Building the Women in Book History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as Preservation of Feminist Labor

This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recuperative potential in feminist literary history. Digital enumerative bibliography uses bibliographical structures within a relational database that allows researchers to track more relevant metadata such as geographical location of subject matter, language, and time period. Whereas traditional enumerative bibliographies use a hierarchy of textual data, a relational database creates a nexus that facilitates new kinds of research queries. As an example, we offer our digital project the Women in Book History Bibliography and use its 1,550 citations as a dataset to trace what is women’s book history. We then advocate for digital enumerative bibliography as a form of feminist recovery efforts that recovers not only primary texts but scholarship about them.