The Database of the EMoBookTrade Project. A Proposal to Encode Early Modern Book Prices and Privileges

The EMoBookTrade project, funded by the European Research Council and directed by Angela Nuovo, has developed a database on book prices (ca. 1530-1630) and book privileges (Venice, 1469 to 1603). This web application shows that digital humanities can play an innovative role in historical research at the same time respecting traditional scientific methods and the needs of ground-breaking inter-disciplinary research. Indeed, the EMoBookTrade DB takes into account both the representation of different kinds of sources and the processing of data deriving from them. Therefore, thanks to a rigorously designed conceptual model, the front end allows for a simple and straightforward source and data representation together with a complex search engine, the results of which can be downloaded in a CSV format suitable for statistical analyses. This article also aims to propose an ontology of price setting and privilege grants, considered as events concerned with the history of the book and the economic history.