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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2015

DAN EDELSTEIN
DAN EDELSTEIN*
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, Stanford University E-mail: danedels@stanford.edu
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Extract

The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), the Making of the Modern World (formerly Goldsmiths’–Kress), or, on a more modest level, the ARTFL project's FRANTEXT, has also breathed new life into old texts. Books that lay forgotten for generations can now be rediscovered thanks to the magic of search engines. To be sure, this power has not always been wielded for good: students today can “cite anything, but construe nothing,” stringing together KWICs (keywords in context), and reading only a surrounding sentence or two (if that). But however they are used, these tools and platforms have transformed our daily work habits.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 237 - 246
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Jonathan Barnes, quoted by Grafton, Anthony, “Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes,” in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 288–324, at 322Google Scholar.

2 See, respectively, Newman, David and Block, Sharon, “Probabilistic Topic Decomposition of an Eighteenth Century Newspaper,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57/5 (2006), 753–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horton, Russell, Morrissey, Robert, Olsen, Mark, Roe, Glenn, and Voyer, Robert, “Mining Eighteenth Century Ontologies: Machine Learning and Knowledge Classification in the Encyclopédie,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3/2 (2009)Google Scholar, at http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000044/000044.html; Baker, Keith, “Revolution 1.0,” Journal of Modern European History, 11 (2013), 187–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Edelstein, Dan, Morrissey, Robert, and Roe, Glenn, “To Quote or Not to Quote: Citation Strategies in the Encyclopédie,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 74/2 (2013), 213–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Linguists have, of course, been working on similar questions, often using similar methods to the ones under discussion here: see, for instance, Wijaya, Derry Tanti and Yeniterzi, Reyyan, “Understanding Semantic Change of Words over Centuries,” in Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, workshop on DETecting and Exploiting Cultural diversiTy on the Social Web (DETECT 2011), 35–40Google Scholar, at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2064475. My thanks to Melvin Wevers for this reference.

3 Examples from literary studies would include Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (New York, 2013)Google Scholar; and Jockers, Matthew, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana, IL, 2013)Google Scholar.

4 See, most notably, Hillier, Amy and Knowles, Anne Kelly, eds., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

5 It was in such terms that Koselleck described the methodological assumptions underpinning the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: “basic concepts are highly complex; they are always both controversial and contested.” See Koselleck, Reinhart, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” trans. Richter, Melvin and Robertson, Sally E., in Lehmann, Hartmut and Richter, Melvin, eds., The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, DC, 1996), 59–70Google Scholar, at 64. See more generally Richter, Melvin, “Koselleck on the Contestability of ‘Grundbegriffe’: A Comparative Perspective,” in Dutt, Carsten and Laube, Reinhard, eds., Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte: Zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks (Gottingen, 2013), 69–95Google Scholar.

6 For an even more damning account than de Bolla's see Spedding, Patrick, “‘The New Machine’: Discovering the Limits of ECCO,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44/4 (2011), 437–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The ARTFL project runs a smaller, more accurate version of the ECCO database (ECCO-TCP) on its PhiloLogic search and retrieval engine, which automatically generates collocation tables. See http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/ecco-tcp. I was thus able to compare the list of terms identified by PhiloLogic within five words of “rights” with de Bolla's lists.

8 Disclosure: I am a principal investigator for one of the visualization projects they discuss (“Mapping the Republic of Letters”).

9 For some successful uses of Gephi by historians see Rothschild, Emma, “Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review, 119/4 (2014), 1055–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project at http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com.

10 See Armitage, David, “What's the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas, 38/4 (2012), 493–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For an example of what this future will resemble, readers can explore the open-data portal of the French National Library at http://data.bnf.fr.

12 See http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.