Visualising European Crime Fiction: New Digital Tools and Approaches to the Study of Transnational Popular Culture

在过去的两个世纪里，文化产业为超国家的流行偶像、人物和故事遗产的诞生做出了巨大贡献。从这一现象产生之初，通俗文学就成为文本和图像从一个国家传播到另一个国家的主要媒介之一。尽管需要解决现代社会的这些关键方面，但对流行文化跨国维度历史的研究只是最近才开始出现。然而，以前的尝试总是面临着处理大量数据的问题。拟议项目旨在解决如何通过使用专用数字化工具对这一生产进行调查的问题。由于大众文学和媒体文化协会（LPCM）创建的数据库，以及与欧洲图书馆的合作，来自贝尔法斯特大学的三个研究小组，利莫日和德布勒森将能够收集48个欧洲国家图书馆的目录，并借助地图和图表分析流行小说的跨国层面。由欧洲大学建立的网络开展的合作工作。2008年，一个国际和跨学科学者小组获得了欧洲联盟委员会文化方案的资助，开展了一项题为“欧洲流行文化：通过电影、漫画和连载文学（1850-1930年）实现欧洲文化的大众根源”的开创性举措。2011年，该小组诞生了LPCM，目前涉及来自欧洲及其他地区15个国家的研究人员。2012-2013年，为了支持LPCM的创新研究和网络工具的倡议，利莫日大学的IT服务开发了该项目的核心数据库。计划活动的一个主要目标是验证使用该数据库与国家和专业图书馆等非学术机构建立合作的可能性。除了与欧洲图书馆的重要关系外，该项目还涉及与犯罪文献图书馆（Bilipo）的密切合作，这是一家专门从事犯罪主题出版物的巴黎公共图书馆。参与该计划的研究人员将与图书馆的工作人员合作，协助他们利用该数据库作为工具，更好地组织和研究他们自己的收藏，并通过虚拟展览推广其内容。犯罪小说被选为案例研究，以测试数据库的潜力，并开发额外的搜索，组织和可视化工具，能够回答参与者的研究问题。通过收集欧洲图书馆的知识库，三个研究小组，都由这一文学类型的专家培训，将研究如何在整个二十世纪世纪在一些欧洲国家的犯罪小说举行和编目。研究将集中在不同的（跨）国家语料库从这次调查中出现的比较，并讨论如何使用地理和统计方法来分析和可视化收集的数据。将从数量的角度对这一类型的历史的既定叙述提出质疑，其目的特别是强调缺乏跨国研究，其他成果包括：两个讲习班和一个会议，以传播研究成果;同行评审期刊Belphégor的特刊，其中将包括会议论文的精选;两个虚拟展览;一系列公共活动，有几位欧洲犯罪小说作家参加;向澳大利亚人权委员会或欧洲文学研究委员会提交赠款申请，以扩大技术文书的实施，并使从事文学研究所有领域其他语料库工作的研究人员能够使用这些文书。

Over the last two centuries culture industries have made a dramatic contribution to the birth of a supranational heritage of popular icons, characters and stories. From the very beginning of this phenomenon, popular literature has been one of the key media for the circulation of texts and images from one country to another. Despite the need to address such crucial aspects of modern society, studies on the history of the transnational dimension of popular culture have only recently started to appear. Previous attempts, however, have always been confronted with the problem of dealing with an immense amount of data. The proposed project intends to address the question of how to conduct surveys of this production through the use of dedicated digital tools. Thanks to the database created by the Popular Literature and Media Culture association (LPCM), and the collaboration with the European Library, three research teams from the Universities of Belfast, Limoges and Debrecen will be able to harvest the catalogues of the 48 European national libraries and to analyse the transnational dimension of popular fiction with the help of maps and graphs.The present proposal builds on 5 years of collaborative work carried out by an established network of European universities. In 2008, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars received funding from the European Commission's Culture Programme for a ground-breaking initiative entitled EPOP: Popular Roots of European Culture through Film, Comics and Serial Literature (1850-1930). In 2011, this group gave birth to the LPCM, currently involving researchers from 15 countries, in Europe and beyond. In 2012-2013, to support the initiatives of the LPCM with an innovative research and networking tool, the IT Services of the University of Limoges developed the database at the core of the project.A major objective of the planned activities is to verify the possibility of using the database to establish collaboration with non-academic institutions such as national and specialised libraries. In addition to the important relationship with the European Library, the project involves a close collaboration with the Library of Crime Literature (Bilipo) a Parisian public library exclusively concerned with crime-themed publications. The researchers involved in the project will work together with the staff of the library to assist them in using the database as a tool to better organize and study their own collection and to promote its contents through virtual exhibitions.Crime fiction has been chosen as a case study to test the potential of the database and to develop additional search, organisational and visualization tools that are able to answer the participants' research questions. By harvesting the European Library's repositories, the three research teams, all trained by specialists of this literary genre, will look at how crime novels have been held and catalogued throughout the twentieth century in a number of European countries. Research will be focused on the comparison of the different (trans-)national corpora to emerge from this survey, and to discuss how to use geomatic and statistical approaches to analyse and visualise the collected data. Established accounts of the history of the genre will be challenged through a quantitative perspective whose aim in particular is to stress the lack of transnational studies.Other outputs include: two workshops and a conference to disseminate the research results; a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Belphégor, that will include a selection of the conference papers; two virtual exhibitions; a series of public events, with the participation of several European authors of crime fiction; the submission of a grant application to the AHRC or the ERC to expand the implementation of the technical instruments, and to make them accessible to researchers working on other corpora in all areas of literary studies.