Abstract
The Radical Translations Project considers the role of activist translators in extending radical, democratic ideas into new contexts in the period 1789–1815. It uses both bibliographical and prosopographical data-models to construct a corpus of c.1000 ‘activist’ translations and linked biographies of some 500 translators working across English, French and Italian languages. This article discusses the challenges of building a multilingual digital corpus in the absence of any pre-existing digital or analogue collection. It also considers the relevance of network analysis to prosopography at a time when many translators wrote anonymously or pseudonymously. Finally it considers how digital tools can be used to cross-reference small-scale but highly granular datasets of texts, people, places and events. Along the way, we comment on the role of selection in the construction of any database and the importance of making this (irreducibly subjective) process more visible to users.
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