Digital Approaches to intertextuality in 18th century France (ASECS 2022, Baltimore)

Digital Approaches to intertextuality in 18th century France (Roundtable) 

Clovis Gladstone, ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, clovisgladstone@uchicago.edu

The Intertextual Hub (intertextual-hub.uchicago.edu) is an experimental digital reading environment which was built around an extraordinarily broad set of text collections with specific focus on the 10 years of the French Revolution and more generally on 18th-century French resources. This platform was built to address a long standing issue in the Digital Humanities space: the integration of distant and close reading in a functional, intuitive, and flexible environment. By situating specific documents in their broader context of intertextual relations, whether in the form of direct or indirect borrowings, shared topics with other texts or parts of texts, or other kinds of lexical similarity, the Intertextual Hub aims to help scholars understand how different types of discourses evolved throughout the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary period, all within the larger cultural context of 18th-century intellectual traditions. Participants to this roundtable will discuss how they have used the various components of this platform for their research, the new avenues of research it opens, and more broadly how the question of intertextuality is central to our understanding of 18th-century intellectual history.