{"id":2428,"date":"2022-02-04T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T22:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=2428"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:05:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:05:26","slug":"simon-burrows-and-glenn-roe-eds-digitizing-enlightenment-digital-humanities-and-the-transformation-of-eighteenth-century-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2022\/02\/04\/simon-burrows-and-glenn-roe-eds-digitizing-enlightenment-digital-humanities-and-the-transformation-of-eighteenth-century-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe, Eds. Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe, Eds. Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>.<\/h1>\n\n
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Ileana Baird<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a>, <\/span>Reviews<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Cover<\/a><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe, Eds. Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>. Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2020. 472 p. ISBN 978-1-78962-194-5, USD 99.99 (Paperback).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe\u2019s edited collection, Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>, is a necessary reminder of the huge strides made by the field of eighteenth-century studies when employing the transformative tools of digital humanities. Impressive in its breath, this volume offers an in-depth view of several institutional projects, as well as sample DH applications to the study of the period. Ambitiously arguing that \u201cthe eighteenth century may \u2026 offer the perfect laboratory for applying digital technologies\u201d (11), the editors have gathered contributions on major digitization efforts and DH projects undertaken in the past decade, many of them interrelated or involving transnational and cross-disciplinary collaborations, that have transformed in a relatively short period of time our understanding of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first section of the collection, \u201cDigital Projects, Past and Present,\u201d provides details on eight large institutional initiatives. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe\u2019s chapter explains the challenges faced by the editors of the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language initiative (ARTFL) in building a digital edition of Diderot and D\u2019Alembert\u2019s monumental Encyclop\u00e9die<\/em>. The authors\u2019 efforts of cross-referencing, for instance, receive particular attention, in light of their goal of creating meaningful \u201c\u2018maps\u2019 of knowledge relationships\u201d (47) through the use of topic modelling and next generation search, retrieval, and analysis systems, such as PhiloLogic4. In the next chapter, Nicholas Cronk narrates the emergence of the Electronic Enlightenment database (EE), the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, and highlights the benefits of such an enterprise in terms of rapid updating of existing epistolary collections, analyzing the social networks they entail, plotting geographic data for senders and receivers, or using data mining to survey the corpus. Similarly, Dan Edelstein details the launching of the Stanford University\u2019s Mapping the Republic of Letters project in an engaging account that underscores the development of powerful visualization tools, such as Palladio, or the efforts to create an interoperable metadata schema for early modern prosopography, such as Procope. Howard Hotson\u2019s chapter presents the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), made available by the Cultures of Knowledge at Oxford, as a model in collaboration among various institutions, experts, and repositories, attentively describing its various phases of development and the creation of online editing tools that allow researchers to better interrogate the corpus. In his chapter, Jeffrey S. Ravel narrates the history of the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise Registers Project (CFRP), from its inception as a digitizing initiative to its current use of sophisticated search and visualization tools that allow users to cross-reference the database\u2019s categories, and outlines the project\u2019s directions of future development and pedagogical use. Angus Martin and Richard Frautschi\u2019s chapter describes the evolution of the Bibliographie du genre romanesque fran\u00e7ais, 1751-1800 project from paper (MMF) to digital format (MMF2), and the tortuous work of designing a database that allows for easy identification of ownership, bestselling titles, patterns of production and dissemination, and purchaser preferences. Simon Burrows\u2019 chapter details the avatars of the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database, an ongoing project that maps the trade of the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Typographique de Neuch\u00e2tel (STN), and the efforts to create data analysis tools that allow for sophisticated searches of book distribution patterns, reception trends, and genre prevalence, to name just a few. Finally, Alicia Montoya\u2019s chapter describes the Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in Europe, 1665-1830 (MEDIATE) project, an open access database housing data from catalogues of private libraries sold at auction in the Dutch Republic, France, and the British Isles between 1665 and 1830, its BIBLIO (Bibliography of Individually-Owned Book and Library Inventories Online) offspring, and their efforts at interoperability with other databases, such as FBTEE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Particularly interesting for this reader, the second section of the collection, \u201cDigital Methods and Innovations,\u201d elaborates on the creation of digital tools, protocols for data entry, and other affordances specifically applicable to Enlightenment studies. Examples range from interactive and exploratory data visualization applications like Tableau, RofLViz, Corrispondenza, Ink, Knot, Palladio, Breve, and Data Pen (Catherine Nicole Coleman\u2019s chapter) to topic modelling the French pre-revolutionary press (Elizabeth Andrews Bond and Robert M. Bond\u2019s chapter) to mapping geospatial data with GeoViz, Recogito, or Edinburgh Geoparser (Katherine McDonough\u2019s chapter) to designing protocols for database building that allow for better analysis and interoperability (Laure Philip\u2019s chapter) to applying prosopographical approaches to the study of salon networks (Melanie Conroy and Chloe Summers Edmondson\u2019s chapter) to using algorithms to track text reuse in ECCO, such as PhiloLine (Clovis Gladstone and Charles Cooney\u2019s chapter). Superb in their range, these chapters highlight the capability of such tailored tools and\/or digital approaches to unveil new data hidden in existing texts or repositories, or to allow for innovative analyses and visually compelling illustrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the book itself would have benefitted from a color display of the visualizations provided, the publishers did try to address this issue by making them available online, at https:\/\/liverpooluniversitypress.manifoldapp.org\/projects\/digitizing-enlightenment<\/a>, where the readers can also access the preface and introduction to the book. It is also of note that, although most of the chapters included here relate to the French Enlightenment, the contributors\u2019 emphasis on its networks of cultural exchange and the interoperability of these projects underscore their larger, European focus. An indispensable resource for any startup digital projects on the period, this collection is a truly enlightening compendium of successful DH initiatives and tools that have expanded our understanding of the period and our ability to explore it in novel and intellectually stimulating ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ileana Baird, Zayed University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe\u2019s edited collection, Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies, is a necessary reminder of the huge strides made by the field of eighteenth-century studies when employing the transformative tools of digital humanities. Impressive in its breath, this volume offers an in-depth view of several institutional projects, as well as sample DH applications to the study of the period. Ambitiously arguing that \u201cthe eighteenth century may \u2026 offer the perfect laboratory for applying digital technologies\u201d (11), the editors have gathered contributions on major digitization efforts and DH projects undertaken in the past decade, many of them interrelated or involving transnational and cross-disciplinary collaborations, that have transformed in a relatively short period of time our understanding of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5242,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888,1887],"tags":[1895,1923],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-18th-century","tag-digital-humanities"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2428"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5667,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions\/5667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}