This chapter argues that the 1870s witnessed the final hegemony of a cause-and-effect form of thick temporality that arguably still dominates our lives. It asks if digital tools open up alternative ways of thinking about chronology, our experience of time, and the possibility of action. The chapter examines two digital projects that change how we approach the 1870s: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History or BRANCH at branchcollective.org, and Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education or COVE at covecollective.org.

The nineteenth century was the first era of “big data” in the modern world, and American literary texts published during this time, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), offer an aesthetic reframing of how individuals and institutions within a culture of data use information at scale to claim authority over knowledge and, by extension, power over people. Moby-Dick also gestures toward the ways that African and African American bodies were subjected to the most brutal regimes of quantification that the nineteenth century had to offer in the form of the transatlantic and intra-American slave trade. One of the major problems facing American literary studies and digital humanities today is the question of how to excavate and explicate the quantitative turn of earlier centuries as we seek to better understand the cultures of data we live in today. The best initial response to this problem is not to begin with a specific digital tool per se, but to build a set of guiding principles for how to critically approach data, media, and power from within a context that recognizes the distinctive contributions of literary texts as aesthetic objects. This essay models one such approach to do so.

This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

Academia can instigate policy debates. Data collection instruments like the Census are framed in a monolingual mindset that makes it difficult to obtain a full picture of language diversity, while the smart city concept can be applied to language to capture a wider range of data. In using language to determine origin and entitlement to refugee status, we interrogated prevailing concepts and enriched judicial procedures by offering new methods of analysis and interpretation, helping to ensure a more just consideration of claims. The chapter also describes the managerial culture of control over the public narrative around the value of modern languages that aimed essentially at protecting the sector and existing ontologies. The chapter concludes with a consideration of locality studies as a new, alternative framework through which to engage in the study of local languages and forge international connections.

This chapter introduces data-driven research methods for theatre and performance. Drawing on two case studies, the chapter demonstrates how to define and identify data, how to collect and organize it, and how to analyse it through computational methods. Careful attention is paid to the tension between a rigorous data model and the uncertainty and ‘messiness’ present in data’s sources. The conclusion promotes data-driven thinking as a way to expand the context and scope of TaPS analyses and to encourage explicit reflection on the mental categories and models within which we understand performance.

Since Kristeva invented the term in the late 1960s, intertextuality has become a dominant concern in Latin literature, despite the fact that Latinists often use the term in a narrow sense. A brief history of intertextuality enables this chapter to model different understandings of intertextuality across different genres and periods. Consideration begins with a passage of Virgil long recognised as a calque of Homer, and moves to other maximal cases of intertextuality in Plautus and Terence. Awareness of the dynamics and ideological power of intertextuality enables fuller consideration of the metaphors with which such passages as these comment on their situation in wider networks of text. The importance of historical context is discussed through several phenomena prevalent in late antiquity, namely cento poetry, compilation and typological interpretation. Developments across these periods in the technology of text focus attention on the cognitive and material dimensions of memory. The chapter closes by putting intertextual memory in Latin literature into dialogue with emerging methods of reading enabled by digital corpora, search algorithms, hypertext and linked data.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities raised by computational visualizations of digitized literature and literary data. Taking Franco Moretti’s Maps, Graphs and Trees (2007) as a starting point, it considers what new insights these techniques of visualization, seldom employed in the humanities, can convey. Carter speaks with leading practitioners in the field to unpack the ways in which new techniques in digital data visualization are allowing scholars “to perform conventional work in new ways.” Applying these techniques to literary data for which they are not designed, however, also reveals a productive push and pull: as one of Carter’s interview subjects, Alex Christie, puts is, “We’re reading the literature on the technology, but we’re also seeing where the literature we’re trying to model pushes against the edges of the technical frameworks we have in hand.”

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

Media historians speak of three “medium shifts” in the history of literature: from orality to writing, from writing to print, and from print to digital. This chapter investigates the history and the significance of the most recent shift, while questioning the notion of an absolute “rupture” with orality, manuscript, and print, all of which remain vital parts of the global literary ecosystem. Drawing on Benjamin Peters’s tripartite approach to the digital in terms of pointing, counting, and manipulating, Foxman argues that the developments in the digital representation of texts have continued to challenge divisions long held to be immutable – not least, those separating content, author, and reading. As we arrive in the digital present, Foxman argues, we are left questioning all our traditional beliefs about what text is.

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 models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.