Eighteenth Century Collections Online Research Articles

OCR quality and the resilience of algorithmic identification of linguistic register features in Eighteenth Century Collections Online

OCR quality and the resilience of algorithmic identification of linguistic register features in Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Capitalism and the return on capital employed. Some further evidence

Return on capital employed is recognised both as a symbol of capitalism and as a calculation designed to help achieve the more effective deployment of available resources. Dating the emergence of this ‘accounting signature’ has been the subject of vigorous debate. Rob Bryer believes that calculation of the return on capital employed played a meaningful role in business life from the eighteenth century onwards whereas Steven Toms (2006, p. 206) finds scant evidence of the existence of this emblem of a capitalist mentality until ‘much later’. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate based on the contents of the Spencer Stanhope archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and UK Parliamentary Papers.

Results from rough data? The large-scale study of early modern historiography with multi-dimensional register analysis


 
 
 Multi-dimensional register analysis is a methodology which can be used to extract functional dimensions from a set of texts. These dimensions describe various functional differences between the set of texts. The differences can be due to various situational constraints related to the production of the text, or they can be related to differences in the author’s intent and communicative purpose. While this methodology has seen considerable use in contemporary linguistics, it has been less used in historical linguistics, and even less so in history, even though the ability to differentiate between various textual functions in historical data would be extremely useful and interesting from the point of view of a historian. In this paper, we perform a pilot study of multi-dimensional register analysis on a subset of texts from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). In particular, our goal is to find out whether this kind of analysis is possible in the first place, or if it is hindered too much to be useful by the low quality of the ECCO data produced by optical character recognition (OCR). To do this, we first perform the analysis on ECCO data, after which we compare the results with results from running the same analysis on the same set of texts from ECCO-TCP, a manually cleaned subset of ECCO data. Our results show that not only are the results from the ECCO analysis interpretable, but they are also highly similar with the results from ECCO-TCP. Multi-dimensional register analysis appears to be a very promising and robust method which can work well even with low-quality data.
 
 

Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications

The Reception Reader is a web tool for studying text reuse in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) data. Users can: 1) explore a visual overview of the reception of a work, or its incoming connections, across time based on shared text segments, 2) interactively survey the details of connected documents, and 3) examine the context of reused text for "close reading". We show examples of how the tool streamlines research and exploration tasks, and discuss the utility and limitations of the user interface along with its current data sources.

From Manual to Digital: Women's Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Digital resources like the HathiTrust Digital Library, Early English Books Online, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online are increasingly central to humanities scholarship, a trend that has only accelerated as academic jobs disappear, institutional budgets tighten, and an ongoing global pandemic limits travel and access to archives. These electronic resources are not simply a panacea in precarious times, however; they are the product of a global information economy that depends on uncredited, invisible, and underpaid labor. The academic humanities are complicit in exploiting and erasing these technology workers, as a growing body of investigative research has shown. This essay contributes a new case study of an offshore outsourcing project commissioned by and for eighteenth-century scholars: the digitization of The London Stage, 1660–1800 by China Data Systems Corporation in 1970. That electronic transcription, which continues to underpin the present-day London Stage Database, was performed by women keypunchers whose labor was systematically feminized, racialized, and devalued in advertisements and corporate media. Drawing connections to the rhetoric around projects like Google Books and the Text Creation Partnership today, I highlight the recurrent figure of the hand and its vexed role in policing the boundaries between agential and alienated labor. Turning to the period that gave rise to contemporary understandings of intellectual property, I conclude by examining a receipt recording three copyright sales between Susanna Centlivre and Edmund Curll. In this ephemeral manuscript, I find a story richly suggestive of how we might reimagine scholarly labor and knowledge work in our moment of technocapitalism.

