Visualising European Crime Fiction: New Digital Tools and Approaches to the Study of Transnational Popular Culture

Over the last two centuries culture industries have made a dramatic contribution to the birth of a supranational heritage of popular icons, characters and stories. From the very beginning of this phenomenon, popular literature has been one of the key media for the circulation of texts and images from one country to another. Despite the need to address such crucial aspects of modern society, studies on the history of the transnational dimension of popular culture have only recently started to appear. Previous attempts, however, have always been confronted with the problem of dealing with an immense amount of data. The proposed project intends to address the question of how to conduct surveys of this production through the use of dedicated digital tools. Thanks to the database created by the Popular Literature and Media Culture association (LPCM), and the collaboration with the European Library, three research teams from the Universities of Belfast, Limoges and Debrecen will be able to harvest the catalogues of the 48 European national libraries and to analyse the transnational dimension of popular fiction with the help of maps and graphs.
The present proposal builds on 5 years of collaborative work carried out by an established network of European universities. In 2008, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars received funding from the European Commission's Culture Programme for a ground-breaking initiative entitled EPOP: Popular Roots of European Culture through Film, Comics and Serial Literature (1850-1930). In 2011, this group gave birth to the LPCM, currently involving researchers from 15 countries, in Europe and beyond. In 2012-2013, to support the initiatives of the LPCM with an innovative research and networking tool, the IT Services of the University of Limoges developed the database at the core of the project.
A major objective of the planned activities is to verify the possibility of using the database to establish collaboration with non-academic institutions such as national and specialised libraries. In addition to the important relationship with the European Library, the project involves a close collaboration with the Library of Crime Literature (Bilipo) a Parisian public library exclusively concerned with crime-themed publications. The researchers involved in the project will work together with the staff of the library to assist them in using the database as a tool to better organize and study their own collection and to promote its contents through virtual exhibitions.
Crime fiction has been chosen as a case study to test the potential of the database and to develop additional search, organisational and visualization tools that are able to answer the participants' research questions. By harvesting the European Library's repositories, the three research teams, all trained by specialists of this literary genre, will look at how crime novels have been held and catalogued throughout the twentieth century in a number of European countries. Research will be focused on the comparison of the different (trans-)national corpora to emerge from this survey, and to discuss how to use geomatic and statistical approaches to analyse and visualise the collected data. Established accounts of the history of the genre will be challenged through a quantitative perspective whose aim in particular is to stress the lack of transnational studies.
Other outputs include: two workshops and a conference to disseminate the research results; a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Belphégor, that will include a selection of the conference papers; two virtual exhibitions; a series of public events, with the participation of several European authors of crime fiction; the submission of a grant application to the AHRC or the ERC to expand the implementation of the technical instruments, and to make them accessible to researchers working on other corpora in all areas of literary studies.

All the proposed activities are intended to plan and promote the creation of initiatives having societal impact beyond the academic community. The immediate beneficiaries of the planned activities include:

1. National and specialised libraries
- Through the harvesting, reworking and visualising of the metadata gathered by the European Library, the project will show how the LPCM database offers the possibility to use in innovative ways an extensive amount of data on transnational popular fiction. Libraries will be encouraged to profit from this tool to promote their holdings. The database will indeed help them create virtual as well as physical exhibitions based on their collections. The visual art of book covers and illustrations will add to the attraction of the catalogues and will draw attention in its own rights.
- The collaboration with the BiLiPo will show the benefits given by the cooperation between scholars and to librarians. The researchers will work jointly with the staff of the BiLiPo to use the database to improve their knowledge of their own collection as well as the quality of the information in their catalogue; by visualising the results through maps and graphs, the project will allow a detailed study of the extraordinary corpus of more than 130,000 crime novels held by this unique institution; the researchers and the librarians will work together on the creation of two virtual exhibitions, which will help promoting the collection and the activities of the library to a wider, i.e. international, public.
- The London conference, the most important networking and outreach activity, will include the participation of representatives of national and specialised libraries.

2. Internet users
The creation of two virtual exhibitions will be one of the major outputs of the proposed project. They will attract internet users to our research and digital tools, helping to create a space of international exchanges and cross-pollination around shared interests. They will be hosted on the virtual museum on the history of European popular culture created by the LPCM researchers (http://popular-roots.eu/), which represents the ideal context to host such outreach activities.
In addition, the project will foster existing links with private collectors and disseminators of popular culture publications online (such as http://litteraturepopulaire.winnerbb.net/ or http://oncle-archibald.blogspot.co.uk).

3. Readers of popular fiction
Crime fiction is one of the most popular literary genre. The dynamic community of crime fiction readers will help maximising the project impact beyond academia. Public events involving authors and translators of crime novels will be organised to disseminate the research results. The project findings will be presented to the public of these events. During the Belfast conference three British and Irish writers whose novels deal with different regional contexts will be invited to discuss their work as well as to compare their backgrounds (possible speakers include: David Peace, Ian Rankin, Eoin McNamee, Declan Hughes, Sam Millar and Brian McGilloway). In Debrecen, Middle European crime writers will be invited (possible speakers include the Hungarian Vilmos Kondor, the Polish Zygmunt Miloszewski and the German Jakob Arjouni) At the London conference, stakeholders in the circulation of crime fiction, authors, translators, and publishers coming from different countries will discuss reciprocal, and transnational, influences on crime fiction and confront their experience with the results and statistical trends revealed by the database. These initiatives will raise the general public's awareness of the advances made by our project.
Specialised bookshops (e.g. Belfast's No Alibis Bookstore: www.noalibis.com, and Paris' L'Amour du Noir: amourdunoir.pagesperso-orange.fr) will also be associated to the project in order to stimulate the public's attention on the project activities.