Online event, 14 December 2020, 4-5pm.

See here for more information: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/events/dhlboro-talk-the-role-of-maps-in-the-digital-humanities.html

Mark Hill (University of Kent) spoke ONLINE for Loughborough University's Digital Humanities Research Group on 29th October 2021, 1-2pm via MS Teams.

Bio: Mark J. Hill is Lecturer in Computational Social Science at the University of Kent. His research interests cover the intersection between Digital Humanities and Intellectual History with a focus on the robust methodological application of the former onto the latter. His current research project reconstructs and examines historical social networks with an aim to better understand their dynamic role in political change.

Title: Identifying and Tracking Ideas Across Historical Communities: A Quantitative Analysis of Early Modern Quaker Networks

Abstract: This paper makes use of social network analysis and quantitative text analysis to identify discursive historical communities. In doing so it demonstrates how written works had distinct linguistic features tied to specific historical groups – even when topics and themes between groups were similar.

This is done by offering an overview of the emergence, division, and ossification of various Nonconformist religious groups over the seventeenth century using networks extracted from a modified version of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) enriched with full-text extracted from Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). With these networks constructed, linguistic features which both unite members, and differentiate communities, are extracted. This allows for one to recognize historically contextual group features in their religious language, information which can be used to compare groups both intra-community and diachronically.

In doing this the paper focuses on the emergence of Quakerism in mid-seventeenth century London as a discrete theological grouping when compared to other Nonconformists. Religious groups, in this case, are particularly interesting due to a superficially shared lexicon – for example, “sin” can have radically different connotation depending on a group’s particular theological beliefs. By identifying the distinctions between these groups one is able to demonstrate both the uses of these methods in terms of coming to better understand these historical works through a more detailed understanding of the language used, and highlight how the transmission of ideas – communication with and between out-groups – could be problematic due to the distinct meanings found in a shared language.