Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain

John Regan (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
20 March 2025

Semantics; Computational linguistics; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Social & cultural history

An in-depth digital investigation of several 18th-century British corpora, this book identifies shared communities of meaning in the printed British 18th century by highlighting and analysing patterns in the distribution of lexis.

There are forces of attraction between words: some are more likely to keep company than others, and how words attract and repel one another is worthy of note. Charting these forces, this book demonstrates how distant reading 18th-century corpora can tell us something new, methodologically defensible and, crucially, interesting, about the most common constructions of word meanings and epistemes in the printed British 18th century. In the case studies in this book, computation brings to light some remarkable facts about collectively-produced forms of meaning, without which the most common meanings of words, and the ways of knowing that they constituted, would remain matters of conjecture rather than evidence.

Providing the first investigation of collective meaning and knowledge in the British 18th century, this interdisciplinary study builds on the existing stores of close reading, praxis, and history of ideas, presenting a view constructed at scale, rather than at the level of individual texts.

By: John Regan (Royal Holloway University of London UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781350360532
ISBN 10: 1350360538
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 20 March 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction Part I: New Digital Insights into Collective Meaning 1.‘Beauty’ and the ‘Beautiful’: Semantic Difference at Scale 2. The Cases of ‘Perception’ and ‘Knowledge’: Semantic Decay Amidst the British Print Explosion 3. ‘Attention’: A Useful, Salutary Failure 4. ‘More is Different’: How the Collective View Contributes to our Knowledge of the British Eighteenth Century Part II: Common Conceptions of ‘Slavery’ across Political and Religious Discourses 5.The Curious Case of the ‘System of Government’ 6. The Evolution of the Meaning of Liberty across the British Eighteenth Century 7.‘Protestant’ and the Antonymic Production of Collective Meaning Conclusion Appendix I: Straightening Out Uneven ECCO Appendix II: How mPMI Works and Why it is Better Than Other Methods for Discovering Collective Meaning Bibliography Index

John Regan is Lecturer in Literature and the Digital at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Reviews for Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain

Exploring at scale ECCO and other corpora of 18-century texts with tools developed by researchers at the Concept Lab (Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge), this exciting new monograph blends expert knowledge of the period with the affordances of the digital to investigate collective meaning and knowledge formation in 18th-century Britain. For those interested in how words and their lexical associations reflect social, political, and ideological change, as well as in the revolutionary potential of distant reading large repositories of texts, this book is a rare treat. -- Ileana Baird, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates Regan’s linguistic analysis of important aesthetic, religious, philosophical and political concepts offers new insights into how 18th-century Britons made sense of the world that surrounded them … Regan’s book offers valuable new insights into the intellectual and cultural landscape of 18th-century Britain. The scholarship of the Cambridge Concept Lab at large … illustrates the positive impact of computational methods on 18th-century studies. * Digital Enlightenment Studies *