Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas: New Methods and Computational Approaches

Peter de Bolla

Nov 2023 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'government' using digital humanities approaches to large scale text data sets. It sets out the methodologies and tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab as exemplifications of how new digital methods can open up the history of ideas to heretofore unseen avenues of enquiry and evidence. By applying text mining techniques to intellectual history or the history of concepts, this book explains how computational approaches to text mining can substantially increase the power of our understanding of ideas in history.

About the author

Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge. His publications include The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (Fordham University Press, 2013), which won the Robert Lowry Patten Award in 2015. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Blackwell, 1989), Art Matters (Harvard, 2001), and The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth Century Britain (Stanford, 2003). He directed the Cambridge Concept Lab between 2013 and 2017, a £1.5m funded project on the structure of concepts. He is an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.