1771 Glossary

Can be directed towards groups or individuals. We chose the term “Addresses” to designate the varied forms of text produced when an individual or group addresses another on a matter of broader public or political concern. Their purposes can be persuasive (e.g., Letters/Addresses, Proposals, Dialogues, Speeches/Orations),  informative (Accounts, Proposals, Announcements/Broadsides/Proclamations) or some combination of the two. We opted for “address” rather than the more usual term of “pamphlet” to make sure readers could understand the enormous variety of forms and media used for this category.

It’s clear that both advertisements and the printing house were important pieces of business infrastructure on which commerce stood in this period, and so this category documents the trade that helped support the growth of the entire sector. Since this category contains only the standalone printing of individual catalogues or bills, advertisements will also be found to dominate the periodicals as well, in terms of their content as well as their business models.

Are words, grammar rules, and definitions that were commonly used in the past, but are rarely used today. Some examples from our texts in our data set are the pronouns "thou" and "thee" and the usage of "f" for "s".

Longstanding academic practices of “close reading,” which is a contrast to distant reading. The focus on brief, specific passages of individual literary works, have been joined by digital, often quantitative forms of “distant reading,” which focus on observation of much larger groups, or corpora, of texts. In what Goldstone labels the “close reading as genre,” “close reading is a re-reading aimed towards producing commentary in either spoken or written form.”

Refers to the presentation of the collected material that was recovered to counteract the over-representation of writings from particular groups that do not reflect a holistic image of the literary environment at that time (Grundy, Rosenthal).

The contrast to close reading with what Underwood, Rosen, and others have labeled “distant reading”. Which uses far greater numbers of texts to observe features at the level of statistical recurrence to produce its commentaries. This project’s focus on genres represents a “toggling back and forth” between the levels of close and distant reading (Rosen).

ESTC numbers are located in the English Short Title Catalogue database as assigned unique identifiers to pre-1801 printed works.

This term refers to the apparent lack of a familiar, epoch-defining political or historical event in the year 1771, whose relevance seems further diminished by landing between two major events in British history (the accession of George III in 1760 and the American War of Independence beginning in 1775).

According to John Frow, genres should be understood not as static categories, but as ways for human beings to “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world.” They organize “language, images, gestures, and sound” as a “form of symbolic action,” creating “effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility,” that help demarcate the specific, and divergent, ways the world is understood, in varied intellectual disciplines but also in specific forms of everyday language.

Frow’s study, because it assumes that genres are enacted socially and communicatively, in a situation where a specific use is chosen from existing possibilities, implicitly relies on a notion of genre system, a set of recognizable genres linked to particular situations and audiences, that shape a social actor’s communicative choices in a social context.

This is the term we arrived at to designate a particular perspective on the present, by suspending the retrospective or causal views of events that were inaccessible to participants at this moment. Suspending our knowledge of “what happens next” helps restore our sheer surprise at unforeseen crossing of paths, or constellations of incidents.

We have followed the RBMS’s practice of grouping together several narrative or descriptive prose categories under the rubric of “historical” texts. This category brings together three groups of what we would now call non-fictional prose genres: travel literature, histories of various topics, and biographies and autobiographies.

This compound term names the broad category of texts that, in the terms of the RBMS controlled vocabularies, contain “rules, guidelines, or instructions needed to perform tasks . . . “ and are intended to be used as a reference during their performance (q.v., “manual”). These books remained popular among readers aspiring to a more elevated level of vocational literacy, and their usefulness as a reference for further practice or development made them an important resource for readers of this class.

Because there was “no such thing as British law,” as Prest puts it, given the multiple, historically distinct legal systems in force in England, Scotland, and Ireland, not to mention the colonies, it is better to describe this category as encompassing “Lawyers’ books.”

We use the term ”infrastructures of literacy” to refer to “the more enduring social, material, and institutional infrastructures shaping local, regional, and urban print environments.”

