Writings:An enquiry into the uses and abuses of digital history

After last year’s RSA in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this time there was a completely different setting: Chicago. On the photo featured here, you can see me in action on the last day of the conference. That was too bad, especially since I had hoped for better after last year, but the conference in general proved very fruitful.

I used this opportunity, to present someo of the work that I undertook for my dissertation. In the near future, I hope to turn this into an article. My abstract was as follows:

In the early modern period, news circulated through easily adaptable anonymous handwritten news-sheets. This paper discusses how the analysis of these adaptations aids our understanding of the broader networks in which this type of document circulated. It comprises a structural comparison based on a dataset built from two different archives and highlights examples of similarities both between and within these collections.

How and when these documents were created is difficult to unravel as they were frequently copied, edited, and paraphrased. The advantage is, however, that with the application of similarity analysis, we can systematically recover the documents’ textual history. The mathematical formula of cosine similarity traces news items with a high degree of similitude across the dataset. This enables one to recover traces of how news traveled between regions and illuminates to what extent different collections were based on the same sources. This method also resurfaced some particularly intriguing examples of news writers making small mistakes during the process of newsletter compilation. This further illuminates the method in which these documents were created on which we otherwise know very little.

Last week, we attended the Renaissance Society of America Conference with a EURONEWS panel. This year, the conference was held in San Juan, Porto Rico, which certainly required an update of my wardrobe of conference gear compared to last year Dublin’s-based edition.

Follow the link for more information: https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/6504

There were many interesting DH panels among which the open meeting of the Digital and Electronic Media community. As you can see above, I have also been spotted here in my new beige blazer, with my supervisor Prof. Dooley right next to me.

The EURONEWS panel itself was on the morning of the conference’s last day. For those interested, I have reproduced my abstract in full here below:

The separation of the news genre from that of history in the sixteenth century brought a new awareness of time. The manuscript newsletters that arrived with weekly intervals, bearing news from different places, gave the present a more distinctive character. Already in early modern times, there was understood to be a relation between the genres of history and news. In the historiography, historical awareness is not understood to be perennial, but only to have come into existence around the sixteenth century, roughly around the same time that the manuscript newsletter was introduced. The development of this historical awareness is generally considered to go hand in hand with a shift from a worldview based on ‘universal’ Christian values to one based on particular moments in time. This paper will explore this tension between universals and particulars with relation to the sixteenth-century manuscript newsletter (also called avviso). Attention will be paid to, among other aspects, the republic of Genoa, which received ample attention in the news during the civil war of 1575-76. The Republic’s citizens are during this time represented in the news as being divided between two particular constitutional moments in the city’s history, namely the years 1528 and 1547.