Visible Prices

Visible Prices

(VP) is a digital humanities project, currently in development, for a collection of prices drawn from literary and historical sources in 18th and 19th century England. Users will be able to search for information relating to a specific good or service, or a specific amount of money. For example, a query for 3 shillings in 1789 reveals that in London, that amount would purchase a bushel of wheat, a quarto of translations from Diderot, or a day’s services of a crippled or deformed child as a companion to an adult beggar. My intent is for the database to make use of the influx of printed texts onto the web in facsimile format, in databases like Google Books, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the British Newspapers Collection, and the London Times Online Archive, to name only a few. Though entry privileges are currently restricted, the goal is to eventually make it possible for registered users to enter data in the process of individual research or classroom activities; and thus to make it possible for researchers specializing in other time periods and regions to extend the scope of the database.

The pointer is from Pam Regis.

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