{"id":3506,"date":"2024-02-29T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=3506"},"modified":"2026-07-03T08:49:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T12:49:23","slug":"ileana-baird-ed-data-visualization-in-enlightenment-literature-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2024\/02\/29\/ileana-baird-ed-data-visualization-in-enlightenment-literature-and-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Ileana Baird, ed. Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture.<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ileana Baird, ed. Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture.<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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Maureen E. Mulvihill<\/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

Ileana Baird, ed. <\/strong>Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture.<\/em><\/strong> Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan\/Springer Nature International Publications, 2022. 385 pages, 90 Figures, 27 Tables. ISBN (cloth) 978-3-030-54912-1; (paper) 978-3-030-54913-8. $99.99 (cloth and paper); Kindle (rent, $23.04; buy, $89). Chapters 1, 3, 8, 10 are open access under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International <\/strong>License<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We begin in a playful spirit: What do John Tenniel, Sidney Paget, and Ileana Baird have in common? If you know their work, the answer is easy: They are all visualizers<\/em>. They speak to the eye of the reader; they connect eye and brain through the agency of image. Can we imagine Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> without the Tenniel illustrations? Or the Sherlock Holmes stories without Paget\u2019s drawings? Or Data Visualization Studies without Ileana Baird? Surely not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over ten finely documented and illustrated chapters, Ileana Baird and her twelve contributing writers offer scholars of the long eighteenth century (1660-c<\/em>1800) a timely high-tech methodology:  graphical conveyance of information. Baird\u2019s new book, Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture <\/em>(2022), demonstrates the utility of content imaging. Baird and her writers have constructed datasets of research on selected topics in visually accessible designs: graphs, tables, figures, tabulations, charts, clustering, topic modeling, network graphs, data mapping, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baird stands on a secure foundation. Presently an Associate Professor of English at Zayed University, United Arab Emirates (PhD, 2012, University of Virginia), Baird has been building a   record of publication on the Digital Humanities, Visualization, and eighteenth-century subjects. In addition to articles and reviews, she has edited or co-edited Social Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century<\/em> (2014); Eighteenth-Century<\/em> Thing Theory<\/em> (2014); All Things Arabia<\/em> (2020); and now Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture<\/em> (2022). <\/em>(Detailed profile<\/a>.) Digital Humanities and its visualization have been a continuing interest of Baird\u2019s; indeed, innovation is the theme of her career. Here is a sample of Baird\u2019s work in \u2018social analysis visualization\u2019, constructed from datasets of research on the networks \u2013 social, literary, career \u2014 of novelist Eliza Haywood, as described (and debased) in Pope\u2019s Dunciad<\/em> and in the poem\u2019s busy apparatus: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Network
Source:<\/strong><\/a> \u201cThe Strength of Weak Ties: Eliza Haywood\u2019s Social 
Networks in The Dunciad in Four Books<\/em> (1743).\u201d ABO Interactive <\/em>
Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830.<\/em> Fall, 2019, pp. 1-36. 
