Category Archives: Collections

The Marquis d’Argens: A Philosophical Life

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Marquis d'ArgensThe Marquis d’Argens (1704-1772) is mainly famous for a book he did not write, Thérèse Philosophe.  That is a great pity, as the books he did actually write are far more fascinating and entertaining than that unfortunate misattribution.  D’Argens was a sceptic, a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church, whose books were denounced by the Inquisition; one of them, La Philosophie du Bon-Sens, was burnt in Paris.  He was also a close friend of Voltaire, and he belonged to the generation that is often overshadowed by that towering genius.  Voltaire greatly admired d’Argens’ Lettres Juives, an epistolary work in which he wrote from the point of view of learned Jews discussing and often mocking the beliefs and customs of the Christian world.  The book manages to combine the subtly intellectual with the entertaining in a remarkable manner.  As a novelist, philosopher, translator, classical scholar, and art critic, d’Argens’ works are so divers that he is difficult to categorize; he was notorious in his own time for his scandalous Memoirs, in which he recalled his youth and love affairs in Paris and Italy in the 1720s and 30s.  A wild elopement, a brief army career, and an ongoing battle with his father, who wanted him to study law, provided the main subject-matter.  Those who read these Memoirs sometimes formed the opinion that he was merely a libertine and a lightweight, but that is not borne out by a careful study of his work.  The mind that emerges from them is deeply reflective, and the philosopher is always apparent in the novels, just as the imagination of a novelist lurks in his works on philosophy.

It is really quite astonishing to me that novels as fascinating as Le Philosophe Amoureux, ou Le Comte de Mommejan, and Memoirs de M. De Meillcourt, ou Le Legislateur Moderne, are so entirely neglected.  The time I devoted to reading all of d’Argens’ novels, and his other works, was frankly huge fun; his philosophical works and translations are all highly idiosyncratic and full of his personal enthusiasms and insights.  D’Argens was an intellectual, but he was also a passionate man, who loved art and music and adored women.  After many love affairs, and one youthful marriage, he settled down with a wife who shared his intellectual pursuits and was happy for him to teach her Latin and Greek so that they could be as closely united in literary as in amatory respects.

D’Argens’ life was extraordinary and well worth a biographer’s attention; after his wild youth he managed to obtain a post as chamberlain to King Frederick the Great, and he became a member of the Berlin Academy.  This meant that he encountered many of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment and was able to observe them even when they were behaving deplorably–which they quite often were.  When we appreciate the true erudition and range of his six-volume Histoire de l’Esprit Humain, we have to acknowledge that d’Argens is a major author.  I have had the satisfaction of putting together the first reliable catalogue of his genuine works.  He was at the nerve-centre of the Enlightenment, and rediscovering him will really enrich anybody’s understanding of this epoch and the development of its thought.  You can learn more in my biography The Marquis d’Argens: A Philosophical Life.

We Want You to Get Involved with The 18th-Century Common

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The Coffeehous Mob, frontispiece to Ned Ward's Vulgus Britannicus (1710).

The Coffeehous Mob, frontispiece to Ned Ward’s Vulgus Britannicus (1710).

We’re excited to announce new ways to get involved with The 18th-Century Common, the public humanities website for nonacademic, nonstudent enthusiasts of 18th-century studies.

There are two kinds of posts on The 18th-Century Common:  Features posts and Gazette posts.  In Features posts, scholars describe their own research, whether published or in progress (Read Rebekah Mitsein’s account of how her Features post on The 18th-Century Common helped her on the academic job market).  Features posts can be on existing topics gathered in thematic Collections on The 18th-Century Common, or on new topics.  We also seek new Collection Curators,  who draw on their existing scholarly networks to solicit Features or Gazette contributions from scholars on a specific topic of interest to the Collection Curator.

In Gazette posts, scholars or students situate recent publications by others—whether in academic or popular media—in scholarly contexts.  Gazette posts show how a recent publication participates in the conversations of eighteenth-century scholarship (see, for example, Cassandra Nelson’s Gazette post on a BBC article by Adam Gopnik about the “Mechanical Turk”).  We’re using the content curation plugin PressForward to generate topics for Gazette posts.  PressForward enables 18th-century enthusiasts (nonacademic or academic!) to nominate content from around the web for inclusion in 18th-Century Common Gazette posts by posting a link on Twitter with the hashtag #18common.  We also use PressForward to collect abstracts of new journal publications for possible Gazette posts.  We encourage faculty to incorporate the writing of Gazette posts into their graduate seminars or advanced undergraduate classes.  Writing a Gazette post gives students practice situating work in scholarly contexts as well as practice communicating ideas clearly to an intelligent, nonacademic readership.  Gazette Contributors will have access to a range of possible material for Gazette posts gathered by PressForward; a Gazette Contributor may choose the topic of a post from this material or from other publications.

