William Combe Project

[dorothealint]

William Combe was a writer in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Ask anyone who has heard his name and they will tell you he was a hack. He was not famous, except for one major work that most people in the field have heard of, The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax. However, of people who have heard of it, fewer can associate his name with even this work. His writing permeated the age but the only place someone can find the comprehensive list of his compositions is in his obituary. Last semester I happened across one of his writings that a novel written by Jane Austen bears a striking similarity to in terms of characters and plot points. I am currently writing a paper proposing his composition as a source for Austen’s work. If this is accepted in the literary community, I think people may look at his lesser works more seriously and a collection of them in one place will become useful to the literary community. It also has the potential for more discoveries of similarities between other works and his, as they were widely available to people of his era. Everyone in that time period read his writings, but no one was aware they were all HIS writings (he did not claim authorship with much enthusiasm) and no one has yet catalogued all his works into one place to see if they can be useful in our current study of contemporaries. My project for this semester will be to begin a website cataloging works by Coombe (and trust me when I say BEGIN because there are sooooo many of them!) This project has the potential to last more than one semester, it is within the realm of serious literary credit, and could lead to great discoveries (I’m allowed to hope). Some of his writings are very amusing and others are boring as (fill in the blank). The project could involve use of OCR, will entail building a webpage and cataloging transcripts of his works on said webpage with markup and some analysis of the writings. Let me remind you that in the olden days, we did transcripts by hand and I have done several already. By hand. Potential avenues of exploration include the sources from which he borrowed his ideas and his influence on discussions of prominent ideas at the time; and stylometry (jgaap) could be explored on whether he wrote everything himself. I did Rick and Morty for the last DH class because I thought it would be cool to have a fun project and now this is my serious project for that whole career thing college is supposed to launch you into.

[emb184]

As a bit of an Austen fanatic, I'm really interested in your paper and William Combe! I've heard the name, but prior to reading this had no idea who he was. It sounds like it'll be a huge undertaking but a rewarding one.

[ebeshero]

For those wondering, here's the Rick and Morty project, and it was a major improvement on existing resources on the web representing that series! @dorothealint, this looks really exciting--a serious, professional-grade project to build on the one you and @quantumsatire did last year. There will be some challenges for launching the project: you'll maybe want to select a collection of Coombe's work to feature in the project site this semester, as well as developing a structure for cataloging the full collection. (I'm thinking this might be something like @setriplette 's work on the Lope de Vega project, where there's a great structure in place, and a portion developed as a starting point for future development.)

[emb184]

I'm not sure where to leave my available times, but I figure here is a good place to start. I'm free Monday Wednesday and Friday before 10, 2, or after 4. Tuesdays and Thursdays I have 11:30-1 open or after 5.