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Distinguishing Discourses

A key feature of the Enlightenment is the development of a discourse on commerce and economy entangled in larger discussions around politics, morality, and progress. Importantly, this debate was not formalised in the way it may be seen today. Instead, it was an emerging subject incorporating diverse and contested ideas. The objective of this case study, then, is to use various methods to identify the boundaries of these emerging economic, political, and moral disquisitions in a data-driven way, using a unified version of the metadata (e.g. publisher, publication year, format of the print product) of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and full texts of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). We approach the task iteratively, first making a separation between broadly defined economic documents and other eighteenth century documents by modeling the features which separate samples from two collections of historical economic texts from the wider ECCO data. Then, based on the previous step, we distinguish works similar to Hume’s Political Discourses (a text at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment) from other branches of commercial and economic discourse, and analyse this set of works in more detail. We also experiment on how a purely unsupervised approach – a contextualized topic model using BERT encodings – groups our set of economic texts. Previous historical scholarship has taken the perspective that we ought to identify language use from large corpora of text. The aim has been to contextually understand language from the perspective of a particular group of historical actors or, as is the case with conceptual historians, detect contested and changing concepts. Our approach is different in that we closely link language use to the material and historical circumstances of the individual texts within which these uses can be found. Essentially, we combine computation and social network analysis with the study of changing concepts and word uses over time, taking individual editions rather than language abstracted from them as the basic object of study. This approach allows us to identify additional contextually relevant works by both their linguistic features, and the material and network history of their production. Jointly, the combination of iterative data-driven discourse detection and the focus on manifested editions allows us not only to extract a significant proportion of the debates forming the Scottish Enlightenment in a data-driven manner, but to link them to the social networks and commercial context in which they were produced and in which they evolved. Thus, this approach allows us to evaluate the existence, scope, and contexts of historical discourses (in this case, economic discourse) in the eighteenth century in a way which is both computationally state-of-the-art and relevant to historical practices and interests. It also demonstrates how data-driven analysis and the traditional hermeneutic approach can be combined to study meanings and their changes over time.

Reflections

In my recent history of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the case study of Patrick Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (1756, 1789) focuses on bibliography and technology to illuminate a story of remediation. The case study was silent, however, on how this book was imbricated in the system of Atlantic enslavement and colonialism. My Reflections essay attempts to redress this erasure by recognizing that the field of eighteenth-century studies is entangled within the legacies of global colonialism and by drawing on anti-racist and decolonial reading strategies. This essay intersects with postcolonial and decolonial approaches to digital humanities, book history, and the archives of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic. It traces the routes across time and place of two book copies, connecting biography, provenance, archives, the violent histories of place and geography, the neo-colonial conditions of digital publishing and technology, and the contexts of power and privilege of my own situation as a white scholar.

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee Helen Hunt (bio) In 1797, a recent Harvard graduate named Charles Prentiss published what might be the first collection of American short stories: The American Bee: A Collection of Entertaining Histories, Selected from Different Authors and Calculated for Amusement and Instruction. Taken together, the stories in The American Bee endorse an antiauthoritarian outlook promoting women’s self-determination, sexual and otherwise, and encouraging men to resist the tyranny that underlies patriarchal ideals. Two texts in this already radical collection, one with American authorship, celebrate decidedly queer bonds for both men and women. While a modern reader might expect that such a collection would not have had a mainstream literary readership, Prentiss specifically marketed the works he published to the friends he had made during his time at Harvard. He must have believed that the antiauthoritarian message of The American Bee would appeal to this network of educated, like-minded, elite young men scattered across New England and the mid-Atlantic. Surprisingly, The American Bee’s queer stories seem to have occupied the center, not the neglected margins, of New England literary culture as Prentiss imagined it. Prentiss’s privileged family history is another reason a reader might be surprised to see antipatriarchal and queer themes featured in his work. He grew up in a New England family that had gained enough prominence for C. J. F Binney to write its biography in 1852.1 His father was a minister, and his brother-in-law was a New Hampshire congressman. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1795 and that same year married Sophia Gardner of Leominster, herself a minister’s daughter from a well-connected family, and they settled there. Prentis turned down a career in law to pursue life as an author, editor, [End Page 1] and publisher of both literary and political works. He published The American Bee early in his career, in 1797, right after he and his brother stopped printing the Rural Repositor, of which, according to Binney, “about one hundred of his old college friends were subscribers, as he was a favorite with them.’”2 Prentiss only remained in New England for a short time; in 1799, he moved to Georgetown, after which he worked in Baltimore until he left to tour Europe in 1804. After his return, he worked as a printer and author in Virginia, Maryland, DC, and Massachusetts. He died in 1820 at age forty-six.3 Turning down a legal career to become an itinerant printer was a risky choice that meant Prentiss traded stability and prestige for financial risk and social obscurity. Many printers faced bankruptcy after the Revolutionary War, and most magazines lasted for just a few years. Consequently, Prentiss must have had an excellent reason to take this chance; his decision testifies to his personal investment in literature, as he consciously worked to ensure that US belles lettres made space for women’s sexual self-determination and same-sex relationships as alternatives to heterosexual marriage. While Prentiss’s family history has attracted scholarly attention, his literary productions have not. The American Bee is rarely read; it is never mentioned in histories of US fiction; and it is the subject of only one scholarly article.4 It is a surprisingly accessible text, since a transcription is available for free through the Evans Early American Imprints Text Creation Partnership, and the Evans Digital Edition and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online houses facsimile pages. Nonetheless, The American Bee has suffered the same neglect as nearly all of the short fiction published before 1820 and of the many compilations of stories published after that, even though “between 1820 and 1845, compilations containing huge amounts of short fiction formed twenty-nine percent of the literary market.”5 As Jared Gardner demonstrates, the emphasis on a unique American vernacular style has privileged individual genius and exceptional Americanness in a way that systematically detracts from the transatlantic tradition of the periodical and has led to the critical neglect of magazines and the short fiction that populates their pages.6 The American Bee certainly participates in this transatlantic exchange in a way that troubles a simple...

