Abstract
This chapter will investigate how the names of continents interacted across three historical periods of the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online corpus. Using a custom-designed measure of word co-association, it will make visible the associations between geographical designators in the early, middle and late century. Semantic network diagrams will visualise the often-surprising ways in which global place names and adjectives kept company within sentences in the historical corpus.
Because this study takes as its field of enquiry the whole of ECCO, what is being made visible is how knowledge about ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’, ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ among other domains, was structured in a common, non-individual sense. That is, the chapter will demonstrate how these place names associated in the vast, impersonal, aggregated repository of the historical corpus. ECCO is constituted of many thousands of written voices and no single voice can predominate. This chapter therefore will reconstruct the most-common ways in which the printed anglophone century understood relations between ‘Europe’ and its others.
Because this study takes as its field of enquiry the whole of ECCO, what is being made visible is how knowledge about ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’, ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ among other domains, was structured in a common, non-individual sense. That is, the chapter will demonstrate how these place names associated in the vast, impersonal, aggregated repository of the historical corpus. ECCO is constituted of many thousands of written voices and no single voice can predominate. This chapter therefore will reconstruct the most-common ways in which the printed anglophone century understood relations between ‘Europe’ and its others.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture |
Editors | Ileana Baird |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Chapter | 4 |
Pages | 121-151 |
Number of pages | 30 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-030-54912-1 |
Publication status | Published - 31 Mar 2021 |
Keywords
- Enlightenment
- EUROPE
- digital media
- Distant Reading
- distributional concept analysis
- other
- European
- 18th century
- Semantics