18th century blog round-up resumes: march edition

I haven’t done one of these round-up posts for a while, but it seems as if some interesting new blogs have been coming online (along with others I’ve followed for awhile), and I wanted to call your attention to them.   Here are some links:

• The 18th-century Common has had some good posts lately.  Jonathan Lamb has posted an essay about Hogarth’s blush and Maori tattoos; and Margaret Koehler discusses her new book, The Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, in the Common’s ongoing collection about Cognitive Science and 18th century studies.
• The Early American History blog The Junto has a very useful omnibus posting called “This week in American History.”  This week’s post contains a link to the soon-to-be-indispensable UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, along with a great post (at the worthy journal of narrative and experimental history, The Appendix) about colonial-era drunkenness.
• At Persistent Enlightenment, James Schmidt asks “What, if anything, does Dialectic of Enlightenment have to do with the Enlightenment?“
• Ted Underwood makes a case for the use of DH methods to help us revisit and refine our categories and macro-narratives of literary history, using the (admittedly incomplete but still voluminous) digital archives now available to us. Takeaway line: “The blurriness of literary categories is exactly why it’s helpful to use computers for distant reading.”

These are just a few of the posts I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. If you’ve got your own thoughts about them, or more suggestions for this week’s round-up, please hit “comment.”

DM

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a new 18th-century blog, early modern online bibliography

Anna Battigelli, a long-time contributor to the Long 18th, has just started her own blog, Early Modern Online Bibliography, which is devoted to the bibliographic issues raised by EEBO, ECCO, the Burney Collection, and other emerging digital resources.  Here’s her description:

[Early Modern Online Bibliography] was created to facilitate scholarly feedback and discussion pertaining to valuable online text-bases for the humanities, such as EEBO, ECCO, and the Burney Collection.  Of particular interest are bibliographical problems encountered while using these text-bases.

Anna’s blog already contains a useful roundup of review articles concerning these databases, here.  I suspect that such a blog could be a very useful place for pooling information concerning the best techniques for digging into these databases (either for one’s own or student research), and for confirming anomalies.  You’ll see that I’ve also added it to our blogroll, under “Eighteenth Century Resources.”

This blog is designed to supplement her ASECS roundtable scheduled for Albuquerque, 2010: “Some Noisy Feedback.”

Best, DM

PS: please let us know if you’d like to suggest your own, or someone else’s, eighteenth-century blog for us to put onto our blogroll.  We’re always on the lookout for more links to 18th century-themed blogs.

Spring Break Blogging Roundup

1.  Academic life department.  This might piss you off, or it might amuse you, if you’re in the right mood.  (Question: from what perspective is writing a PhD the same as watching a really good cable TV show?)  On the other hand, this will definitely piss you off.  (For yet more amusement/schadenfreude, read this, but not for too long, since it’ll make your skin fall off)  (courtesy of The Valve and How the University Works)

2.  Contemporary relevance of 18th century writers department.  John Holbo at Crooked Timber analyzes an 18th century right wing blogger precursor of Edmund Burke, Justus Moser, and his pamphlet, “On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and their Children in our Day” (1772).  In the meantime, Steven Waldman at TPM Cafe wants to make us feel good about the success of religious toleration in America, despite the fact that ordinary liberals and conservatives–meaning all the angry folk filling up his comments section–are still clueless  about what it means.  It would also be nice to see a historically accurate, or at least precise, definition of “deist” somewhere in this discussion, but it is a blog, after all.  (Though this discussion, including the comments, from Boston 1775 seems a whole lot less woolly-headed than Waldman’s.) 

3.  Superb 18th-century window-dressing department.  While we’re still on the topic of the FFs in all their ugliness and Giamatti-like tics and insecurities, Boston 1775 has a nice round-up concerning the HBO wigstravaganza, John Adams.  Don’t miss Jill Lepore’s NYer review essay, either.  Love the wigs and the sets, not so sure about the dialogue.  Isn’t it always that way when we see our period depicted in the movies?

DM