Speculative Bibliography as Infrastructure: Building the Viral Texts Search Index

Abstract

This article gives a history of developing a search index for the Viral Texts Project (https://clusters.viraltexts.org/). It takes up the challenge of representing speculative bibliographies not only as conceptual arguments but also as operational databases, linked to existing digital spaces and discoverable on the web. In doing so, it engages long-standing debates in bibliography and textual studies, particularly the tension between preserving textual integrity and enabling new forms of access. One central concern is how to bind text, image, and metadata together, while also allowing for reversible links that trace connections between the printed page and the clusters of texts circulating elsewhere that readers and editors in the nineteenth century could never have tracked. Here the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is especially crucial as it allows users to move fluidly between high-resolution page images and the extracted clusters. To make these bibliographic objects usable, the article also outlines the end-user search affordances of the system. These features highlight how a search index is itself a sort of scholarly edition that can be understood as a dynamic infrastructure that foregrounds circulation, intertextuality, and the contingencies of preservation.