This dissertation contributes to the Digital Humanities in general and to the study of the picaresque novel in particular. Its immediate goal is to coordinate and enhance the dialogue of scholars and readers of the picaresque. In order to accomplish this objective, I created an extensive digital bibliography and textual archive whose search capacity and structure were designed to host and foster dialogue among critics and lay readers alike.
The bibliography and archive are presented in the form of a Zotero Group Library. Zotero is a free, downloadable software application that allows for the crowd-sourcing and collaborative annotation of primary and secondary references and texts by scholarly communities. The group library I have developed and begun to annotate (and which contains over 1900 works to date) represents a living medium of exchange and will always maintain its essential status as a collective work in progress. The dissertation’s objective is to cultivate order within the field, such that all who use the library will have a progressively better reading and research experience and thus feel empowered to make their own contributions to the ongoing dialogue. The technological infrastructure provided by this project will contribute to our shared endeavor as students, readers, and scholars of the picaresque.
The dissertation’s Introduction discusses digital technology within a specialized scholarly community and attempts to demonstrate how digital tools can be successfully employed in traditional literary research and criticism. It is followed by two appendices: the first, a “user’s manual” for the library (its “Readme” file); the second, an automatically generated bibliography of the library’s current contents. This document is accompanied by two supplemental files, both of which represent exports of the Zotero library—one RDF (with notes but without files) and one CSV (with notes, in UTF-8 without BOM)
