Introduction: “Speaking to the Eyes”—Reassessing the Enlightenment in the Digital Age

This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. Addressing essential period-related themes—from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics—, this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its tenets in light of new data. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

Afterword: Novel Knowledge, or Cleansing Dirty Data: Toward Open-Source Histories of the Novel

This afterword discusses the most important, most under-rewarded, and most unsexy aspect of data visualization: the production and use of reliable underlying data. Starting from the premise that visualizations are only as good as their underlying evidentiary base, Freidman addresses the contributions of digital projects that have laid the foundation for such practices, including massive multi-institution projects like Orlando, mid-sized projects like The Early Novels Database (END), and the author’s own small-scale project, Manuscript Fiction in the Age of Print (MFAP). Following this assessment, the author proposes a set of guidelines for best practices in creating new data so that amendable, transformable visualizations can be produced, built on collective knowledge.

Outliers, Connectors, and Textual Periphery: John Dennis’s Social Network in The Dunciad in Four Books

This chapter uses social network analysis to visualize the fields of relations involving John Dennis, the most important critic of the first half of the eighteenth century, with the other protagonists in Alexander Pope’s satire, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). By using visualizations generated by GraphViz, a program that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and ShivaGraph, a tool that helps visualize large networks and navigate through them as through a map, this chapter brings to light data that is structurally embedded in the poem but not immediately legible given the large amount and complexity of information. In Dennis’s case, they reveal the competing stories told by the poem and the apparatus and the critic’s main role as the uncrowned king of The Dunciad’s textual periphery. These visualizations also highlight Dennis’s essential position as a network connector, his camp affiliations, the role played by peripheral characters in the plot network of the poem, and the main dunces targeted by Pope, or the poem’s “hall of infamy.”

Examining the Early Modern Canon: The English Short Title Catalogue and Large-Scale Patterns of Cultural Production

This chapter presents the findings of an ongoing digital project of the Helsinki Computational History Group at Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) focused on the history of eighteenth-century book publication. The authors have created a historical-biographical database based on The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), a standard source for analytical bibliographic research, and extracted a data-driven canon which considers changes over time, subject-topics, top-works, authors, publishers, publication place, and materiality. This chapter provides both methodological and historical insights into the development of print and demonstrates the huge analytical potential of harmonized metadata catalogs. While quantitative analyses of the book trade were attempted before, they did not engage with the complex process of canon formation at such a large scale. The authors’ work highlights the formative role played by publishers in this process and the epistemological shift started at the end of the seventeenth century, when religious works were increasingly replaced by literary works. As the authors argue, this shift in the production and consumption of print allowed for a reinvention of the canon during the eighteenth century.