Libération des données: An Open Science Approach to the Curation and Analysis of the XVIIIe siècle: bibliographie

Christof Schöch: “Libération des données: An open science approach to the curation and analysis of the XVIIIe sècle: bibliographie". Digital Humanities Conference 2024 (DH2024). Washington, DC: George Mason University / ADHO, 6-10 July 2024. https://dh2024.adho.org/program/. – Presentation, see: https://dhtrier.quarto.pub/BIB18. Abstract In February 2023, Canadian literary scholar Benoît Melançon announced, under the title “Libération des données”, that he was providing an openly-available data dump of a bibliography on research into Englightenment Literature that he had been curating since 1992 in monthly instalments and that contained a complete set of all references for the years 1992-2022, with more than 64.400 entries (Melançon 2023). The fact that this data was freely available, but in a somewhat unwieldy format, felt like just the right kind of challenge for a small project; and the programmatic ‘liberation’ of the data was a prompt to approach this challenge from an open science perspective. Subject bibliographies support the creation of quantitative overviews (e.g. Luhmann and Burghardt, 2021) and qualitative surveys (e.g. Schöch et al. 2023) of a given field. In turn, bibliometrics, i.e. the statistical analysis of bibliographic datasets, provides insights into the history and characteristics of publication activities, but also into the methods and pitfalls of such analyses and the risks of relying on bibliometric indicators for performance assessment (e.g. van Raan 2019). The value of open bibliographic data has been articulated clearly and programmatically (e.g. Peroni et al. 2015). With the slogan “Open Science: just science done right” (Imming et al. 2018) in mind, the plan was to approach the liberated data not just with further liberation in mind, but also to maintain the spirit of openness as far as possible in how this liberation was approached. Therefore, this contribution aims to showcase the unique resource represented by the XVIIIe siècle: bibliographie, to provide insight into strategies for the curation of bibliographic data (as well as some of the challenges involved in the process) and its transformation into a more standards-based dataset, to highlight key findings about the publication habits of the research community whose work is documented by the bibliography, all while making the process as transparent as possible by using open source tools only and providing data and code on a website: https://christofs.github.io/BIB18/.