The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe. 5 vols. Stephen Bernard, General Editor. Vol. 1: The Early Plays, ed. Rebecca Bullard and John McTague; Vol. 2: The Middle Period Plays, ed. Michael Caines; Vol. 3: The Late Plays, ed. Claudine van Hensbergen; Vol. 4: Poems, ed. Stephen Bernard, and Lucan’s Pharsalia (I–III), ed. Robin Sowerby; Vol. 5: Lucan’s Pharsalia (IV–X)

<i>The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe</i>. 5 vols. Stephen Bernard, General Editor. Vol. 1: <i>The Early Plays</i>, ed. Rebecca Bullard and John McTague; Vol. 2: <i>The Middle Period Plays</i>, ed. Michael Caines; Vol. 3: <i>The Late Plays</i>, ed. Claudine van Hensbergen; Vol. 4: <i>Poems</i>, ed. Stephen Bernard, and <i>Lucan’s Pharsalia</i> (I–III), ed. Robin Sowerby; Vol. 5: <i>Lucan’s Pharsalia</i> (IV–X)

The common cosmopolitan reading culture of eighteenth-century Europe and North America: new digital perspectives

This article uses a range of digital historical bibliometric resources to explore how far it is possible to speak of a common reading culture across Western Europe and North America in the later eighteenth century. It looks at the holdings and borrowing records of British and North American libraries and edition count data drawn from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and the English Short Title Catalogue and compares them with French and Swiss evidence drawn from the publishing records of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, Parisian stock sale and confiscation records, and records of print runs and provincial legalisations of counterfeit stock. From this preliminary survey, the article suggests that there was a strong enough overlap between elite reading of novels, travel literature, and history to suggest that Britain and English-speaking North America shared a common reading culture with much of Western Europe. Further research in coming years is expected to flesh out and clarify this picture.

What is a computational emotion?

ABSTRACT Much recent work in cognitive science and psychology has rediscovered the James-Lange hypothesis, which grounds affect in physiological states and processes. This article complements such an approach in a very different manner, through the computational analysis of large historical datasets. Rather than focusing attention upon the singular affective body […]’. By so doing, it seeks to extend James’s theory of emotion across much larger temporal and spatial scales. Rather than focusing attention upon the singular affective body, I examine a much wider cultural body – the hundreds of thousands of texts collected under Eighteenth Century Collections Online – in order to demonstrate the changing discourse on physiological affect. Computational modelling, I demonstrate, enables us to extend scholarly attention beyond canonical texts so as to consider more obscured or miscellaneous literature, ranging from surgical journals to midwifery manuals. By focusing upon a series of key words and terms – ‘irritability’, ‘sensibility’, ‘mental emotion’ – I demonstrate that such overlooked material anticipated the James-Lange hypothesis in unsuspected ways. I conclude by making a number of speculative analogies between the distributed nature of computational enquiry, on the one hand, and the distributed nature of embodied feeling, on the other.

‘Beauty’ and the ‘Beautiful’: a Computational Analysis of the Company They Kept Across the Eighteenth-century Corpus

Abstract This article is a computational enquiry into the different ways in which two words, assumed to be central to the eighteenth-century concept of aesthetics, were used across that century. Using word co-association measures designed specifically for this study, I show the markedly different lexis that surrounded the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ in three decades of historical textual data from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Having demonstrated that these words were used in very different semantic contexts in the beginning, middle, and end of the century, the article presents semantic network diagrams which further demonstrate the distinctness of noun from adjective. I argue that while ‘beautiful’ is suspended in a semantic space that is recognizably aesthetic, ‘beauty’ is not. Furthermore, that which is deemed ‘beautiful,’ according to the evidence presented here, presents something of a challenge to received narratives of how the concept of aesthetics developed throughout the eighteenth century.

