented. Furthermore, by giving a static, uniform selection of information, the bibliography is pre-filtering what is deemed important. Because of this, in trying to systematically fully record a novel's physical presence, a traditional bibliography alienates its reader from the novel in question.

As a response to these problems, the goal of this project is to strip away excess information and present what remains in a streamlined and compartmentalized manner.

The 1777 edition of The Mutability of Human Life is notable in that it forgoes all front and back matter other than the title page, which is itself sparse, giving the reader very little information about the novel. A traditional bibliographic entry for this particular publication is incredibly dissonant with the novel's self-presentation, making it a key example of the failings of a traditional bibliography. Though the goal of this project is specifically not to attempt to capture the "essence" of a particular novel, the simple presentation was meant to mirror that of The Mutability of Human Life, resulting in a clean, focused, and easily accessible stream of information.

Upon loading the site, the user is prompted to enter a list of terms (given in a card at the bottom of the page) they are interested in. The requested information is then rendered in a parallax view, allowing the user to slowly walk through the page and take in each piece of information. Anything that can be expressed in two lines or less is rendered in one joint section at the top, and layouts which require more space are rendered below that. These layouts were carefully designed to be easy on the eyes; for example, the catalogues listed under circulation are stored by city in a collapsible table, initially presenting the user with only a list of cities. At the bottom of the page, the user can edit the term list if they wish to see more or less information. The title of the novel and the source information remain constant regardless of user input.

Though some selection of what information to include is unavoidable, the idea behind this project is to make as much information as possible available to the user, including everything listed in a traditional bibliography and more. By allowing the user to filter only what they want to see, the tool avoids making claims about what the novel is, instead allowing the user to explore for themselves. (Note: Due to time restraints and the obscurity of the chosen novel, the actual project has a very limited amount of information available. Ideally, this would not be the case.)

Test it out here, or take a look at the github repository here. Note: The site is running on a free server and may take a moment to start up.

[Brook, Frances.] THE EXCURSION. IN TWO VOLUMES. BY MRS. BROOKE; Author of the History of Lady Julia Mandeville, and of Emily Montague. London: T. Cadell, 1777.

Brooke, Frances. THE| EXCURSION | IN TWO VOLUMES.| [40mm ]| BY MRS. BROOKE;| Author of the History of Lady Julia| Mandeville, and of Emily Montague.| Vol. I.| LONDON:| Printed for T. CADELL, in the STRAND| MDCCLXXVII. I 216p; II 270pp. 12mo.

Contents

Vol 1. A1r half title, A1v blank, B1r-K6v text. Vol II. A1r half title, A1v blank, A2r title, B1r-M6v text.  

Notes

Volume 1 sourced from British Library and accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale document number: CW3309241626. Volume 2 sourced from British Library and accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale document number: CW3309241842.