As part of EDPOP, a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is being developed at Utrecht University to facilitate research into early modern European popular print culture. It will enable researchers to create and annotate their own virtual collections of printed materials, and to consult collections made by other researchers.

Users can collect metadata from various bibliographic datasets and enrich it with annotations to perform different types of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Available datasets will include, among others, the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), CERL’s Heritage of the Printed Book database, the Short Title Catalogue of the Netherlands (STCN), and library catalogues of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library.

As part of the VRE, an online glossary of early modern popular print genres has been published in September 2023.

Collections within the VRE can be used, for example, to study the development of a certain genre across time and/or regions, to trace the surviving copies of a certain work, or to analyse the production of popular material in a certain town or print shop.

Collections offer a way to bring together expertise on various types of popular print and to help fellow researchers save time collecting and assessing dispersed bibliographical data.

In the long term, the VRE aims to incorporate digitized texts, images, and biographic metadata to be able to trace networks of people and materials across Europe.

Developing team

The VRE is being developed in collaboration with Utrecht University’s Research Software Lab by:

• Jeroen Salman (project leader)
• Andrea van Leerdam (postdoc)
• Cristina Reguera Gomez (student-assistant)
• Julian Gonggrijp (developer)
• Tijmen Baarda (developer)
• Luka van der Plas (developer)

Funding

Utrecht University Datahub SSH

Timeframe

Envisioned launch: 2024

Test phase: starts Autumn 2023

We welcome suggestions or participation in the test phase. Please contact j.salman@uu.nl