Upcoming Events

NLP Coffee Break:

Formerly the “Language and Computation Works in Progress” lunch-time meeting. This is a low stakes coffee break works-in-progress group inviting advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from across the institution to share their research, teaching, or even simple curiosity about all things related to Natural Language Processing and its applications to the humanities and social sciences. Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.

First fall meeting: Friday, August 30th at 2pm.

Sponsored by:

Data+ Summer 2024—Ethical Consumption before Capitalism

Is it ethically permissible to sell, buy, and use luxury goods? What labor practices do we tolerate to make these goods available? This project traces the early history of these questions as European powers started to exploit the natural resources and peoples of the New World.

We want to trace how the discourse of commercial consumption and the labor needed to sustain Early Modern Markets is presented 17th century documents produced for the English Trading Companies and responding to the economic exploitation of the New World. An ever-growing supply of new luxury goods reached England through the recently-opened trade routes to the New World, the African Continent, and India. The production and trade of these new goods required innovations in the pursuit of early colonial projects: especially maintaining a sufficient labor force working to supply these goods.

The Virginia Company of London hired popular ministers to represent the New World as both a providential landscape where the undesirable and “poor” of London could be turned into productive laborers and eventual colonists. Starting 1619, the City of London agreed to supply the Virginia Company with labor, by detaining and paying for the transport of hundreds of “vagrant” children to the New World as indentured servants. At the same time, the ministers working for the Virginia Company organized schools to convert Native Americans to Christianity and to work for the colony.

The team will use BERT and MacBERTh and ArcGis methodologies to trace and explain this history.

In collaboration with Jessica Hines—Visiting Assistant Professor, English Department, Whitman College

Project and results from the 2023 team:

Is it ethically permissible to sell, buy, and use luxury goods? What labor practices do we tolerate to make these goods available? In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, England was faced with an ever-growing supply of new and exciting goods, made possible by new trade routes to the New World, the African Continent, and India as well as by the exploitation of indentured and enslaved laborers. Investors were asked to contribute to financially-risky ventures; prospective settlers of the New World colonies were enticed by promises of moral as well as economic improvement. In the propaganda of the period, the inherent risks and hardships of these ventures were glossed over or diminished to highlight the potential economic and spiritual profits to be made.

However, the goods cultivated and traded through these new global markets were viewed with suspicion: from exotic dyes to tobacco and opium to enslaved persons, the act of buying and selling in Early Modern England  represented an uneasy mix of economic opportunity and ethical risk. How can “godly” English merchants trade in goods that require exploitative labor? What kind of profit can be ethically justified? These and similar questions have shaped our own modern understanding around the ethics of consumption and global trade, making it critical to understand how premodern people understood the relationship between consumer culture, trade, and living ethically.

Students worked with Word2Vec to connect the ethical dimensions of the discourse on consumption with gender, race, and religion. The final product for the project will ask students to experiment with interactive visualizations (such as a Shiny app) to track the changes in the language of ethical consumption in our period of interest.

Project Website: https://sites.duke.edu/ethicalconsumption/

Interactive app to visualize changes in the discourse over education and conversion of Native Peoples: https://datap2023ecbc.shinyapps.io/ecbc2023_rshiny/.

Project and results from the 2022 team:

Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon off-sets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). These modes of ethical consumerism assume that individuals become political, as well as economic, actors through shopping. Concern with the morality of consumption is not new to capitalist societies, and we can see as much in the earliest discourses surrounding the market economy. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, acts of consumption became increasingly aligned with corruption, as individual and corporate bodies were depicted as altered, even damaged, by trade.  And, in an increasingly global and colonial economy, authors debated the ethics of expanding into new markets from India to the Americas. These questions and others like them have shaped our own modern discourse around the ethics of consumption.

Building on the past two years of work, this project will extend the analysis of consumption performed in 2020 and 2021 to include the data collected and analyzed by the Bass Connections team from the rare materials archives of Duke’s Rubenstein library and of the University of Alabama Birmingham’s Lister Hill library. These materials include Medieval and Early Modern medical manuals, which will help us to analyze the metaphorical translation from medical consumption of the human body to economic consumption of the body politic; seventeenth-century mercantile theory texts, which theorize how consumption is connected to trade and monetary policy; as well as treatises and legislative documents on monopolies, corporations, and trading companies.

