Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2025
Abstract
The article explores how the interplay of ideological values and technological capacities have shaped the digital bibliography of British print history. Using a misgendering in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) as a case study, the article explores how information flows through resources like Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Early English Books Online (EEBO), library catalogues, WorldCat, and retail outlets like Amazon. The article argues that as data from the ESTC is reproduced through linked data structures, information is ‘authorized’ far beyond what a single resource would do alone or what its original authors imagined or designed. While feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship has discursively created and revised new histories of textual production, in contrast foundational resources like the ESTC perpetuate old assumptions with unfixed errors and editorial practices that render the who and the why of their metadata choices opaque. The article concludes that radical revision is necessary if we are to disrupt centuries of a white and male norm in British print history.
Keywords
early english books online, eighteenth century collections online, english short title catalogue, feminist bibliography, print history
Language
English
Publication Title
Journal of Early Modern Studies
Rights
(c) 2025 Kate Ozment. This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ozment, K. (2025). Digital Bibliography in the Age of Linked Data. Journal of Early Modern Studies, 14, 33–45. https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-16517
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version