Read more about these ways of getting involved in The 18th-Century Common:  our Get Involved page includes tutorials on nominating content with the Twitter hashtag #18common as well as on using PressForward to create Gazette posts.  Contact the editors at [email protected] with questions, proposals for Features or Gazette posts, interest in serving as (or assigning your students to serve as) Gazette Contributors, or interest in becoming a Collection Curator.

The Adventures of an 18th-Century Common Post

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In 2015 I wrote a Features post for The 18th-Century Common because I will never pass up an opportunity to tell the world about James Bruce, the verbose Scottish explorer who traveled to Abyssinia in the 1760s in search of the source of the Nile.  But beyond the instant satisfaction of sharing something I find fascinating, contributing to a public humanities website turned out to be worthwhile for other reasons:

It was an opportunity to practice translating my research.  In Fall 2015 I was on the job market, faced with the tasks of describing what I study to people outside my field, articulating how I make it interesting and relevant in undergraduate classes, and advocating for its intellectual and social impact.  Reworking even a small piece of my project for a public audience helped me start developing language and examples to communicate its exigency.

It was a quick and open-access way for people to see what I do.  I sent the link to people outside the academy who have been resources for me, and to friends and family who wanted to know more about what I study.  It came up when search committees looked me up online.  Students in the department that I will be joining in the fall read it, and they asked me questions about it during my campus visit.

It had a fast reach.  I recently ran across a web exhibit about the European exploration of the Blue Nile that was put together by a History class at Washington and Lee University.  I was pleased to see my post among their sources and amazed at how quickly it had an impact.

It turned out to be both fun and useful.  And how often does that happen?

Editor’s note:  Learn how you can get involved in public humanities project that is The 18th-Century Common.

Join Us

Join Us

There are several ways you can get involved in the public humanities project that is The 18th-Century Common. How can I write for The 18th-Century Common? Respond to our latest Call for Papers Become a Collection Curator. Collection Curators draw on their […]

Open-Access Anne Finch Digital Archive

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Readers of early British poetry and early women writers will soon be able to discover all of Anne Finch’s poems and plays in the first scholarly edition of her work:  The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, general editor, Jennifer Keith:  Volume 1:  Early Manuscript Books, edited by Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff, associate editor Jean I. Marsden; and Volume 2:  Later Collections, Print and Manuscript, edited by Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff. The print edition establishes for the first time an accurate record of all known work by Finch that has survived:  more than 230 poems (the number varies depending on how one enumerates different versions of some poems), two plays, and letters.

Already available is the open-access Anne Finch Digital Archive, which complements the print edition.  Materials on the open-access Anne Finch Digital Archive enable users to explore the archival elements of Finch’s texts.  The featured poems on this site have been selected from a great number in Finch’s œuvre to illustrate her work in different poetic kinds, including song, fable, biblical paraphrase, translation, verse epistle, and devotional poetry.  For every featured poem, the site includes commentary with embedded links to illustrations, information about composition and printing dates and sources, audio files of the poem read aloud, and source copies showing authorized manuscript and print texts with transcriptions.  We will continue to add resources to the site, including recordings of musical performances of the songs featured.  The multimedia elements of this site reflect the various ways that Finch’s work engaged her contemporary readers and listeners, who knew her work in manuscript, print, or performance, or in all of these forms.

Writing in an era known for the overtly public and political poetry of John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), articulated a different literary and political authority.  From her position as a female aristocrat, once at the center of the court and then for many years a political internal exile, Finch explored the individual’s spiritual condition as inextricable from social and political phenomena.  Her interest in affairs of state frequently informed her exposure of patriarchy’s constraints on women and men.  Finch’s work participates in the strategies of her contemporaries such as Dryden and Pope—the public speaker who sought to influence state politics, the renovator of classical mythology and pastoral who exposed contemporary mores, the fabulist who satirized state and society, the friend who used the couplet for conversation and exchange, and the wit who made discernment a moral good.  But Finch both furthers and deviates from these practices.  Readers will discover her innovative use of form and genre to explore a wide range of themes and her complex use of tone to enlist the reader’s discernment and develop a poetics of intimacy.

