• 1 Many of the works accounted for today were not visible to Césaire’s bibliographers at the time. We (...)
• 2 This figure does not count the larger body of work published on the subject of négritude and its co (...)

2By the end of the 1960s, soon after the publication of Une Tempête, a total of 135 scholarly works had been published on his work. By the end of the 1970s, the number more than doubled to 273. At this point, the total production on Césaire included at least thirty-six monographs, 162 articles and five theses1. Césaire was well on his way to being required reading for the aggregation at the École Normale Supérieure — the same aggregation that he himself failed because he was too busy writing. Today, only three years after Kora Véron refined and expanded the work of Thomas Hale in Les Écrits d’Aimé Césaire. Bibliographie commentée (1913—2008) in 2013, we count 1,201 secondary works written directly on Césaire2. As Hale and Veron’s bibliography attests, we also know much more today about Césaire’s own writings in print; and with the work of several researchers and archivists in recent years—Jean Jonnaissant, Lilian Pestre de Almeida, Katerina Gonzalez Seligman, Kora Véron, Nadine Albert Ronsin and myself, to name but a few—a genetic dossier is beginning to take shape with the surfacing of rich and important manuscripts.

• 3 Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction(...)
• 4 D.W. Krummel, “The Dialectics of Enumerative Bibliography: Observations on the Historical Study of (...)

3I find it difficult to believe that the bibliographic work started with Césaire’s critics in the back pages of their essays and monographs as early as the 1950s, and continuing apace in the publication of these major bibliographies, has not had an impact in the growing research activity around Césaire. What a shame, then, that institutional support for bibliographic work of the enumerative, authorial kind has dwindled in recent decades3 and more so at the moment when we need to deploy these modalities for the sake of decolonial, queer, feminist and ecological memory. The internal struggles within bibliographic circles have a role to play in this state of affairs. After all, enumerative bibliography has too often been seen as the poor cousin of analytic and descriptive bibliography by those who should know better4. I would argue, though, that the bulk of the blame lies elsewhere.

• 5 For examples of the literature, see Anirban Dasgupta et al., “The Discoverability of the Web”, Proc (...)

5With the rise of databases and “discoverability” we see a series of new private industries forming alliances with research and public libraries5. In recent years a handful of North Atlantic monopolies—EBSCO, ProQuest, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier, to name a few—have come to dominate the production, flow and “discovery” of the scholarly and pedagogical record in European languages at massive scales. Besides publishing, many of these companies focus on large-scale aggregation and indexing of a host of meso-level operations. Libraries, in turn, have reacted by growing their managerial and IT hierarchies, becoming hesitant middlemen between these companies and scholarly activity. This shift comes as libraries start providing their patrons with information about existing digital literature outside their analog holdings and the bibliographies that accompany them. Besides these closed-access, for-profit industries we see as well the rise of several open-access formations, both legal and contra-legal, that depend on commercial search engines or internal discovery mechanisms specific to each platform.

• 6 These early meetings took place in Bellagio, Italy, bringing together an international team of Cari (...)

9My personal bibliography of Césaire began around ten years ago as a Word document. In those days I knew less than I do now about the destiny of bytes. The work began during early talks of a Digital Library of the Caribbean6. During those days, I had also transitioned from a dissertation about certain mythopoetic, mythohistoric themes in Caribbean literature to the very risky, but ultimately more satisfying, single-author dissertation. At this time, I had won a scholarship to spend a séjour at the École Normale in Paris to track the footprints of Césaire’s student years. While at the rue d’Ulm, I became interested in la critique génétique and the activities of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM), which was housed on my floor on the way to the communal showers. While I did not find much to write home about during that first incursion, the bibliography had grown by journey’s end to a few hundred entries, both primary and secondary sources.

• 7 Yvan Goll, Situations de l’écrivain: Études réunies par Michel Grunewald et Jean-Marie Valentin (Pa (...)

