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

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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.