2025/07/23 by Laura Estill · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · doi:10.16995/dscn.18897
openalex publication_date 2025/07/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Enumerative bibliographies are lists of scholarship that capture the state of a field. This article first evaluates digital texts of one such bibliography, Franz Thimm’s Shakspeariana from 1564-1864 (1872), before applying textual analysis using Voyant Tools. The takeaways are both methodological and interpretive: we can use inaccurate online texts (“dirty OCR,” that is, optical character recognition), we can fruitfully apply text analysis to printed bibliographies, and we can learn about bibliographies with Voyant Tools even if they are multilingual. This research shows how Thimm’s bibliography emphasizes Shakespeare publication from major urban centres and surfaces the importance of nineteenth-century German translation and scholarship on Shakespeare, while inviting us to reconsider how we credit translators (or not) as we name them in our lists. Ultimately, experimenting with digital tools to analyze early bibliographies can help us better understand the history of our scholarship.