10In 2007, following the breadcrumbs left in the footnotes and works-cited pages of Césaire’s critics—far afield into tangential figures in the author s trajectory—I came upon a curious lead in the biography of Ivan Goll: “Enfin dernière lettre de Breton à Goll le 12 décembre 1944 qui réclame cette fois ... le complément des manuscrits de Césaire: Et les chiens se taisaient.” (Finally, the last letter from Breton to Goll dated 12 December 1944, asking for the rest of Cesaire’s manuscripts: And the dogs were silent.)7

• 8 The rest of that story is told in my article “Découverte de l’Ur-texte de Et les chiens se taisaien (...)

11Aided by a small travel bourse from l’Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie and ITEM, I made my way back to France, to the sleepy town of St Dié des Vosges where, the town lore would have it, America was baptised as such. With the help of Mme Ronsin and other kind librarians at the Bibliothèque Municipale, and using a cheap scanner that I carried in my backpack across the Atlantic, I was able to scan the relevant Césaire documents, without knowing yet what I was scanning. Months later, when I finally found time to study the images, I realised the witness was a hitherto unknown version of Et les chiens se taisaient, based on the Haitian Revolution and meant for the theatre8. My fate was sealed; this “discovery” channelled my trajectory as a textual scholar, a librarian and a practitioner of the digital arts.

• 9 Kora Véron, I learned soon enough, was far more advanced in these efforts.
• 10 See: https://www.zotero.org/about/

12By then, my personal bibliography was beginning to represent one of the few efforts at the time to construct a full bibliography of manuscripts, published works and secondary sources9. The range of documents was growing outside the affordances of a simple list on a Word document, so I transferred the list to the more efficient and then young Zotero, “a free, open-source research tool that helps you collect, organise, and analyse research and share it in a variety of ways”10. The Zotero database and interface immediately satisfied my needs for organisation, but more importantly, and surprisingly to me at the time, it began to reveal patterns in the bibliography that would blur the lines between interfaces and new knowledge.

• 11 Albert-James Arnold, éd., Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (Paris: CNRS, 2014).
• 12 See: http://cesairelegacies.cdrs.columbia.edu/researchathon/.

13During the several years we worked on the critical/genetic edition of (a large portion of) Césaire’s works11, the bibliography grew to become a resource worth sharing, and worthy of serious attention. In 2013, the same year that the Hale-Veron bibliography was published, at the tail-end of many gatherings in the North Atlantic region in celebration of the centenary of the poet’s birth, we organised a two-day event, “Legacies of Césaire”, at Columbia University. Taking advantage of the many scholars who were visiting us for the occasion, we planned a day-long bibliographic “researchathon” to precede the conference proper. According to our web announcement12,

• 13 Daniel J. Cohen, “Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem: Building Connec (...)

17Zotero, though, is not merely a tool for generating citations. Although it does that job extremely well, since the beginning its community of users and contributors have found other uses for the reference management software. The ability to add notes, tags, attachments and related sources to citations announced that the tool’s ambitions went beyond simply facilitating the work of creating Works Cited pages. CHNM’s early decision to move away from the model of downloading content to manage locally—as Zotero’s avatars Scribe and Web Scrapbook had done—and instead operate on the browser, also marked an acknowledgment that “the Web browser had become the location for research”13. This last paradigm shift, and Zotero’s ability to read the signs on the wall, is not to be underestimated given our current dispensation. Not only do distribution and access systems today try to meet the reference management software halfway, effectively plying our metadata aspirations; vendors are frantically vying to create controlled research environments linked to content under their control. One only needs to take a look at the vast landscape of self-styled digital humanities projects to notice how we have come to take for granted the combination of analysis and access in the browser.

• 14 Trevor Owens, “Zotero Maps: Visualize Your Zotero Library on the Globe”, Zotero, n.p., 10 May 2010, (...)