Corpus Linguistics and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is the most comprehensive dataset available in machine-readable form for eighteenth-century printed texts. It plays a crucial role in studies of eighteenth-century language and it has vast potential for corpus linguistics. At the same time, it is an unbalanced corpus that poses a series of different problems. The aim of this paper is to offer a general overview of ECCO for corpus linguistics by analysing, for example, its publication countries and languages. We will also analyse the role of the substantial number of reprints and new editions in the data, discuss genres and the estimates of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) quality. Our conclusion is that whereas ECCO provides a valuable source for corpus linguistics, scholars need to pay attention to historical source criticism. We have highlighted key aspects that need to be taken into consideration when considering its possible uses.

Skim Reading, a Flat Canon, and the Question of Value

This short reflection considers how the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database has changed scholarship, sometimes for the worse. Through the example of a paper I wrote on the Pacific Northwest sea otter trade in Canada, I argue that more texts do not equal more knowledge. This essay suggests two positive ways digital resources can assist eighteenth-century studies: freetext searches of primary texts and humanities-based linked knowledge such as Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles.

Breaking the Book: Contrasting Paradigms of Print Culture

I opened Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015) (which, paradoxically, I read in digital form on a smartphone) with a lot of anticipation. Laura Mandell is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, and an enthusiastic pioneer and advocate of digital collections such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for studying early English texts. Therefore, I expected this book to have insights into how digital texts differed from print, and how academic discourse can make effective use of digital resources, for example to analyse texts. What the book contains, however, is much different. Rather than being an assessment of digital texts, Breaking the Book is much more ambitious: it emphasises changes in print culture for much of the book, only considering digital publishing towards the end. Mandell asks, “how does the book machine work,” by looking at the history of the printed book. The book concludes with a manifesto for print humanities – not, in fact, a manifesto for digital humanities at all, but a claim for how digital print can transform “the book machine.” Nonetheless, a reader will see this book more as a contribution to the history of the printed word than a study of digital humanities.

The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula

The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula Deanna P. Koretsky (bio) I am fortunate to teach at an institution that encourages students to read against the grain of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal power structures that built, and that continue to inform, most Western academic disciplines.1 Spelman College, a historically Black college for women, emphasizes the critical study of what much of the Western academy still calls difference or otherness as an essential component of all students' education, regardless of personal background or intended course of study. In their first year at Spelman, all students take a two-semester course called African Diaspora and the World, which trains them to read their studies and their lives through the lenses of critical race theory, feminist theory, and African diaspora studies. By the time they step into my classroom, they have already been introduced to the critical vocabulary necessary for thinking about who and what is left out of a field like eighteenth-century British literature. My teaching invites students to think with me—with us—about the dis/function of disciplinary boundaries and why moving toward decolonial academic practices requires more than simply adding writers of color to our syllabi.2 Expanding our canons is crucial, but this can quickly amount to tokenism if we do not also create opportunities for students to understand [End Page 151] why—beyond empty neoliberal rhetorics of diversity and inclusion—these expansions matter. As Achille Mbembe has argued, decolonial efforts must reach beyond content knowledge, to the very notion of knowledge itself, because Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim detachment of the known from the knower. … They are traditions in which the knowing subject is enclosed in itself and peeks out at a world of objects and produces supposedly objective knowledge of those objects. The knowing subject is thus able to know the world without being part of that world and he or she is by all accounts able to produce knowledge that is supposed to be universal and independent of context.3 A decolonial teaching practice requires us to acknowledge our necessarily subjective, always partial, inherently biased position in the world. Further, it necessitates laying bare the methods by which we arrive at certain types of knowledge. To that end, I ask students to engage with the raw materials that, in many Western educational contexts, continue to be regarded as foundational for understanding historical periods: I send them into archives. In my introductory survey of eighteenth-century British literature, students complete a semester-long research project in which they use physical or digital archives (such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online [ECCO] or the open-access Internet Archive) to curate their own online collections around topics of their choosing. Toward the end of the semester, they share their projects, and we spend the last few weeks of the course discussing whether and how their findings reframe the primary and secondary materials that we had been reading together all semester. What inevitably emerges is a conversation about how lack of representation at the scholarly level trickles down into broader cultural perceptions and value patterns. Producing these projects in the form of a website underscores the stakes of this type of inquiry: publishing their work online makes students active participants in framing how anyone with an Internet connection can potentially encounter a long-whitewashed literary past. The expectation is not that students will make some groundbreaking discovery, though many do begin their research hoping for such a find. Most hit the obvious road blocks and have to recalibrate. But instead of completely changing their plans, I ask them to sit with the obstacles and find new ways into their original research questions. And this is actually the lesson: at some point, almost all students find themselves grappling with the ideologies that underwrite cultural preservation and academic knowledge production. Ultimately, my goal is to encourage students to think about how [End Page 152] such seemingly neutral concepts as "knowledge" and "history" function as instruments of larger power structures that can be interrogated and transformed.4 I invite students to become aware of how historical knowledges are constructed by engaging and, if necessary, questioning...

