Over several years, Mark Algee-Hewitt and I negotiated the first-ever release of approximately 1 million bibliographic records from The Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography (MLAIB), which describe scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles about literatures in English. This English-language literature subset represents about 1/3 of the MLAIB‘s total records.
These records not only contain metadata about the articles themselves (author, press, journal, etc.), but also contain metadata about their contents as described by bibliographers (subject authors, subject works, genres, critical methodologies, etc.) using the controlled vocabularies of The MLA Thesaurus and the Contextual Indexing and Faceted Taxonomic Access System (CIFT) designed to support the early digitization of the MLAIB.
A few articles have used small samples and derivative data from the MLAIB before, but this will be the first-ever analysis of a comprehensive set of complete bibliographic metadata.
The article will describe large-scale trends in the recent history of English-language literary studies, with a special emphasis on the history of literary studies from 1982 to present, which is when the MLAIB implemented its computationally controlled vocabularies for bibliographers.