18As far as I can tell, the first attempt to bring mapping functionality to Zotero came with the Zotero Maps plugin developed by Entropy Free LLC and the Zotero project in 2010. While it worked, the tool allowed you to map “any combination of item titles, tags, places of publication, abstracts, and your notes”14. Among the early uses that Trevor Owens suggests, we find the following:

• 16 Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?”, Spatial Humanities (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, (...)
• 17 Daniel Chang, et al., “Visualizing the Republic of Letters”, Stanford University http://web.stanfor (...)

19Although the tool has not kept up with Zotero’s version updates, Zotero Maps and Owens’ call effectively pinned to the map of bibliography tools what is now called “The Spatial Turn in the Humanities”, not an invention, but “a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together”16. The idea of mapping document citations, more generally, was already picking up steam on the West Coast when Owens made his suggestion. In a 2009 article, “Visualizing the Republic of Letters” by Daniel Chang and colleagues from Stanford University, we learn that the Republic of Letters project was well underway17. In 2012, Dan Edelstein would also begin work on “Voltaire’s Places of Publication (1712—1800)”, which fits more clearly within the genre that we could tentatively start calling geo-bibliography.

• 18 I am consciously postponing the work of location beyond cartographic representations — what I mean (...)
• 19 See: https://footprints.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/.

20Owens was also right to call attention to book historians. Many of these, along with manuscript provenance sleuths, had been quick to recognise the value of geospatial tools. A good example of this type of work comes from Mitch Fraas, at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Between 2013 and 2014, Fraas gave us a series of wonderful maps on the blog Mapping Books, leveraging the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. These maps, tracing the movement of manuscripts and collections, start painting a picture for us of a world of textual materials in motion and settlement, sampling for us the pseudo-Borgesian vision of all actual texts at all times and all places18. Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a more recent effort of Columbia University and partners, provides us with an example of such wonderful work extended to a dataset with phenomenally enriched metadata19.

• 20 “Understanding Paper Machines”, Inscape Blog, http://landscape.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/understanding (...)
• 21 See: http://papermachines.org/how-to-use-paper-machines/
• 22 Version 5.1, slated to be released in 2016, promises to allow users the ability to create their own (...)

21The next powerful mapping tool attached to Zotero — also part of a wave of commendable efforts in the digital humanities to build tools that were easily accessible to the layperson, and to do so adjacent to successful efforts—came in 2012 when Jo Guldi and Cora Johnson-Roberson set out to build “a digital tool that brings a large corpus of historical paper to life”20. The result was Paper Machines, a plugin for Zotero that, among other analytical tools, provides a geoparsing tool. The geoparser generates two visualisations: Flight Paths and a Heatmap. The first one, Flight Paths, “generates a map linking texts from their places of publication to the places they mention, filtered by time.”21 The script can recognise bibliographic entries specified in the Place field. In addition to the citation, the script can also geoparse the content of attachments. Combining these two, the map generated reveals the “flight path” between the location where an item is published and the places it mentions. Like Zotero Maps before it, on the bibliographical side the tool is constrained by the limited number of Zotero database fields, oriented until recent work at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCFFNM) by the desire to produce citation formats22. The tool is also geared towards a particular form of interpretation that oscillates between the poetics of place in a given work and the place where that work was declared to have been produced.

• 23 Secondary sources are all located. I am still in the process of transcribing the entries in the Hal (...)
• 24 The bibliography itself may exclude many works written on négritude in general, which may have larg (...)

23My own approach to mapping our collective Césaire bibliography is similar to Tobias, but without leveraging the API and automating the whole process. The work begins by adding city and country to all entries in the Césaire bibliography in the “Extra” field based on the location of record for a given press for a given document, or barring that, the location of the author at time of publication23. Once a set is complete, I export the bibliography as a comma separated values file (CSV). I clean up the data (excess fields, for example) and check for integrity using Google Refine. After the data is clean and the right columns are separated, I import the dataset into CartoDB. One of the current advantages of working with CartoDB is the ability to generate a few useful visualisations out of the box without having to add much code. Below are two early examples based on the complete set of articles, books and theses in the secondary sources folder in our Zotero bibliography24.