The edition has received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Women’s Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Wake Forest University.

Open Anthologies and the 18th-Century Reader
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openanthologycollageAs any reader of The 18th-Century Common knows, the last quarter century has witnessed the astonishing digitization of thousands of texts from the past:  novels, poems, essays, histories, plays, many of them available for free.  For scholars, the creation of this Digital Republic of Learning has (on the whole) been a boon, enabling new modes of inquiry that could barely have been imagined a generation ago.  For students, however, the digitization of the archive has been a more mixed blessing.  As newcomers to the field, students can very easily find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of material that shows up in the simple Google search that is likely to be their first means of access.  Students are unlikely to know how to judge of the quality or authenticity of what they find, or to be able to recognize the difference between a well-edited text and something with virtually no authority whatsoever.  Texts are haphazardly distributed, some behind commercial paywalls such as Gale’s ECCO collection, while others are in reasonably well-curated but still imperfect archives like Project Gutenberg. Still others seem to have been put together with no thought whatsoever.  In keeping with the tendency of the Internet to level the field of information, all such texts come decontextualized in several senses.  Rarely are the texts that students or general readers are likely to find annotated to provide the kind of historical contextualization that most readers need to make sense of works from this period.  And, too, the fact of digitization decontextualizes all works from the past from the conditions of their production and dissemination; everything looks the same on the screen.

openanthologyOur projects intend to improve the quality of eighteenth-century texts available for students, general readers, and scholars, and to enlist students in the project of producing them.  The Open Anthology of Literature in English aims to build a digital anthology from the ground up, offering digitized texts that have been edited for accuracy and annotated for modern readers.  Students are crucial collaborators and makers in this project.  Using the TypeWright tool at the 18th Connect project, they can correct the OCR of original texts, and in the process get to see what eighteenth-century print looked like.  And they can identify what should be annotated (who knows better than they do what they need in order to make sense of a work from the past?), and then research what they and readers like them need to know.  They get to work with TEI/XML, which means that they get to see the digital tools of the twenty-first century print shop.  As students complete texts, they become part of a permanent, open-access archive of reliable works, encoded in TEI/XML that is available for the use of teachers who want a place to which they can send their students.  Students thus create something that lives on past the term in which they are enrolled in the class, and the community of students and readers get an archive of free and reliable texts that take full advantage of the resources offered by digitization.

novelsincontextNovels in Context is a web-accessible TEI/XML database application focused on a particular moment in literary history.  Drawing on the practice of public scholarship, the free code ethos, scholarship around the digital archive and digital edition, and the Open Educational Resources movement, Novels in Context seeks to provide a curated, extensible, searchable, and reusable collection of primary source materials focused on the eighteenth-century English novel.  This project is unique not only in its use of database technology and the standardized TEI Simple markup but also in its commitment to the material page–each item is accompanied by quality page images sourced by hand from libraries and special collections.  If everything looks the same on the screen, so too in print anthologies, which deracinate the text from its reality in time and space.  Without understanding something about how a text or an utterance or a performance comes to be in our purview, agile, contextualized engagement with literature—much less the world at large—is impossible.  By involving students in its creation, Novels in Context works to fulfill the promise of feminist pedagogical theory that  urges both collaboration and connection, seeing students as critical makers—full, capable partners in the scholarly work of keeping our cultural heritage alive.

While these projects work to improve the quality of digital texts in an open, collaborative, and scalable way, they also speak to another concern with the market-driven tendencies of academic publishing.  The construction of a Digital Republic of Learning is and has been underway in myriad forms on the Internet since the 1990s, to be sure, but the past decade has seen a noted rise in the number of corporate fingers in the pot.  To be committed to the public goods of education, we need texts and pedagogies that are public and open, but they also need to be critical, rather than affirmative.  A user-generated open anthology of the kind we are imagining is a step in this direction.  As the eighteenth century teaches us, power in the public sphere is in large part a product of one’s ability to negotiate its social and technical components.  Looking toward the eighteenth century, which witnessed its own technological and social revolutions in the dissemination of knowledge, can also be of real use in our current educational context.  Knowledge and power, knowledge-power:  one of our most salient charges as teachers and scholars today must be to enable the fullest possible participation in public conversation.  And when we say “fullest,” we mean it in the broadest sense—rich, responsible, free, purposeful, ethical, capable of enabling new relations of power, new relationships between our present and our past, newly connected selves.

