About The Sea of Books

An older women woman in 19th-century dress, wearing a bonnet and shawl, stands on a stool in a library, peering closely at the bookshelves. A caption on the original image reads "It was some time before she could find what she looked for." — *Pictured: a woman eagerly awaiting the invention of search engines. (From the 1897 edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, illustrated by the wonderful Hugh Thomson.)*

The Sea of Books is the blog for UCD’s Centre for Cultural Analytics. This is where members of the team post updates on our various projects, announce upcoming events and publications, and talk about any aspects of our research that takes our fancy. From time to time we also feature guest posts by our students.

Curious about the blog’s title? You can find the explanation here.

Want to know more about the images we’ve used on the blog? Here’s a post about our main source of pictures, the British Library Labs images collection.

The CCA’s current project, which is funded by the European Research Council, is called European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture (VICTEUR). You can find out more about this project here.

History of the blog

The Sea of Books started out life as the informal discussion forum for the CCA’s Nation, Genre and Gender project, which uses social network analysis to look under the bonnet of a corpus of 19th and early 20th century novels from Ireland and Britain.

For a complete list of novels analysed by the project to date, please see our Collection page.

The main website for Nation, Genre and Gender is here – you can use it to find information about how the project works, case studies showcasing our research on three of the project’s featured novels (Pride and Prejudice, Phineas Finn, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and sample data for these novels. And here’s an introduction to the project team!

The Centre for Cultural Analytics wish to express our thanks to the European Research Council (ERC), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Irish Research Council (IRC), the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and the UCD Advance Academy for their prior and ongoing support of our research and teaching endeavours.

All content on this website is licensed under a a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.