The Hidden Collection: An online database of literature translated in Poland since 1918
The talk will focus on the presentation of the Hidden Collection project, which is developing an online tool for researching the history of Polish literary and non-literary translation from 1918 to the present day.
The database is created using a collection of over 250,000 bibliographic records describing books translated into Polish, obtained from the National Library’s catalogue thanks to the involvement of National Library librarians. The initial collection underwent verification and substantive editing by the research team of the ‘Stulecie Przekładu’ (‘Century of Translation’) project at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, and over 60 experts from leading academic centres across Poland – philologists and translators specialising in specific linguistic and cultural fields. As a result, the initial data has been checked, corrected and supplemented, particularly in aspects related to translation. At the same time, a preliminary version of the online interface was developed, which will enable convenient browsing and searching of data according to criteria such as author, title, publisher, place and year of publication, as well as the translator’s name and gender, and the languages of the original and the source.
Furthermore, the interface – built with code snippets already in use on the National Library’s websites (Omnis, National Library Descriptors) – will offer basic visual data analysis functionalities for selected research questions, as well as periodic updates of the database with new information regarding translations registered by the National Library.
The project is currently in its final stages of implementation. During the meeting, the current version of the interface and the data processing workflow will be presented. We will conclude with a discussion on the potential of the Hidden Collection and the prospects for the project’s further development. We look forward to your comments and discussion with the audience.
Team: dr Agnieszka Podpora (director), prof. Magda Heydel (data verification supervision), dr Joanna Cieloch- Niewiadomska (data standardization), dr Maciej Sagata (interface, backend), Ewelina Chociej (interface, frontend)
The Hidden Collection project is being carried out by the Centre for Translation Studies at the Jagiellonian University as part of the Jagiellonian University’s DHLab Flagship Project, in collaboration with the National Library, with funding from the Excellence Initiative programme.
To participate online please sign up here: https://forms.gle/4K1MJ7V9JW8MDKmq7
The meeting will be in Polish.