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr

Reviewed by: Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr Emily C. Friedman Leah Orr, Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2017. Pp. viii + 336. $45. I will be deeply disappointed if Orr's work does not inspire imitators. She begins with the premise that, when confronted with the "complex and messy" collection of fiction in the early eighteenth century, rather than choose to eliminate chaos by selecting a handful of texts and forcing a progressive and linear "rise," we should instead approach the corpus of fictions "without predetermined conclusions" because "their values may baffle us, but that does not make them less valid." Of course, it is worth noting that assessing what counts as fiction in a period of generic slipperiness is easier said than done, as Orr herself notes: "How do we study fiction in a world that seldom distinguished fact from fiction, new from old, original from translation?" Her corpus, which consists of "nearly five hundred separate works of fiction printed in England between 1690 and 1730" is, as she notes, a task only truly achievable in a time when the bibliographies of fiction and the English Short Title Catalogue can be brought to bear on the digital corpora of Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Orr adds to that sum a valuable appendix of over two dozen works of fiction not included in McBurney's Checklist of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739. She considers both printed works newly published in the period and reprints, providing a rich sense of the works available in the marketplace. Published fiction, she argues, was so disconnected from the notion of "serious" literature that it provides [End Page 192] "greater insight into the business side of the literary production than other forms of writing do." It is worth noting that these parameters cannot wholly account for earlier texts encountered in private collections or via manuscript circulation, which was still a viable mode for text transmission. And while an easy answer would be that such forms of circulation were too exclusive to be considered alongside the prose fiction corpus in print, Orr's own findings about the nature of the fiction marketplace reject such a simplification. These correctives about "common knowledge" are one of the most important contributions of this monograph. She also provides useful correctives and compelling arguments for claims that the fiction marketplace was much smaller than previously assumed, that chapbook readers "would have to have reading skills at least as good as a reader of a simple amorous tale," that "many works of fiction were anonymous because readers were not concerned with who wrote them, and authors were not trying to make a reputation for themselves by writing fiction." Her description of her focus as on "texts, booksellers, and readers" belies her primary engagement with textual apparatus—in many cases the primary resource for evidence about the latter two categories. Orr notes that the barriers to accessing texts are "no longer a problem" which is largely true, though it is a claim that deserves (at least) two caveats: (1) the majority of the digital surrogates used to fuel this work are held by proprietary databases; and (2) the category of "surviving texts" is an incredibly important qualifier. These of course do not undercut in any way the contribution of Orr's work here: it is as comprehensive as possible, and I look forward to her data being fruitfully joined to complementary work in the future. Because so much of Orr's work seems ripe for extension by scholars working on other genres or other periods, I find myself wishing there were a way truly to see her method and her data—admittedly an impossibility within the constraints of the monograph form. Her thirteen tables are a tantalizing snapshot of the hard-won, and largely invisible, labor of building controlled vocabularies and imposing taxonomies on a wildly variable corpus. What Orr does with this substantial corpus is nevertheless useful: analyzing and enumerating genre term strategy in title pages and advertisements and rethinking our existing categories and taxonomies. Her observations on her novel...

What Is the History of the Book?

What Is the History of the Book?

Quantifying the impact of dirty OCR on historical text analysis: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study

AbstractThis article aims to quantify the impact optical character recognition (OCR) has on the quantitative analysis of historical documents. Using Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study, we first explore and explain the differences between the OCR corpus and its keyed-in counterpart, created by the Text Creation Partnership. We then conduct a series of specific analyses common to the digital humanities: topic modelling, authorship attribution, collocation analysis, and vector space modelling. The article concludes by offering some preliminary thoughts on how these conclusions can be applied to other datasets, by reflecting on the potential for predicting the quality of OCR where no ground-truth exists.