Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies is “a digital scholarly archive of the annual directory of London sex workers, published between 1760 and 1794. This project provides access to all eighteen surviving editions (the earliest from 1761) and explores the lives of women in Georgian London’s sex trade through critical historical analysis.” Edited by Alexander Huber, the website “recover[s] the histories of marginalized women in Georgian London while maintaining awareness of the problematic male perspective inherent in the source material” using “digital facsimiles, structured data extraction, and critical analysis.” The site features a IIIF viewer to explore the editions, a searchable set of entries, map, a network analysis, and several visualizations. The site also provides rich background on a range of historical contexts, from local government to health & medicine.
The methods essay outlines the care with which the site was constructed, including the process of data extraction, the critical framework employed, and various ethical considerations, particularly the insistence that the project resist the objectification and exploitation of women that pervades the original source material.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Kayla Abner, Emily Cukier, Rachel Hogan, Mariam Ismail, Anna E Kijas, Jill Krefft, Frances Jane Sleger (Editors-at-Large), Pamella Lach and Hillary Richardson (Editors for the week), Ruth Carpenter, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Molly McGuire, Christine Salek, and Rachel Starry (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).