In creating several visualizations of her subject, Baird used digital
design tools SHIVA Graph and GraphViz. <\/figcaption><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Baird\u2019s collection succeeds as a useful new product owing to three features: its timely subject; its range of topics discussed by specialists from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, the UAE, the U.S.; and its striking graphical component of 117 images. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Chapter One, Baird sets out the purpose, organization, and utility of her collection. Her thorough opening remarks (27 pp., 63 footnotes) introduce readers to theory and praxis<\/em>, explaining that \u201c[T]his collection is a truly interdisciplinary effort that showcases the significant digital humanities work done in the field of eighteenth-century studies and its potential to transform our disciplinary practices.\u201d Baird continues, \u201cBy translating these new findings in suggestive visualizations, the contributors to this collection unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.\u201d (23) The book\u2019s contributors are published specialists, and Baird demonstrated editorial intelligence in her interdisciplinary selections<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her stellar cast of established specialists begins with Simon Burrows<\/strong>, who opens the collection. \u201cIn Search of Enlightenment: From Mapping Books to Cultural History\u201d discusses an important project at Western Sydney University on the eighteenth-century French book trade. The following chapter, on the English Short-Title Catalogue<\/em>, is arguably the best of the book, assembled by the five-member team of Mikko Tolonen, Mark J. Hill, Ali Zeeshan Iza, Ville Vaara, and Leo Lahti<\/strong>; their essay demonstrates the benefits of collaborative scholarship in a fresh look at the early-modern canon constructed by a traditional bibliographical tool. John Regan<\/strong>, in \u201cEurope and Its \u2018Others\u2019,\u201d discusses visualizing lexical relations between Western and Non-western locations in another bibliographical tool:  Eighteenth-Century Collection Online. <\/em>Bill Hall<\/strong>, in \u201cText Mining and Visualization\u201d explores cultural formations and structural changes in fifty years of eighteenth-century poetry criticism (1967-2018). Jakub Zdebik<\/strong> gives us \u201cThe Grid and the Visualization of Abstract Information\u201d in three well-selected eighteenth-century models. Courtney A. Hoffman<\/strong> in \u201cExploring Data Visualization\u201d examines time, emotion, and epistolarity in Frances Brooke\u2019s The History of Emily Montague.<\/em> Baird<\/strong>\u2019s chapter, \u201cOutliers, Connectors, and Textual Periphery,\u201d offers a social analysis of John Dennis\u2019s networks in Pope\u2019s Dunciad.<\/em> Simon D. I. Fleming<\/strong> in \u201cPublishing Music by Subscription,\u201d will capture music historians with new attention to the concerti of Charles Avison. The collection closes with Emily Friedman<\/strong>\u2019s Afterword on “Cleansing Dirty Data: Toward Open-Source Histories of the Novel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reviewer’s single disappointment with Baird’s collection is its omission of some serious contexts. While the content coverage is interesting and original, specialists will miss dedicated engagement with the most representative voices of the Enlightenment: Descartes, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire; likewise, Gibbon, Hume, Locke, and Newton.<\/em> Is this not the promise of the book\u2019s title? And in the best of all possible worlds, Baird\u2019s new book would have included a preface by that Da Vinci of design, that Galileo of graphics: Edward Tufte<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, while data visualization has been common practice for decades in economics, finance, medicine, and, of course, statistics, Baird\u2019s ambitious book is entirely innovative for scholars of pre-1800 literature and culture. Her collection of essays valuably introduces eighteenth-century specialists \u2014 likewise, graduate students, PhD advisers, curriculum designers \u2014 to the theory and practice of this new approach. As Baird and the contributors show, scholarly argument and presentation can now be enhanced through creative graphical images. A line of inquiry can be illustrated by a researcher, then grasped almost immediately by the reader. (Note this prescient essay<\/a> by the reviewer in 1993.) Scholarship is effectively transformed from word to word-with<\/em>-image: a functional pairing. Researchers can be released from the constraints of conventional exposition by creating datasets of research and moving that data into the visual medium. We have here a further development in Digital Humanities: data visualization effectively takes Digital Humanities to a more technically advanced level. It also gives scholars a new (visual) rhetoric in constructing arguments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maureen E. Mulvihill, Princeton Research Forum, New Jersey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For their contribution, the author acknowledges Daniel R. Harris, Brooklyn, NY \/ Sarasota, FL.; Karen M. Reeds, Princeton Research Forum, NJ; Linde M. Brocato, Special Collections Cataloger, University of Miami, FL; and her editor at SHARP News<\/em>, Nora Slonimsky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over ten finely documented and illustrated chapters, Ileana Baird and her twelve contributing writers offer scholars of the long eighteenth century (1660-c1800) a timely high-tech methodology:\u00a0 graphical conveyance of information. Baird\u2019s new book, Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture (2022), demonstrates the utility of content imaging. Baird and her writers have constructed datasets of research on selected topics in visually accessible designs: graphs, tables, figures, tabulations, charts, clustering, topic modeling, network graphs, data mapping,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888,1887],"tags":[1895,1923,1930,1937],"class_list":["post-3506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-18th-century","tag-digital-humanities","tag-europe","tag-literature"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506","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=3506"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6938,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions\/6938"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}