To that end, we seek collaborators on both projects, teachers and students who want to make creating digital editions eighteenth-century texts.  We will provide TEI/XML templates and lessons to enable students to become active, critical contributors to the textual commons.  Please contact [email protected] or [email protected] to find out how you and your students can join in the task of creating open, curated digital editions of texts from our collective past.

The Letters of Hannah More: A Digital Edition

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The Collected Letters of Hannah MoreThe Letters of Hannah More: A Digital Edition brings together for the first time the fascinating letters written by the celebrated playwright, poet, philanthropist, moralist, and educationalist Hannah More (1745-1833).

More was one of the most important voices of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.  At the heart of a complex and extensive network of politicians, bishops, writers, and evangelical Christians, which included figures such as William Wilberforce, Samuel Johnson, and Elizabeth Montagu, More sought to redefine and reshape the social and moral values of the age.

Though More’s fame and influence were considerable throughout her fifty-year literary career, she has remained a peripheral figure in later assessments of the literary culture of the period.  In part this is because some of her views are unappealing to modern tastes (she argued strongly against women becoming more involved in political life, for instance, and she was fiercely opposed to Catholic emancipation), but it is also because she has acquired a reputation for dour, dreary earnest religiosity.  That her evangelical Christian beliefs were central to More’s life and works is undeniable, but she was also playful and light-hearted, and she especially delighted in the company of children.  More’s cheerless reputation developed after the publication in 1834 – just a year after her death – of William Roberts’s four-volume edition, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, in which More’s cheerful and teasing voice was deliberately and ‘primly’ edited out.  So badly did Roberts misrepresent More that her goddaughter Marianne Thornton begged correspondents not to “judge of Hannah More by anything […] that Roberts tells you she said or did.”

To her friends and family, the publication of More’s letters was inevitable.  In 1813, William Weller Pepys urged her to compose her letters so that “the subjects, though familiar, should be always interesting.”  He acknowledged that writing for publication ran the risk of producing mannered and contrived letters “yet I would not have you totally lose sight of the possibility of such a thing taking place” (Roberts, III, 380).  Prior to her death in 1819, Patty More undertook the initial editorial groundwork by collecting together relevant letters and papers (without her sister’s knowledge).  The task was continued by Mary and Margaret Roberts, to whom Patty had entrusted the papers and whom More later appointed her literary executors, who worked on arranging, copying, and dating the letters, “the most troublesome part of a posthumous concern,” More observed from a distance (Huntington Library, HM 30620).  The Roberts sisters also approached their brother, William, a lawyer and journalist, about taking on the role of More’s official biographer and editor.  The resulting four-volume Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More was published in 1834.

More had some experience of the administration of a literary estate.  In early 1781, she assisted Eva Maria Garrick, the widow of David Garrick, More’s theatrical mentor of the late 1770s, to arrange and dispose of his letters.  Among them she discovered her own letters but, observant of protocols for such matters, considered it “a breach of trust to take them till they are all finally disposed of” (Roberts, I, 193).  Garrick’s carefully ordered papers, however, contrasts with the disorderliness of More’s own extensive archive which fell increasingly into disarray as her mental faculties diminished in old age:  Mary Roberts worried how More, who was “no longer capable of exercising the same care & caution as formerly,” suffered private letters to “lie scattered on her Table” (British Library, Eg. 1965, f. 100).

The size and content of More’s archive inevitably fluctuated over the years.  The majority of the letters that she wrote, of course, ended up in the collections of their recipients.  Some groups of letters, however, found their way back into More’s archive, such as her letters to Horace Walpole and her early letters to William Weller Pepys, although what survives today cannot reflect the extent of the original accumulations.  Nor were all of More’s letters considered worthy of long term retention.  William Roberts observed that when More was afflicted by a pleuralic fever, “The letters which were received by her sisters . . . amounted to some hundreds.  They were destroyed; but had they been preserved, their unvarying topic would have excluded the variety to which letters owe their interest” (Roberts, III, 244).  More herself, concerned for her posthumous reputation, was not averse to destroying letters:  she burnt nearly two hundred letters sent to her by Clapham Sect friend, Henry Thornton, and requested that Marianne Thornton destroy a series of her own letters after her death (Huntington Library, MY 669 and MY 716).  Consequently, the letters that survive in manuscript and print must represent only a fraction of More’s epistolary output.

