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What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? This book explains how computational approaches to text mining can substantially increase the power of our understanding of ideas in history.
List 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.
About the author
Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge. His publications include The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (Fordham University Press, 2013), which won the Robert Lowry Patten Award in 2015. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Blackwell, 1989), Art Matters (Harvard, 2001), and The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth Century Britain (Stanford, 2003). He directed the Cambridge Concept Lab between 2013 and 2017, a £1.5m funded project on the structure of concepts. He is an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
