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Why a Single Year?
The Why?
The 1771 Project employs digital methods to clean, assemble, and compare texts published in 1771 in three cities: London, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia. We did this to offer a new and unique perspective on literary and cultural history, by providing a cross-sectional view of a single year’s historical events and publications across three cities. Reducing our scope to one year’s publications in three cities helps us organize our data by genre, author, printers, and so on. This kind of historical cross-cutting helps bring new insights to those books, their authors, their cities, and that year. This summer, the project team focused on 1771’s fictional texts, scanning and cleaning about 20+ novels to prepare them for digital analysis and comparison.
We will use this fictional sub-corpus, along with a project website and workflow documentation, to support continued ingestion of texts until every literary genre becomes available for comparison and analysis. These products will lead to a proof of concept and prototype for internal and external grant applications for the coming year. SIPH interns spent the summer learning how to craft and present a variety of data, which they combined with humanist readings of texts, genres, and authors’ biographies. Today you will hear Haian Hoang, Anisah Khan, and Reece Simmons described their roles in the process of distributing workflows, developing the website, and conducting text-cleaning in the 2024 SIPHDH Internship Showcase Presentation. So, if you’re wondering, “why study a single year?” the answer is, because picking any year, even a supposedly empty year like 1771, will reveal to an observer why 1771 is in fact the world’s most important year, at least from the perspective of 1772.
Our goal is to transform historical texts to resonate with modern audiences, re-present content to uncover hidden patterns and themes, identify overarching trends in genre and authorship, and discover new insights through fresh perspectives.
Transforming 1771 From an Empty Year to a Known Year with Collective Historical Memories
Novels were written by women and men as a literary escape from their realities. Many themes occurred while novel cleaning about romance, human nature, making a perfect government, and religion to name a few. However, the issue Dr. David Mazella recognized in previous scholarship of British Literature because he was dissatisfied with the inflexibility of conventional literary histories, which were usually organized around a single genre, a more or less familiar set of writers, and a nationally organized canon. These elements could readily be assembled into a developmental story whose chronological range coincided with an equally conventional epochal and national scope.
The team implemented an interdisciplinary approach combining the disciplines of Literature, History, and Digital Humanities to resolve the inflexibilities of literature being grouped by genre.
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