Mapping Expatriate Paris: The Shakespeare & Company Lending Library Project (MEP)

Mapping Expatriate Paris (MEP) is a digital humanities project, sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), that examines the Lost Generation using the documents, books, and memorabilia in the Sylvia Beach Papers in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC). MEP grew out of a graduate seminar taught by Professor Joshua Kotin in 2013. During a course visit to RBSC, Jesse McCarthy, a student in the seminar, suggested that the Shakespeare and Company lending library cards would make an excellent dataset for a mapping project about interwar Paris. In Spring 2015, Princeton’s CDH awarded Kotin and McCarthy a one-year grant to digitize the lending library cards and develop display and access tools.