Digitizing Enlightenment

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.

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.