Students’ poster: https://bigdata.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Ethical-Consumption-year-3.webp

The students produced an interactive app that visualizes networks around the discourse of “tobacco” and “opium” that can be viewed here:
https://zyr2000.shinyapps.io/dataplus/

Bass Connections 2023-2024: Ethical Consumption before Capitalism

Background

Is it ethically permissible to sell, buy and use luxury goods? What labor practices do we tolerate to make these goods available?

In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, England was faced with an ever-growing supply of new and exciting goods, made possible by new trade routes to the “New World,” the African continent and India, as well as by the exploitation of indentured and enslaved laborers. Investors were asked to contribute to financially risky ventures; prospective settlers of the New World colonies were enticed by promises of moral and economic improvement. In the propaganda of the period, the inherent risks and hardships of these ventures were diminished to highlight the potential profits to be made.

However, the goods cultivated and traded through these new global markets were viewed by many with suspicion. From exotic dyes to tobacco and opium, these sought-after luxury items represented an uneasy mix of economic opportunity and ethical risk — some due to their addictive qualities, and others because of their production by slave labor. 

These and similar questions have shaped our modern understanding around the ethics of consumption and global trade, making it critical to understand how premodern people understood the relationship between consumer culture, trade and living ethically.

Project Description

Building on the work of previous teams, this project team will explore early discourses around consumerism and language pertaining to culture, trade and ethics. In order to understand premodern views of “ethical consumption” and global market relationships, the team will take two linked approaches. 

First, team members will take a qualitative approach through close reading and annotation of premodern literature found in the traditional archives at Duke. Second, they will take a quantitative, data-driven approach to identify how linguistic traces of this ethical discourse have been created, borrowed and reformulated over an expansive body of text.

The team will use the approximately 60,000 medieval and renaissance texts made available by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). This year’s team will expand the project by analyzing the reception of new luxury goods within English markets both by including an analysis of popular texts (such as ballads, news sheets and plays) and by tracking literature produced by specific trading companies.

The team will also focus on goods, labor and trading networks that are tied to gender-, class- and race-based discourses, such as luxury dyes and intoxicants, as well as the growing support of the colonial projects in the New World through the exploitation of a mix of indentured (Irish and British) and enslaved (African and Native American) labor.

Digital project accepted for Out of the Archives: Digital Projects as Early Modern Research Objects, North Carolina State University, March 2022.

Data+ Summer 2020—For love of greed: tracing the early history of consumer culture

In collaboration with Jessica Hines—Assistant Professor, English Department, Birmingham-Southern College.

Are the concepts of a “consumer” and of a “consumer society” modern ideas? The Middle English word “wastour” can be translated as “consumer” as long as we keep in mind that it carried very specific negative connotations associated with excess and waste. But does that mean that English men and women in the Middle Ages could be said to have a concept of a “consumer” or of a “consumer culture”?

This project aims to address the question of how to trace conceptual and semantic change by focusing on the discourse of economic consumption. The project will start with a set of core, related lexical terms to begin assessing how the ethical, political, and economic language of goods-consumption changed around the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the Market economy. Using this preliminary lexicon of key terms in Middle English, Early Modern English, and Latin that constitute period-appropriate clarifications and modifications of the concept of “consumer” and attendant concepts (such as “greed” and “speculation”), students will identify documents from our corpus that participate in the discourse of consumer culture in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. In turn, selection will be used to expand our initial lexicon into a fully fledged and period-indexed semantic field.

