Reviewed by: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara. Review: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies It is something of a truism to claim that the web cannot be understood as the all-encompassing archive of human reality and knowledge. Omniscience is not the right attribute to describe the web. When viewed as a Hegelian totality that contains all there is, the internet inevitably fails to fulfil all standards. For this reason, it is more sensible, in conceptualising the nature of the digital world, to discard Hegel in favour of Kant with [End Page 175] his eighteenth-century conception of mind and reality. As a figurative technological brain, the internet does, obviously, offer some access to reality by encoding and decoding the world in all manner of computerised languages. However, its epistemic coverage cannot embrace it all: there are still countless layers of noumenal reality that lie beyond the reach of the digital, awaiting their potential computerisation. Access to those noumenal layers of knowledge has been one of the primary concerns in the burgeoning field of digital humanities (DH) in at least two senses. On the one hand, it is strikingly conspicuous that numerous textual realities of old remain "unprocessed" as "inaccessible materials,"1 thus calling for "new spaces for exploring humanity's cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmedia methods and genres of the digital present."2 Said otherwise, much as the internet has grown into a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, its reach still falls far short, leaving a whole horizon of uncharted textualities from the past. On the other hand, there is a further problem with the actual "accessibility of digital collections to both specialists and non-specialists alike."3 In multiple instances, old materials are rigorously processed, digitised, and made available in official repositories, yet their real availability is "marked by social and economic inequalities"4—with only a small number of subscribers having the prerogative to access and use them. For this reason, as Matthew Kirschenbaum rightly puts it, DH must work concertedly towards eliminating such inequalities and promoting "a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility."5 Coincidentally enough, around the same year 2010 when Kirschenbaum published his article arguing for more democratic DH projects with egalitarian accessibility, a new website called The 18th-Century Common came into existence in the very democratic spirit of sharing up-to-date research and general knowledge on the history and culture of the long eighteenth century with "nonacademic readers … in accessible, nonspecialized language." The website's name is in itself aptly eloquent and symbolic: it echoes the historical idea of common land, i.e., a hybrid estate of private ownership that is offered for public usufruct. Transformed into a "symbol of open access for shared benefit," the English common goes digital and becomes a cyberspace where the eighteenth century is epistemically accessible and available to anyone, whether academically affiliated or independent, who wishes to keep up to date with new scholarship on the early modern period. So far, this cyber-common land has been able to attract more than 1,400 subscribers who have signed up for any news stories uploaded to the website. The titular notion of common land that the webpage champions is aesthetically reinforced by the appropriate painting displayed on the background. It is a canvas held at the Yale Center for British Art, dated from 1748–50, and painted by the famous British artist Thomas Gainsborough. It shows, as its title indicates, a wooded landscape with a nearly camouflaged cottage, a resting shepherd, and a modest flock of sheep and goats. This simple ekphrasis may say little per se, but it entails a coherent symbolic meaning: Gainsborough's large landscape, together with the limitless horizon in the background of the painting, lends itself to being regarded as the open space, the shared ground, or the democratic land that the website plants and cultivates in order unrestrictedly to gather all kinds of users interested in the eighteenth century. In other words, the space opened by [End...
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Oct 25, 2022
Ercan Akı 
Open Access