Although affecting disinterest in her biography while alive, More was concerned to assist in the reconstitution of her archive following her death:  a provision in her will, which requested that all the friends with whom she corresponded hand over her letters or copies of them to her literary executors, was designed precisely to facilitate the posthumous editing of her letters.  At least one friend, Marianne Thornton, refused to turn over her letters to Roberts believing them unfit for publication.  Other friends, however, were more cooperative, such as John Scandrett Harford and Lady Olivia Sparrow.  To the latter, Mary Roberts proposed a reciprocal exchange of letters and assured her that any “private or confidential matters” would be expunged before publication (British Library, Eg. 1865, fol. 100).  She also outlined the broad editorial methodology that had been adopted:  as many as possible of More’s letters to her “intimate correspondents” would be recalled at the earliest opportunity in order to allow sufficient time for their appraisal, and from each parcel a few of “most interesting & worthy of insertion” would be selected for the memoir.  A group of More’s letters to Lady Olivia Sparrow (with a few to her daughter, Millicent), was sold by her grandson, Lord Robert Montagu, to the British Library in 1865, and a selection of these form the basis for this pilot project.  Five letters from More to Lady Olivia Sparrow are preserved in what remains of her original archive (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library), and the project team will in due course establish the extent to which these particular manuscripts relate to the letters that Roberts selected for publication.  Today More’s 1,800 letters are scattered across some ninety repositories in Britain and North America with at least two groups of letters remain in private ownership.

The publication of More’s letters for the first time in a reliable and scholarly edition (which will also be fully searchable) will bring back together, for the first time since their dispersal in the nineteenth century, what remains of More’s epistolary output.  Doing this will enable a much-needed reassessment of her significance by making explicit the extent to which More was embedded within, and exercised great influence over, the major cultural, political and social networks of her era.  It will also make visible for the first time the larger patterns of More’s letter-writing activities:  already, visualizations of the data gathered so far offers insights into the way More’s letter writing changed over time; how her relationships with her closest correspondents shifted; to whom she wrote most often.  The rhythms of eighteenth-century life can also be seen to exert an influence over More’s letter-writing, with More writing far fewer letters whilst the fashionable were in London.  A staunch defender of Sabbath-keeping, More unsurprisingly wrote very few letters on Sundays, but she wrote more than might be expected of an avowedly strict Christian woman.

The edition of More’s letters is currently under construction:  a small collection (to Lady Olivia Sparrow) is available, and this will be added to gradually over the next six months.  It is hoped that all of More’s surviving letters will be available within the next four years.

The project is a collaboration between scholars from the UK, the US and Canada.

Project Leader:  Dr. Kerri Andrews, University of Strathclyde

Technical Adviser:  Professor Laura Mandell, Texas A&M

Modern Humanities Research Associate:  Dr. Sarah Crofton, University of Strathclyde

Advisory Board:  Dr. Nicholas D. Smith, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Dr. Sue Edney, University of Bristol; Dr. Anne Stott, Independent Scholar; Dr. Anne Milne, University of Toronto; Dr. Dahlia Porter, University of North Texas

The project has been supported by funding from the Carnegie Trust, the MHRA, and the University of Strathclyde.

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

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LadysMagazine‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ is a two-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant scheme.  The team of academics behind it is based at the University of Kent and is led by Jennie Batchelor, who works closely with the project’s two full-time Postdoctoral Researchers:  Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi.  Our aim is to shed new light on one of the first and longest running women’s magazines of all time.

In an 1840 letter to Hartley Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë wrote that she wished “with all [her] heart” that she “had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine,” a periodical that ran for 13 issues per annum from more than six decades and had an estimated circulation of 10,000 monthly copies at the height of its popularity.  170 years later the history and cultural and literary importance of a publication, the vast majority of the original content of which was produced by unknown and unpaid reader-contributors, remains undocumented.

Our project fills this significant gap through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of one of the first recognizably modern magazines for women from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818.  In its two-pronged book history/literary critical approach, this project sets out to answer three key research questions:

  • What made the Lady’s Magazine one of the most popular and enduring titles of its day?
  • What effects might an understanding of the magazine’s content, production, and circulation have upon our conceptions of Romantic-era print culture?
  • What role did the Lady’s Magazine play in the long-term development of the women’s magazine and the history of women’s writing?