Building on this first set of results, students will be asked to analyze how the discourse of goods-consumption articulated itself during our critical period. For instance, it is well known that in Medieval and early Renaissance Latin theological literature, the term curiositas, from which the English “curiosity” derives, is directly linked to the sinful attitude of insatiable, intellectual greed—that is, a desire to know beyond reasonable bounds—and, figuratively, to greed and gluttonous over consumption in general. This connotation of term “curiosity” begins to become less prominent, and eventually fade away, in the seventeenth-century, as “intellectual curiosity” comes slowly to be associated with exploration and discovery. In this example, a stark conceptual distance between the present and the pre-modern past is encapsulated in the usage of just one term. With this project, we want both to expand our understanding of what terms in the discourse of consumption morph under the pressures of changing ethical concerns during the Reformation and to identify more precisely when these changes occur.

(Digital) Mapping Political Uncertainty in Revolutionary London in the 17th century

This summer project aims to teach students about the politics of revolutionary London in the 17th century through the exploration of petitions to Parliament, political pamphlets, and propaganda. This is an opportunity for you to join a small group of Duke students interested in Early Modern history, politics, and literature and learn how to use digital mapping to understand a specific historical period. Historical digital mapping is a highly interdisciplinary discipline that combines technical skills with humanistic studies. You will also learn how to work with digital archives and databases by doing original research on primary sources.

Students participating in the program will receive a $500 award.

Overview of the questions under consideration: In 1642, the tensions between King Charles I and the members of Parliament erupt into a full-fledged Civil War. Writers in support of the King, on one hand, and of Parliament, on the other, forge arguments to justify their claims of the right to rule and to demand the allegiance of the population. London, with over 500,000 inhabitants and the center of political, legal, and economic activity is of critical importance during this revolutionary period—and the output of its printing presses make evident that this was a war of ideas as well as of firepower.

While we know the results of this conflict, the people of London lived in what felt like an unprecedented period of upheaval and uncertainty.

In this summer project, we will focus on the period of 1642-1649, that is, the period from the beginning of the Civil War to the execution of Charles I. Our goal will be to better understand how the ideological battles of this war were fought. We will approach this period by focusing on London and its printing presses, mapping their locations and learning about the most influential authors and their connections.

Cosponsored by the Rhodes information initiative at Duke and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Visualization Fridays: “From page to text to data”

A page—whether from a manuscript or in printed form—has more information than its text. How can this information be thought about for quantification and visualization? Visualization of knowledge has deep roots in the practices of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where forms of visualization and page organization could be as contentious as the conceptual “content” they represented. In this talk, I will focus on the problem of extracting “data” from pre-modern works for visualization and analysis. I am particularly concerned with how humanistic analysis can be thoughtful about the “datafication” of narrative without shying away from the insight that can be gained from visualizations.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 24

Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is the painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
   Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
   They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Critical Digital Humanities Reading Group.

This reading group is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Its purpose is to provide an introduction to wide array of theoretical methodologies in the digital humanities (DH). Over the academic year, we will work through core readings that will help us explore the critical frameworks that inform the field and how digital applications and tools affect our interpretive lenses.

For the academic year 2019-2020, the reading group is broadly structured to focus on:

• theoretical background in the Fall Semester

• methodological concerns in the Spring Semester

Readings are selected in part based on the interests of those who attend.

Upcoming from the Duke Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host: Pedagogy and the Premodern (March 6-7, 2020)

Scholars of the premodern face an increasingly difficult challenge in the modern academy: presenting medieval and early modern texts, materials, ideas, and histories in classrooms and institutions preoccupied to an unprecedented extent with the new and the now. In addition to perennial questions of the (allegedly) declining relevance and appeal of premodern study to postmodern undergraduates, we face in our classrooms potential barriers to student engagement and learning--difficulties of language; problems of unfamiliarity; questions of relatability--that are specific to our fields and require considered approaches. More troublingly, the premodern past has become in recent years a particularly explosive site of contestation as insidious and racist attempts to co-opt this past have been made ever more visible, both inside and outside the academy. In light of these contemporary concerns, what does it mean, today, to teach the premodern past responsibly and ethically? How might we effectively engage students in the unfamiliar past in a way that connects with a rapidly changing present? How can we help students to attend seriously to medieval and early modern voices, concerns, and ideas? How does the medieval and early modern classroom remain a vital and vibrant force in the modern university?