1,721,028 research outputs found
The FBTEE Revolution : mapping the Ancien Regime book trade and the future of historical bibliometric research
No full textI first began to question prevailing orthodoxies of eighteenth-century book history during my sojorns in Hell. For the uninitiated, Hell (Enfer) was the reading room of the old Bibliotheque nationale de France where scholars consulted banned books. It was there that I first encountered the rare pornographic libelles that luminaries of a previous generation of scholars had suggested ‘desacratized’ or fatally undermined the Ancien Regime monarchy
Introduction : digitizing enlightenment
No full textThis book charts the development of a set of remarkable and interrelated intellectual and digital projects that are transforming the way we view the history and culture of the eighteenth century. The featured projects include some of the best-known, most well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘Digital humanities’ (DH), 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, visualize and analyze relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways
Introduction
No full textThe question of relations between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century is currently arousing renewed interest among Enlightenment scholars. It is now widely realised that, as no country develops in isolation from those around it, the study of a country or linguistic zone needs to be situated in a wider context. The history of France or Britain, in particular, cannot be understood without taking into account the neighbour across the Channel. This is particularly true of a period when the Republic of Letters was more than a mere rhetorical flourish. The subject of French and British reactions to their
neighbour is of course not new, but contacts across the Channel at all levels at this time were more intense and varied than is generally realisecl. Follo-wing the pioneering studies of scholars such as Ascoli and Grieder, more recent work has attempted to go beyond generalisations about 'Anglomania' and look in closer detail at these interactions. Several publications and conferences have already been devoted to the question of intellectual exchanges, some concentrating on particular individuals or questions, while others have been wider in scope
The Chevalier d'Eon, media manipulation and the making of an eighteenth-century celebrity
No full text1he Chevalier d'Eon first honed his skills of media manipulation in his quarrel with the French ambassador to London, the Comte de Guerchy, in 1763-1764. He did so with such success that, by the end of their spat, d'Eon had become a household name among Europe's elite, while his allegations that Guerchy had conspired to kidnap and murder him were widely accepted by the British public and had given rise to a criminal prosecution against the ambassador. During the course of the dispute and his vitriolic press campaign against Guerchy, d'Eon learned to fabricate evidence and to mould his public identity. Thus the Guerchy affair laid the groundwork for d'Eon's later celebrity and manipulation of perceptions of his gender. It also provides a case study in the construction of celebrity status in the later eighteenth century
The Courier de l'Europe as an agent of cultural transfer (1776-1791)
No full textBenedict Anderson's work would seem to imply that, in general, the newspaper press will offer lean pickings for historians of cultural transfer. In Imagined communities, Anderson suggests that newspapers played a fundamental role in forging the (often xenophobic) nationalism of the nineteenth century by helping readers to envisage themselves as part of a national community linked and defined by a common and exclusive language and cultural values. This depiction suggests that the newspaper press acts primarily as a forum for national self-definition, rather than a bridge between cultures. As is so often the case, however, conditions before the watershed of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were very different to those which prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. In particular, many of the most prominent newspapers of the
pre-Revolutionary period were aimed at a pan-European elite audience conversant with the French language. Among these internationally orientated French-language gazettes was the Courier de l'Europe
Introduction
No full textCross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy, Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playvtrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. In 1763, a hostile writer predicted that d'Eon's memory would be associated with dishonour and scandal for both himself and France: 'Il outrage la France jusques dans les siecles a venir.'... Le Livre du Plenipotentiare [i.e. d'Eon's Lettres, mlimoires et nligociations] sera un monument eternel de Ia division des Ministres Francois ... Les Historiens diront que son administration etoit mauvaise ... que dans cette Cour tout etoit livre a la cabale eta la prevention. Les Annales d'Angleterre citeront ces endroits, pour ... le Tableau de la France sous le regne de Louis XV. Cest ainsi que le plus petit mortel deshonore souvent un grand Etat, et le fletrit jusques dans la derniere posterite. [He outrages France right up to centuries to come: ... The book of the Plenipotentiary will be an eternal monument to the division of French ministers ... Historians will say that its administration was bad ... that in that Court everything was given up to faction and prejudice.
The Annals of England will cite those places for ... the picture of France under the reign of Louis XV. This is how the smallest of mortals often dishonours a great State, and blackens it for the whole of posterity.
Afterword : the future of FBTEE : towards a digital history of the book
No full textSoon after the publication of the FBTEE-1. 0 database in June 2012, other scholars began to suggest it was a game-changing digital resource. According to Jeremy Caradonna, in a comparison with Stanford University’s much-discussed ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ digital project, FBTEE was ‘one of the best and most cutting-edge digital tools that historians of early modernity now possess. … [It brings the] historical profession into the age of interactive digital technologies and GIS. ’ Other accolades were similarly enthusiastic. Robert Darnton called the database and interface ‘a prodigious achievement and a joy to use’. The effusiveness of this praise came as a surprise. The FBTEE project was born of a set of tightly organized research questions: a database approach had been chosen because it appeared the best means to answer them. At the start of the project, we had not considered our approach particularly novel. Databases were by the mid-noughties a mature technology and widely used in commercial and research organisations. The discipline formerly known as ‘humanities computing’ had a long and illustrious pedigree. Even the term ‘Digital Humanities’ had been in use among practitioners since before the turn of the millennium
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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