Datamining the Enlightenment through Secondary Sources: JSTOR, Dirty Quantification, and the Future of the Lit Review
Speaker(s): Dan Edelstein
The traditional lit review tends to focus on a selection of canonical authors and works, along with a sampling of lesser known (often more recent) references. But 鈥渢he literature鈥 shares with literature a common feature, namely a great unread. Thanks to interfaces such as JSTOR鈥檚 鈥淒ata for research,鈥 we can now apply some of the methods that scholars have adapted for the distant reading of literary texts to secondary sources. In this presentation, Professor Edelstein take the scholarship on the Enlightenment as a case-study for data-mining the lit review.
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Dan Edelstein, professor of French and, by courtesy, of History,听works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities. His books include听The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution听(winner of the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize) and听The Enlightenment: A Genealogy听(2010). He is deeply involved with Mapping the Republic of Letters,听a large-scale digital humanities project, one of whose primary aims is to map the correspondence networks of major intellectual figures.
Lunch provided; all are welcome
Sponsors: Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, 1660鈥1830, a 黑料百科 Humanities Center Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender; The French Culture Workshop
Contact: erikj09 [at] stanford.edu (erikj09[at]stanford[dot]edu)