Description
Book SynopsisJohn Regan is Lecturer in Literature and the Digital at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
Trade ReviewExploring at scale ECCO and other corpora of 18-century texts with tools developed by researchers at the Concept Lab (Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge), this exciting new monograph blends expert knowledge of the period with the affordances of the digital to investigate collective meaning and knowledge formation in 18th-century Britain. For those interested in how words and their lexical associations reflect social, political, and ideological change, as well as in the revolutionary potential of distant reading large repositories of texts, this book is a rare treat. -- Ileana Baird, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: New Digital Insights into Collective Meaning 1.‘Beauty’ and the ‘Beautiful’: Semantic Difference at Scale 2. The Cases of ‘Perception’ and ‘Knowledge’: Semantic Decay Amidst the British Print Explosion 3. ‘Attention’: A Useful, Salutary Failure 4. ‘More is Different’: How the Collective View Contributes to our Knowledge of the British Eighteenth Century
Part II: Common Conceptions of ‘Slavery’ across Political and Religious Discourses 5.The Curious Case of the ‘System of Government’ 6. The Evolution of the Meaning of Liberty across the British Eighteenth Century 7.‘Protestant’ and the Antonymic Production of Collective Meaning Conclusion Appendix I: Straightening Out Uneven ECCO Appendix II: How mPMI Works and Why it is Better Than Other Methods for Discovering Collective Meaning Bibliography Index