In response to these questions, we are producing an open-access fully annotated, downloadable index of the magazine’s content for its first 50 years, which will launch in September 2016.  Titles of articles are accompanied by the names or pseudonyms of their contributors, and their contributors’ status (author, translator, extracter, or pilferer) is given wherever it can be clearly ascertained.  Attributions are made where possible.  In fact, we are amassing a small but growing body of evidence about a number of regular and mostly unknown contributors to the magazine and their lives or careers beyond its pages.  We regularly publish about these discoveries, and many other topics besides, on our project blog.

In addition to illuminating the production and composition of the magazine, we also pay detailed attention to its diverse, text-based contents.  Since the titles of articles in the Lady’s Magazine are often misleading (an article purporting to be about women’s dress might make an impassioned plea for reforms in female education, for instance), our index tags content by genre, key stylistic features and prominent keywords (marriage, education, politics, for example) making it easy for readers to find items of particular interest.

We are mining the data we are collating and will be presenting our findings in the form of web, book, and journal articles on attributions, the career profiles of magazine contributors, and statistical and interpretive analyses of the shifting content of the magazine over the course of its long history.  Jennie is also in the process of writing a book about the magazine’s place in the Romantic literary marketplace.  By making the annotated index of contributor signatures and content analysis freely available online, we also hope to promote further research by scholars and other interested parties on the Lady’s Magazine, late-eighteenth-century periodicals, and authorship and print culture in the period more generally.

One of the greatest joys of the project has been disseminating and talking about our research in progress via our Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog, all of which are regularly updated. Through social media, we have entered into conversations about the magazine, its diverse content, and the issues it debates and generates with modern-day readers all over the world.  Establishing a community of interested parties who felt they had a stake in the publication was vital to the success of the Lady’s Magazine, whose readers and subscribers were also its authors.  We like to think that, in a small way, the online community that has grown around the project captures and perpetuates something of the spirit of the magazine itself.

It has certainly been a genuine and generative collaboration that has advanced the project in ways that we could not have anticipated when we began.  For instance, Jennie’s happy acquisition of a copy of the periodical from one of our blog’s readers, which contained a number of rare surviving embroidery patterns, led to a flutter of Twitter excitement that snowballed into ‘The Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off,’ a non-competitive sewing bee in which dozens of people all over the world have recreated 10 Lady’s Magazine patterns for display at an exhibition at Chawton House Library to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), a novel whose hero and a major plotline are taken from a short story in the Lady’s Magazine.

To find out more, do visit the project website and blog, or contact Jennie ([email protected])

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

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Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a digital project in support of the teaching, study, and research of the poetry of the long eighteenth century.  It comprises a full-text collection of richly-encoded digital texts and a research project that aims to integrate texts and (digital) scholarship into a curated research collection.  ECPA is based on the principle of user participation, the corpus is edited and annotated collaboratively, and will grow and evolve with the requirements and interests of its users.

ECPA was originally intended as a way of providing literary and historical context for its sister project, the Thomas Gray Archive, covering the lives and works of contemporaries of Gray’s such as William Collins, Mark Akenside, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Christopher Smart, and James Thomson.  As the project evolved and widened in scope, its initial contextual focus shifted to an analytical one.

ECPA builds on the texts created by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).  The transcription and encoding has been enriched with additional descriptive (e.g., author attributions on poem level) and analytical markup (e.g., recording verse, stanza, and poem form, assigning of themes and genres, assigning rhyme scheme, assigning metrical pattern, recording of syllable pattern, addition of explanatory/editorial annotations) in support of a computationally assisted close reading process.

As readers engage with texts in different ways and with different objectives, we have modeled these different types of user engagement into distinctive “views” of the text.  So far, we have focused on views that support a first reading of a text (“reading” view) and the initial analysis of a text (“analysis” view) in the form of a close reading.  Over time, the ECPA research project will enable new modes of engagement and allow for increasingly sophisticated ways of interacting with the texts.

ECPA is currently available in public beta and is in active development.  Current developments are concerned with increasing the number of poets and poems represented, and exploring the possibility of including other European languages.  We welcome any feedback about issues, feature requests, or general feedback about the content, functionalities, or design of the Website.  Please e-mail <[email protected]>.

