¶ Bibliotecas Privadas de Navarra
Bibliotecas Privadas de Navarra is a book history and digital humanities project that aggregates the inventories of 35 Navarrese private libraries from 1583 to 1694. The owners were primarily members of the clergy, but the corpus also includes 4 legal professionals and 3 women. Libraries can range in size from just a few titles to several hundred. All of these inventories are post-mortem inventories made after the owner’s death and preserved in court proceedings held in the Archivo Real y General de Navarra (AGN) and the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP). The project website contains a catalog of all of the inventories which may be searched and filtered collectively. Each owner has their own page with a full transcription of the inventory and any biographical information. In addition, the website explains the genre taxonomy applied to the entries, lists all of the authors contained within the corpus, and presents visualizations of the data.
The bibliographic data from these inventories was the basis for my honors thesis, an interdisciplinary analysis applying a cultural studies analysis to a bibliographic base wherein I inferred the identities that 37 clergy, legal professionals, and women of Navarre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries expressed through their libraries. The thesis is available for download through the College of William and Mary’s institutional repository.
¶ Lorenzo Coroneu
Lorenzo Coroneu was a French bookseller who kept his shop in Pamplona, Spain. When he died in July 1684, he passed with no heirs nor a will. The ecclesiastical tribunal of the Diocese of Pamplona declared that his executors should sell off his personal goods and the contents of his bookstore to pay his debts and his funeral expenses. This order would spawn a 12-year saga involving multiple executors to see the 2,487 volumes in his stock sold. Detailing these events is a court document (C/1436 N.2 of the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona) which contains the original inventory of Coroneu’s bookstore, auction records, and other sales records made by the executors and agents of the court. It constitutes an invaluable primary source to Navarrese book history and was the principal source for my MA thesis on Lorenzo Coroneu’s book stock, his business practices, and the relation of his store to the legal culture of the time. A transcript and searchable catalog of the original inventory are available online.
¶ Pangolin Press
Pangolin Press is a collaboration between me, a book historian, and my dad, a mechanical engineer. In March 2020, I asked him if he could design a model printing press that could be 3D printed on our printer at home. We had several weeks of back and forth on the design, and then a working model was born, both in a historically accurate form and with a novel platen/screw designed by my dad. The press can print using a variety of plates, including 3D printed plates, potatoes, and linoleum. Videos of the press in action are available on YouTube.
¶ Chymistry of Isaac Newton
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is a project operating at Indiana University Bloomington since the early 2000s. It analyzes Isaac Newton’s alchemical manuscripts and provides normalized and diplomatic transcriptions plus digital surrogates of these manuscripts. As a research assistant and text encoding analyst for the project, I work primarily on the bibliography section of the project, which consists of tracing Newton’s citations in the manuscripts to other alchemical manuscripts and printed texts.
See an explanation of my workflow and the challenges of working on the bibliography in this Twitter thread from Day of DH 2020
Alexandra E. Wingate 