This session grew from the Fall 2022 Gale-ASECS Nonresidential Fellowship in the Digital Humanities: all three presenters were fellows who used digital humanities methodologies on long eighteenth-century projects; the respondent, Roger Strong, brings Gale-Cengage Group’s technical expertise with digital tools and database technologies. The papers are unified in terms of methodology: each uses the Gale Digital Scholar Lab to apply tools like N-Grams, Topic Modelling, Sentiment Analysis, and Named Entity Recognition to databases such as ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). The panel is thus meant to showcase three different projects using similar methodologies and to consider how large volumes of text can be treated as data for the purpose of drawing new conclusions about them. The connections among the papers do not stop here. Each tracks a corpus of eighteenth-century writing to discover more about an important category or rather a linkage or overlap between two important categories: first, attendees will hear about disability in relation to writing and communication; second, about violence in relation to masculinity and law; third, about gender and sensibility. In each of these cases, the panelists have determined and will be arguing that a new perspective on their chosen areas was made possible by a reexamination of the material through a digital lens. As such, the presentations will be split between showcasing research results and making concrete arguments, hoping to demonstrate that yes, digital methodologies are capable of creating new knowledge.

Jared Richman will open by pointing out that some scholars have suggested that “disability” was not a viable category for identity and embodiment in the eighteenth century (with the term not achieving its modern definition until the middle of the nineteenth). However, the fact that “disability” was not so much a settled category does not indicate a lack of disability representation in early modern texts – far from it. Richman explores how writers in eighteenth-century Britain deployed a complex web of linguistic and typographical strategies to represent and politicize disfluency and non-normative speech. Because it was marked by an explosion in print culture, the period took a keen interest in various modalities of speech and other forms of communication (including vocalization, image, text, and gesture). Using data collected through Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab, this paper will trace the presence of disfluency in the textual archive to illustrate the deepening cultural awareness and concern over vocality and elocution in response to the era’s anxieties over deformity, illness, and disability.

Then, Adam Kozaczka will explore how dueling appears across works by Frances Burney, Mariah Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Walter Scott—it is condemned as a practice yet the threat of gentlemanly violence often preserves gentlemanliness, as in Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) which though an outspokenly anti-dueling novel still relies on a sympathetic character threatening a duel to achieve the novel’s happy ending. Similar situations occur in the other novels. It is almost as if these authors followed Bernard Mandeville’s age-old suggestion that a society of duelists is a polite society, where the threat of honorable violence keeps men on their best behavior in public. Periodicals and treatises tell a very different story: using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab to examine ECCO (eighteenth-century collections online) among other databases, a distinct and religion-driven anti-dueling discourse takes shape. This paper explores the tension between fiction’s quiet tolerance of dueling and the periodical press’s outspoken condemnation of it, considering this tension in light of major legal debates about personal combat—does it produce murder, manslaughter, or merely chance medley, a Norman-derived term for accidental death?

Finally, Heather Heckman-McKenna’s original database is the first to study sensibility through the lens of the subversive female body. The database tracks the number of actions of sensibility (such as trembling, fainting, blushing, etc.) in texts of the period and allows researchers to perform a combination of close and distant reading to consider how sensibility was used in the period. This paper will show the database at work and will describe some new findings. This work illuminates how women writers explored the potential power of feminized bodily responses in literature of the period. It also operates as a feminist recovery project, charts women’s agency over time, and maps a feminist progression into the twenty-first century. The project supported by this database moves us forward in understanding subversive bodily actions and traces the pre-history of modern feminism.

Roger Strong will respond to all three papers, citing his technical expertise in the digital humanities and providing a broader perspective on the digital tools and comprehensive databases that Gale-Cengage group provides.