Haptic Texts: Connecting through Media in the Eighteenth Century

Descrizione del progetto

Quando le idee diventavano virali sulla carta

Molto prima dei meme e dei retweet, le idee diventavano virali sulla carta. Nel XVIII secolo, i periodici stampati diffusero commenti politici e sociali in tutto il mondo anglofono. Tuttavia, gli storici hanno solo scalfito la superficie del modo in cui questi media hanno plasmato il pensiero pubblico. Sostenuto dal programma di azioni Marie Skłodowska-Curie, il progetto HAPTEXT si immerge in questo iniziale ecosistema di informazioni. Combinando la lettura ravvicinata con gli strumenti digitali, il progetto traccia il modo in cui le idee radicali sono passate tra i titoli e i lettori, spesso sfuggendo al controllo degli autori. HAPTEXT sta anche costruendo il primo database bibliografico dei periodici, rivelando come i lettori abbiano annotato, rimodellato e amplificato i contenuti, creando una rete mediatica di epoca illuminista che è più moderna di quanto pensiamo.

Obiettivo

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.