Women Writers Project

By Caterina Agostini This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the July 2019 Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. For more information on the seminar, see here.  Corpus, Methods, and Guidelines The objects of my research are scientific thinking, language, and modes of communication from 1543 to the 1630s, when astronomer Copernicus, physician Vesalius, scientist Galileo, and numerous others published texts which, from a modern perspective, mark the starting point of…

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One of the interesting intersections of digital humanities scholarship and library science is the use and description of archival records. With the increase of digital materials and information comes a proliferation of digital records and corresponding data. As scholars continue to understand the ways text as data can be conceptualized, defined, quantified, and visualized in the humanities, textual records and metadata are similar topics of recent scholarship. In “The Reconfiguration of the Archive as Data to Be Mined,” Michael Moss,…

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Giants were a serious problem for early modern British historians. For example, in a chapter titled “Whether it be likely that there were ever any Gyaunts inhabiting in this Isle or not” from his “Historical Description of the Island of Britain,” William Harrison offers a lengthy meditation on the historical plausibility of giants, arguing against the idea that the presence of fables in a nation’s historical record should irredeemably discredit that nation’s history. Harrison writes that to “some mens eares,”…

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