Explorations: What This Blog is About

EXPLORATIONS is where I will post about various projects I’m working on, especially as they relate to 18th-century print and manuscript cultures.  This is also the place where I write about how DH tools and techniques fit into my work in 18th-century literature and in Irish Studies.

In addition to working on the “Reading Early Modern Irish: A Digital Guide to Irish Gaelic (c.1200-1650)” project with Brendan Kane and Tom Scheinfeldt at UCONN and with colleagues here at Notre Dame, I’ve recently been trying my hand at topic modeling with MALLET and learning the basics of programming with Python.  Although my work is squarely in the pre-digital 18th century, including manuscript literature, there are many productive parallels to explore between the 18th century’s explosion of printed texts and the rise of the internet and the searchable database.  In due time, I also hope to explore network analysis methods in trying to understand the sometimes elusive networks that thrived in the 18th century where print and manuscript cultures intersect.