#Thank you very much for coming today, and to CELL for hosting
#To start, I’d like to ask what a price is, in the first place?
##It’s usually a number of monetary value.
##It’s also the cost, not only of a given object, but also of a particular kind of interaction between two individuals. You have to pay the price in order to have the interaction.
But, a different question:
# What is a price when it’s found in a document? It might be the same as the above, but here’s what else:
## It’s a number, first of all.
## It’s a point of intertextuality between the document and the external world.
## It’s an item whose recognizability decays quickly, due to inflation and the passing of time. The speed at which it decays varies, since some objects’ prices change more swiftly or suddenly than others.
Finally, depending on the document – and who created it, a price is
## an accurate or an inaccurate statement of fact. If the price is meant to entice people to enter into a transaction, then it’s real. But in a work of fiction, though a price may be meant to have an effect on the reader, the effect is not meant to make her buy anything.
This brings me to two questions:
#How are prices in literature meant to be read and understood?
##What needs to be done in order to make them legible?
---The first question is challenging because it is not entirely clear how necessary authors thought it to be strictly accurate regarding the prices they included in their novels, or what effect they expected prices to have on readers, besides conveying the realism of the narrative.
---The second question is more directly germane to this conference, because I submit to you that the only way to make prices in literature generally “legible” is to archive them, and create a way to quickly and easily see prices in context with each other. You could certainly research a price, but to do so would be somewhat painstaking if you were researching anything other than a staple good already being tracked by economic historians, like the price of wheat.
#In order to make prices legible, I’ve started creating an interface that allows people to read them in conjunction with other data.
#Here’s the main interface; and though you can’t here, normally you can scroll through time, seeing prices described for each year, and color-coded according to whether they’re goods, services, experiences, bribes, etc.
#This is built with MIT’s Simile Exhibit Suite, which is open-source, and can be run in conjunction with a GoogleDocs spreadsheet. I
# You can also filter according to genre, location, type of coin, year, and amount.
# If you click on any of the prices, you get a pop-up detail showing the item, source, and quoted context; and
# you can also look at the same information in list and tabular forms, as well as going to the GoogleDoc which contains the data in its most unfiltered format.
#Finally, you can look at prices according to their geographical location;
#and again, see lists of objects, and click them for prices.
#This means that I can look at specific prices in novels; and look at novels as reduced to a list of prices, as I’ve done here:
#With Richardson’s Pamela – a note, these are the specific prices that are presented as income, associated with income, or with the cost of an endeavor.
Seen this way, the novel is very much a network of money which flows outwards from Mr. B, for services rendered – even when given as a bonus. In nearly every case, Mr. B dictates what goods and services are worth, and confirms his authoritative stance by providing the price, as opposed to refusing to do so.
This pattern is only challenged by Sally Godfrey, the woman with whom Mr. B had an illegitimate child, when she raises enough money independently of him to begin a new life in Jamaica. Not to be thwarted, Mr. B bribes the crew of the ship she is sailing on with 5 guineas, to ensure that they will be good to the ladies.
To start contextualizing this, here’s what 5 guineas would buy: (and 4 guineas would buy slightly less)
By creating and filling this type of archive, I gain, potentially, a great deal of context, because I can see the purchasing power that’s being ascribed to the character or associated with the object.
#But it’s possible that in doing so, I also lose – or rather, the author loses, his or her credibility.
One of the factors that influenced me in starting this project was a book by the Victorian information scholar Mary Poovey, who suggested that it was, in fact, highly problematic to study economics through literary texts because for the goal of realistic accuracy was in conflict with authors’ purposes of creating imaginative engagement – and that realistic documentation was a low priority.
##Poovey Quote
##The question this raises is: How widespread is the cavalier attitude that Poovey describes? Is it a characteristic, not just of Victorian authors, but of those writing 18th century novels as well?
While we think of archives as housing valuable artifacts, I’m building an archive that is almost certainly going to have its share of inaccuracies. I hope to demonstrate that such inaccuracies actually do have considerable value – and also, to understand more about how authorial orientation towards price has evolved over time.
#Price is a particular type of tool that allows us to make a quick exchange, and it is enough in use to seem ubiquitous and rather mundane, and ignorable. And it’s everywhere, if you look – a sort of common detritus used to improve setting; something that looks like archival noise.
##Crane quote
##A million book library isn’t useful to readers in most cases; but in terms of making prices legible, it’s not only useful, but important.
#Conventionally, economists and literary authors have been constructed as being in stark conflict. Part of the construction of that conflict is based on the stereotype of economists knowing about money, and authors starving in garrets.
#The result is that it may seem impossible that prices are useful, because authors can’t know anything about it. While this is a generalized statement, it is one that has made it more difficult to study price in a single author or group of authors because it’s seen as noise amidst more important emotions. And thus, distant reading through an archival structure becomes the best opportunity to change noise from mere raucous clanging into a recognizable instrument.
##If you have a million books (or more) that exhibit a particular phenomenon, then you start trying to see what it means to see that phenomenon clearly.
#When you start to put this archive together, it raises more questions, because
#Archiving prices means working to find appropriate ways of classifying its different nuances – such as, for example, prices that are subject to disagreement or debate within their originary text.
#And declarations of price value that are expressive, rather than real
#There’s also the question of whether an archive of prices should be seen as an archive, as opposed to a single text, Because human nature tends to read prices in comparison, rather than isolation.
#Finally, there’s the question of whether such an archive is better suited to being the starting point, or the ending point. Depending on what I can or choose to include, its search range can become more or less fuzzy.
One way of looking at the question is to think about whether my job is strictly to preserve, or to create building blocks.
To go back to the idea of a price as a number that allows individuals to enter into a transaction, I suppose you could say that my goal is to make prices more visible, because by doing so, I can make a larger variety of transactions “affordable” – not only for literary scholars, but also historians, and anyone else who finds prices interesting or useful.
Thank you.