The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD)

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Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD)

The period from 1790 to 1820 was a significant moment in British women’s literary history.  During this period more women published novels than men, even as the novel was solidifying as a respected literary genre.  By the end of this period the novel was reputable enough a medium for Sir Walter Scott, celebrated poet, to pen the wildly successful Waverly series (1814).  His success, however, came on the backs of the many women novelists who paved the way before him in the previous thirty years.

But what was the contemporary critical response to such a momentous period in the history of the British novel?  The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD) seeks to uncover just that.

The NRD is the first and only database to focus on one genre’s historical reception.  Cataloging reviews of novels from the period’s two foremost review periodicals, the Monthly Review and the Critical Review, the NRD brings together book reviews and book market data, providing a repository of criticism reacting in print to this period in the novel’s, and women’s, literary history.

The NRD includes 1,836 book reviews, representing 1,215 novels and 445 identified authors.  It features transcriptions of review criticism as well as data on women writers, novels, and review periodical makeup.  The NRD contains a unique combination of contemporary primary sources that speak to the novel’s solidification as a literary genre during this period, including review articles, advertisements, and novel prefaces, many from archival sources not available digitally.

The NRD also offers a data-set by which distant reading of this period in literary history can be explored, uncovering for the first time the Reviews’ role in shaping our modern novel canon.  Distant reading studies of the novel, such as this study from the NRD of publisher William Lane, offer a new means of asking questions about the history of the novel and how contemporaries experienced its evolution.  Its scope enables the NRD to encourage a broad survey of the literary marketplace in which the novel grew in the late eighteenth century, one that brings forward the many anonymously published and still obscure women novelists from this period that are often neglected in our study of the novel.  The NRD presents opportunities for text mining review criticism, tracing economic market changes in novel production and sales, or publishers’ trends, tracking the novel’s evolving gendered authorship, understanding how reviewers discussed and understood a novel’s authorial gender, and excavating growing genre parameters by which the novel was evaluated and effectively produced.

The NRD is currently in Phase I of three phases of development.  Phase I features transcriptions of review criticism—criticism that due to poor OCR in digital archives and scattered periodicals collections, are currently unavailable to most scholars.  The NRD seeks to make this text corpus available to scholars in an open-access relational database platform.  This platform, Phase II, which introduces a review bibliography, novel publication data, and authorial gender demographics, is under construction with hopes of a 2017 release.  Phase III will provide users with review page images and the ability to read issues of the Reviews in their entirety, tagged review subjects and the power to create their own tagging profile, and a formula builder to manipulate NRD data for their own research.

Curating The Mind Is a Collection

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The Mind Is a Collection is a born-digital museum of early modern cognitive models.  For the last decade or so, I have been studying the spaces in which the philosophies of the British Enlightenment were thought, penned, or put into practice.  One outcome of this research is a book, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth Century Thought (Penn, 2015).  But this book was all along imagined as the catalogue of a museum, a collection of the things that people used to make sense of mental processes.  The Mind Is a Collection is that museum, gathering in one place roughly a hundred objects used to model the mind.  Some of these objects can be found in private collections or museums around the world, but others have vanished, are fixed in place, or never existed in the first place.  In other words, such a virtual space navigates the world in much the same way as an ideal one.  It seeks thereby to capture the essential ideality of mind as an emergent property of imaginary objects.

We generally think of the mind as something absolutely different from the rest of the world.  There is, on the one side of a bright divide, the world of stuff: intelligible and unintelligible objects, things-in-themselves, perhaps other people, maybe our own bodies.  There is, on the other side, the world of the intellect: rational and irrational objects, things as we know them, our sense of others, and some sense of ourselves.  This is the bright line of the mind/body divide: there is mind-stuff and matter, consciousness and brute creation.  This is what is meant by the catch-all term “dualism.”

The philosophers tell us again and again that dualisms are nonsense–and I’m inclined to agree.  There is (they say) no final line in the mind, no screen where ideas pop up or frontier that separates there from here.  We are embedded in the world in which we move; “mind” is a category mistake.  Yet, there is a catch.  Despite the fact that philosophical dualisms have been overwhelmingly, repeatedly, and even routinely discredited, the figures of thought cling on, turning up in philosophy and folk psychology alike.  Some of the most powerful voices speaking against these sorts of dualisms have themselves noticed the difficulty of speaking beyond them (see for instance Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained); even if we accept that we are speaking nonsense, it is hard to know how to talk about mental activity without falling back on vocabularies hinging on difference.

