How books reshape lives
CBW began as an exhaustive, annotated bibliography amassed through original research by Professor Alison Booth and graduate students at the University of Virginia. The digitization of that bibliography has allowed for the creation of a relational database interconnecting data about the women and men featured in the biographical narratives, the biographers, editors, and publishers of the collections, and the books and narratives themselves. In addition, CBW has become a narrative analysis project: under Booth’s supervision, expert readers are examining digitized texts and performing stand-aside markup to uncover the narrative technique and structure of these stories. Recently, CBW has partnered with Social Networks and Archival Contexts (SNAC) to integrate and share person records. As part of this SNAC partnership, CBW’s latest venture is to develop a prototype tool for identifying, storing, and researching cohorts of women connected in what Booth calls “documentary social networks.”