What this is

We are interested in books and translations, and how they circulate.

Many of our posts are coming out of our slow-moving project Hungarian Literature in Translation. It is a quantitative project, based on the metadata of literary translations from Hungarian between 1800-2009. All translations of Hungarian literary texts into any language.

But our focus is not exclusively, or even primarily Hungarian. We are using this perspective to explore the global circulation of translations and of books. Through our own research into the metadata of translations of Hungarian works, we seek to understand the world system of translations. We post about our own research as well as about related topics.

Who we are

Péter Király is a software developer and researcher at GWDG, the data, computing and IT research center at Göttingen, Germany. His main research interests are quality assessment of cultural heritage metadata and cultural analytics, and the data analysis of these metadata as historical sources. He is an editor of Code4Lib Journal, co-chair of LIBER Data Science in Libraries working group, member of different library and digital humanities related groups, maker and supporter of open source and open data projects. He is collaborating with the British Library, Belgian National Library, Europeana, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Harvard University and other research and cultural heritage organizations worldwide.

András Kiséry teaches English at The City College of New York (CUNY). He has published on early modern textual and political cultures, including Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (OUP, 2016), and the volume he co-edited with Allison Deutermann, Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester UP, 2013). He is now writing a book about media and remediation in early modern England. An essay taken from this project came out in the Summer 2024 issue of Critical Inquiry. With David Nee, he also coedited the Winter 2023 special issue of MLQ on old new media and 20th-century humanities. With Jane Raisch, he is contracted to edit Christopher Marlowe’s works for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series.

Stay up-to-date

We are grateful for your interest. We have full-time jobs that allow us to do this research: subscription to our Substack is free and will remain free.

If you subscribe, every new post is sent directly to your email inbox—and it also makes our work a tiny bit more visible on the Substack interface. For a spam-free, ad-free reading experience, plus audio and community features, get the Substack app.