The Mind Is a Collection focuses on one dominant instance of this habit, a mainstream cognitive model for the British Enlightenment; it is organized around a related batch of metaphors for mentation, bubbling up repeatedly at the time and place commonly named as the source of modern dualisms.  Its crucial intervention is to argue that dualisms name the state of certain forms of networks; it argues that the mind/body distinction, decried as a philosophical fallacy, arises as the proof and function of embedded cognitive systems.  Put differently, philosophical dualisms are constructed in working spaces of thought.  John Locke calls the mind a cabinet; he was a collector of books.  Joseph Addison compares thinking to a walk in a garden; Addison was a planter and an important figure in the development of English gardening.  These are metaphors foisted on working spaces of thought.

The usual way to explore this phenomenon would be to write a book about it, posing the argument that “mind” is a name for certain kinds of emplaced relationships.  But it seemed just as natural to me to pose this argument through a museum, since collections like museums were the smithies of modern mentation.  This, then, is that museum, which contains some of the critical objects of eighteenth-century philosophy.  John Locke says that the mind is a cabinet?  Well, some of the critical artifacts from his cabinet can be found in the first space of this museum, called “Metaphor.”  (The rest can be found in Oxford, at the Bodleian Library.)  Joseph Addison compares thinking to walking?  The back door of The Mind Is a Collection, located in “Digression,” lets out onto Addison’s favorite walk, the water-walks of Magdalen College.  And so on.

Taking these metaphors seriously involves recognizing a reverse vector.  We don’t just model our mind on the spaces in which we think.  We create gadgets, in turn, based on those mental models.  We invent tools that respond to how we understand our minds to work.  Call it the feedback loop of cognitive modeling.  We are the creatures of our gadgets, just as our gadgets are the creatures thoughts.  So, Locke says that the mind is a cabinet, and he becomes a minor pioneer in library science, developing indexing methods based on his library.  The pamphlet Locke authored that discusses this method is mentioned in Exhibit 1, “Locke’s Index.”  Joseph Addison claims that thinking is like walking, and he becomes a gardener, planting the walks that make his species of thinking possible.  The house he built, and walk he planted, is the subject of Exhibit 14, “Addison’s Walk.”  We, in other words, shape our environments to match our mental models.  This museum collects the traces of this sort of shaping.

Composing The Mind Is a Collection meant producing about 80,000 words of new prose, for the prose of the book is almost completely different than that of the virtual museum.  It also meant securing permissions for those handfuls of images not in the public domain—though even the most casual visit to the museum will show you that not many of the images in the museum involve simple photographs of things in the world.  Most of what you will find there was painstakingly worked up with architectural modeling software.  The process begins with 3-dimensional models built in Sketchup 2015—a museum inspired by multiple iconic C17 and C18 spaces (the old Bodleian, the Ashmolean, Stowe House, and so on), filled with objects modeled from scratch based on my personal viewings of various iconic C17 and C18 objects.  I then rendered this space, populated with these things, into photorealistic images, using Thea Render’s engine and studio.  Producing these images meant, among other things, developing custom materials, designing virtual “cameras,” and arranging a virtual lighting system.  I then cleaned up the resulting images in Photoshop, and built a clickable image map for each.  This leads to the final step, when image, image map, and prose are brought together in a single website, hosted by Squarespace.  It is here that the virtual museum springs into being.  Most of this work I did myself, but some involved work from some very special friends (see for instance Sir Kenelm’s Idea).  What results is, I hope, the half compellingly real, half dream-like fantasy of a virtual mind-museum.

Putting together this museum has been a labor of care.  But the labor has been about remaining true to the museum’s driving insight: that ideas are things distributed in space.  Even a philosophical dualism, so this museum argues, is the name for a certain kind of network—a network that can be seen online.  I invite you to visit, to see what I’ve been on about.  Admission to The Mind Is a Collection is always free.  You’re welcome to browse, to pursue whatever is of interest to you, and to skip what isn’t.  Leave for coffee and return.  Your ticket is good for multiple entries.  The longer, more detailed discussion of anything you find there is available in the book of the same title.  Links to places where you can find the book will be found in the gift shop.