This chapter uses digital humanities approaches to discover the computational signature of the idea of government in the British eighteenth century. Data mining techniques are applied to the large dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online in order to ascertain the precise composition of the idea of government and to track its evolution over the entire century. The connections between government and despotism are explored in the concluding argument.

This chapter uses methods in text mining in order to trace the history of the idea of liberty between 1600 and 1800. It seeks to investigate the standard account of this idea developed most rigorously by Quentin Skinner over many years. Using quantitative methods and the tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab, it discovers a slightly different history from the standard accounts that complements and augments that history.

This chapter probes the conceptual architecture of irritability in the eighteenth century. It justifies this case study not through a pre-established research agenda but because automated statistical comparisons reveal a marked transformation both in the term itself and in the broader network in which it is embedded. Irritability has long been marginalised in favour of its sister term, sensibility; yet we demonstrate the abiding significance of the former, in a variety of canonical works (Erasmus Darwin, Edmund Burke) and less familiar medical handbooks. This largely overlooked medical discourse infuses broader thinking on gender, colonialism and aesthetics; it worries the distinction between human and non-human life. We conclude by proving that the emergence of the irritability network holds significant consequences for other forms of conceptual thinking. In particular, we show how it affords a rethinking of the notion of habit, and facilitates the transformation of the cultural concept of system from a largely Newtonian and mechanistic notion, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to an increasingly dynamical and physiological entity.

This chapter outlines a novel method for discerning the structure and history of concepts and their aggregation as ideas. Based on the analysis of co-ocurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of ‘binding’ that allows one to inspect the larger constellations of words and concepts that comprise ideas which can be tracked diachronically. The chapter also describes the method used for ascertaining the ‘binding’ between concepts, and for modelling ‘ideas’. A detailed account of how the ‘shared lexis tool’ was built is also included.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.