Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas
Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas
What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'government' using digital humanities approaches to large scale text data sets. It sets out the methodologies and tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab as exemplifications of how new digital methods can open up the history of ideas to heretofore unseen avenues of enquiry and evidence. By applying text mining techniques to intellectual history or the history of concepts, this book explains how computational approaches to text mining can substantially increase the power of our understanding of ideas in history.
- Provides intellectual historians with some new methods and exemplary approaches
- Engages with quantitative and computational methods for text mining
- Offers exemplary methods and techniques for a digital history of ideas which will enable scholars working on any period to engage with new computational approaches to the history of ideas
Product details
April 2025Paperback
9781009263603
310 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from March 2025
Table of Contents
- Part I. Computational Methodologies for the History of Ideas:
- 1. Introduction Peter de Bolla
- 2. Distributional Concept Analysis and the Digital History of Ideas Peter de Bolla, Ewan Jones, Paul Nulty, Gabriel Recchia and John Regan
- 3. Operationalizing Conceptual Structure Paul Nulty
- Part II. Case Studies in the Digital History of Ideas:
- 4. The Idea of Liberty, 1600-1800 Peter de Bolla, Ewan Jones, Paul Nulty, Gabriel Recchia and John Regan
- 5. The Idea of Government in the British Eighteenth Century Peter de Bolla, Ewan Jones, Paul Nulty, Gabriel Recchia and John Regan
- 6. Republicanism in the Founding of America Peter de Bolla
- 7. Enlightenment Entanglements of Improvement and Growth Peter de Bolla, Ryan Heuser and Mark Algee-Hewitt
- 8. The Idea of Commercial Society: Changing Contexts and Scales John Regan
- 9. The Age of Irritability Ewan Jones and Natalie Roxburgh
- 10. On Bubbles and Bubbling: The Idea of 'The South Sea Bubble' Claire Wilkinson
- 11. Embedded Ideas: Revolutionary Theory and Political Science in the Eighteenth Century Mark Algee-Hewitt
- 12. Computing Koselleck: Modeling Semantic Revolutions, 1720-1960 Ryan Heuser.