From the perspective of genre, the broader categories of “literature” or “the literary,” along with their boundaries, have been under debate since at least the seventeenth century, and remained a central, if contested, term in our target year. Nevertheless, this “difficult word,” in Williams’s terms, takes on more historical specificity if we begin with a basic eighteenth-century notion of reading matter for those who read well and were therefore “well-read.” With the term’s further extension to “polite learning,” and then to “the practice and profession of writing,” including the notions of merit, reputation, and value, we find the genres contained here reflecting purposes of moral or intellectual improvement as well as diversion.

Data that provides more information about one or more aspects of data. It is often very descriptive and is used for discovery and identification. Some examples from our dataset are author's name, date of creation, and file format. 

Microhistory is a historical method that drastically reduces the scale of analysis and applies its findings to broader social contexts. Rather than addressing broad topics and historical events, microhistory narrows its focus to a single, often “insignificant,” happening—in our case, the year 1771. This method allows for a more detailed view of disadvantaged peoples, those who tend to be neglected in macrohistorical models.

Is the process of converting scanned images of text into electronic text that can be read by computer and other photoelectric devices. This makes it possible to use a text editor to edit, search, and find word count on an file.

For this category the dataset includes all serially printed and dated publications from the ESTC containing news and other matters of interest, which we further divided into newspaper and magazine genres (Tierney). Though there is much experimentation and overlap between the two both in form and content, newspapers are generally published more often, and contain proportionately more news, while magazines, often published monthly, contain large amounts of collected or borrowed materials.

Periodization refers to the process of dividing the past into qualitatively differentiated, chronologically defined categories (Cohen). British history, at least in literary studies, tends to bypass century divisions, and instead uses dynastic changes, major events like wars or revolutions, or longer epochs to designate its periods. Our project, for example, works with the “long eighteenth century.”

We coined the term, “print environment” as a companion concept to “genre system” to denote the characteristic mix of categories, genres, infrastructures, markets, and audiences available to writers, printers, and readers in a particular location.

The admittedly ad hoc formulation of puzzles/songs/jests was created by cobbling together three of the more popular genres of printed, non-narrative entertainment, songs and jokes (which sometimes take the form of riddles or quizzes). Both can be found in various collections or periodicals, but all use or assemble brief, popular, often anonymous, and formally and thematically diverse materials for solitary amusement or polite conversation.

Recovery, especially within feminist literary studies, refers to the intentional seeking out and ‘recovery’ of materials written by overlooked female authors or published in time periods glossed over in existing academic study.

Religious publications represent a dominant part of the writings in every location, though the differing ecclesiastical structures in each meant that the intended audiences and underlying beliefs differed more than the generic forms themselves which tended to be shared across most English-speaking settings, as for example with forms like sermons, hymns, or catechisms.

Rescribe is a desktop software that automates text cleaning using Tesseract, a popular OCR engine. This option saves time by processing your PDF files automatically.

The compound category of “scientific/scholarly/critical” texts brings together works studying the natural world and its governing laws (medicine, botany, agriculture, natural history, exploration, geography, as well as mathematics, geometry, algebra, etc), along with studies of human history, behavior, artifacts and forms (antiquities, art/architecture, language/criticism, government etc).

Like the microhistory, the single-year, or annualized, genre of history has attracted a number of historians and literary scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries, most famously Hans Gumbrecht, James Chandler, and Michael North, chiefly because of its ability to model both simultaneous and geographically dispersed events in historical accounts. The choice of year, and whether to base it around a familiar or unfamiliar year, has a large yet unpredictable effect on the eventual shape and emphasis of the study.

Refining raw text data to prepare it for analysis by removing errors, inconsistencies, and irrelevant formatting.

Also known as Text Data Mining (TDM) is the process of extracting meaning from unstructured text data and transforming it into structured data to uncover patterns, trends, and further insight.  

One thing we discovered during the recursive category- and genre-assignment stage was that an initial stage of sorting, designed to represent general but distinct knowledge domains, like, e.g., “legal,” “religious,” or “literary,” made the second stage of specific genre assignments much easier to produce.