Project description
When ideas went viral on paper
Long before memes and retweets, ideas went viral on paper. In the 18th century, printed periodicals spread political and social commentary across the anglophone world. Yet historians have only scratched the surface of how this media shaped public thought. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the HAPTEXT project dives into this early information ecosystem. Combining close reading with digital tools, the project traces how radical ideas jumped between titles and readers, often escaping authorial control. HAPTEXT is also building the first bibliographic database of periodicals, revealing how readers annotated, reshaped and amplified content, creating an Enlightenment-era media network that is more modern than we think.
Objective
The project, HAPTEXT, examines how periodicals - texts printed at routine intervals - circulated to create the first age of 'viral' media in the eighteenth century. Within the anglophone world, periodicals have long been recognised as a vital source of information on political, social and economic matters in a period heralded as the Age of Enlightenment. Yet periodicals are yet to be fully integrated into cultural studies of the eighteenth century and there has been no systematic study of how information circulated across titles to reach wider audiences, or how readers actively responded to public papers by annotating the printed page or writing letters for publication. The project objectives are to:
1. Establish a new methodology for periodical studies that reveals how individual readers interacted with periodicals
2. Demonstrate how content escaped the control of its authors, being remediated and transmediated to reach new audiences
3. Reveal how radical ideas circulated between publications and between readers via the periodical
4. Build the first bibliographic database dedicated to locating periodical publications
Using close textual analysis, computational history and corpus linguistics, HAPTEXT reveals how interactions with and upon the printed page intersected with literary endeavour to produce viral media. The anglophone context provides a rich cache of material for study, revealing the changing priorities and anxieties of an island nation in an increased age of globalisation and period of colonial wars (American and French Revolution, Napoleonic War).
Through this Fellowship, the researcher, Dr Jennifer Buckley, will develop the training, high-impact dissemination, and experience commensurate with a leading researcher of her career stage. The researcher will be based in the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, and supervised by Prof. Matthew Sangster, a leading expert in Book History, authorship and Digital Humanities.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities languages and literature linguistics
- natural sciences computer and information sciences databases
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
- social sciences other social sciences development studies development theories global development studies globalization
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
G12 8QQ Glasgow
United Kingdom
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