Additional resources for this book are available on our Manifold site, which can be accessed via https://liverpooluniversitypress.manifoldapp.org/projects/digitizing-enlightenment
Digitizing Enlightenment explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways.
In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one.
Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research.
Featuring contributions from Keith Michael Baker, Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert M. Bond, Simon Burrows, Catherine Nicole Coleman, Melanie Conroy, Charles Cooney, Nicholas Cronk, Dan Edelstein, Chloe Summers Edmondson, the late Richard Frautschi, Clovis Gladstone, Howard Hotson, Angus Martin, Katherine McDonough, Alicia C. Montoya, Robert Morrissey, Laure Philip, Jeffrey S. Ravel, Glenn Roe, and Sean Takats.
Table of Contents:
List of figures and tables
Keith Michael Baker
Preface
Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe
Introduction: Digitizing Enlightenment
I. Digital projects, past and present
Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe
The ARTFL Encyclopédie and the aesthetics of abundance
Nicholas Cronk
Electronic Enlightenment: recreating the Republic of Letters
Dan Edelstein
Mapping the Republic of Letters: history of a digital humanities project
Howard Hotson
Cultures of Knowledge in transition: Early Modern Letters Online as an experiment in collaboration, 2009-2018
Jeffrey S. Ravel
The Comédie-Française Registers Project: questions of audience
Angus Martin and the late Richard Frautschi
Towards a new bibliography of eighteenth-century French fiction
Simon Burrows
The FBTEE revolution: mapping the Ancien Régime book trade and the future of historical bibliometric research
Alicia C. Montoya
Shifting perspectives and moving targets: from conceptual vistas to bits of data in the first yearof the MEDIATE project
II. Digital methods and innovations
Catherine Nicole Coleman
Seeking the eye of history: the design of digital tools for Enlightenment studies
Elizabeth Andrews Bond and Robert M. Bond
Topic modelling the French pre-Revolutionary press
Katherine McDonough
Putting the eighteenth century on the map: French geospatial data for digital humanities research
Laure Philip
The illegal book trade revisited: an insight into database protocols and pitfalls
Melanie Conroy and Chloe Summers Edmondson
The empire of letters: Enlightenment-era French salons
Clovis Gladstone and Charles Cooney
Opening new paths for scholarship: algorithms to track text reuse in Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Sean Takats
Conclusion: beyond digitizing Enlightenment
Bibliography Index of persons Index of titles General index
About the Author :
Simon Burrows is Professor of History and of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University and lead-investigator of the award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project. His books include 'Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution', 'Enlightenment Best-Sellers' and (as co-editor) 'Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820'. Glenn Roe is Professor of French Literature and Digital Humanities at Sorbonne University. He has published widely on a variety of subjects, including French literary and intellectual history, the design and use of new computational methodologies for literary-historical research, and the constructive critique of ‘big data’ approaches to cultural collections.
Review :
'Anyone embarking on a DH project, be it large- or small-scale, would do well to read this volume carefully before they begin.'Hélène E. Bilis, Wellesley College
Reviews
'It is clear that anyone embarking on a DH [digital humanities] project, be it large- or small-scale, would do well to read this volume carefully before they begin.'
Hélène E. Bilis, H-France Review
