Things noted

Early modern:

• Fernando Cervantes in the TLS reviews a range of books on early modern Spain.
• Phil Withington, ‘Citizens, Soldiers and Urban Culture in Restoration England’, English Historical Review (2008).
• John Morrill reviews Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (2007), a great deal of which can be read on limited preview on Google Books.
• Imago Urbis: Giusepe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome is a University of Oregon website that projects Vasi’s 18th century engravings of Roman architecture onto the contemporary map of Giambattista Nolli, alongside modern satellite and photographic overlays.
• The Economist on the internet as early modern coffee house.

Other periods:

• PhDiva on the British Museum’s Elgin exhibition.
• Brett Holman on Britain’s relationship with the bomber, 1908-1941.
• The top 100 blogs by liberal arts professors - US-centric, but lots of interesting links.

Comparator

I posted previously about being inspired by Digital Scholarship in the Humanities to mess about with word clouds. The same post also gave me the idea to try some text comparison tools.

TAPoR’s Comparator tool allows you to type in the URLs for two different pieces of text. It then compares the two, producing a word list showing whether words appear in both.

I tried it out with two texts in the pamphlet battle between John Taylor and Walker of 1641 that I’ve been looking at recently. Late in the summer of 1641, a text called The Irish Footman’s Poetry appeared by a third author - one George Richardson. The text referenced various previous pamphlets in the dispute. Although it appeared when Taylor was on a journey down to the south-west of England, it is often attributed to him. (No real George Richardson appears to have existed).

I ran Richardson’s text through the tool alongside one of Taylor’s pamphlets from the dispute. I had a hazy idea in my head that this could just possibly be a magic tool that could tell me the real author of a pseudonymous text.

Unfortunately it didn’t tell me very much. What it gives you is a list of words that occur in both texts, and the ratio with which they occur in both. In some cases I can imagine this being very useful - for example to trace the transmission of texts in cases where later works references or draws upon previous works. In my case, though, the only words that emerged in common were everyday verbs like “do”.

Then I tried doing two separate sets of more detailed analysis using the HyperPo tool. Here are the results for Taylor:

• Total words (tokens): 1813
• Unique words (types): 785
• Highest word frequency: 91
• Average word frequency: 2.31
• Standard Deviation of word frequencies: 5.07
• Average word length: 4.29
• Standard Deviation of word lengths: 2.11
• Number of sentences: 44
• Average words per sentence: 41.2
• Number of paragraphs: 17
• Average words per paragraph: 106.6

Here is the same analysis for Richardson:

• Total words (tokens): 1841
• Unique words (types): 726
• Highest word frequency: 86
• Average word frequency: 2.54
• Standard Deviation of word frequencies: 5.29
• Average word length: 4.35
• Standard Deviation of word lengths: 2.22
• Number of sentences: 95
• Average words per sentence: 19.4
• Number of paragraphs: 38
• Average words per paragraph: 48.4

Again not much stands out - in any case trying to look for similarities this way could be distorted if, for instance, the same author was deploying different literary styles in each text.

So, TAPoR’s tools were fun to try out, but not much help in this particular case - a far better way to establish who the real George Richardson might have been is through a detailed contextual, bibliographic and stylistic analysis of the text. That said, I’d still recommend having a play about with TAPoR’s wide range of tools since you may well find something of use.

Word clouds

A very useful post the other day from Lisa Spiro at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, covering two things:

• Using word clouds
• Text comparison tools

I’ve been messing around with both over the last couple of days. Below are some thoughts on uses of word clouds.

Word clouds are a useful visual representation of the frequency with which a word appears - the bigger the word in the cloud, the more it appears in the text. They’re often used for blogs to represent tags the blogger has used. I’ve got two in the sidebar on the right, one for the categories I sort my posts into and one for the tags I’ve used.

Words clouds aren’t horribly difficult things to learn how to program. I’ve been following Bill Turkel’s wiki on how to become a programming historian and have managed to make my own using Python. But if you want to cheat, Wordle offers you a much easier way. Just cut and paste your text into the website and it automatically generates a cloud for you. You can then customise it within a range of styles.

How is this useful for historians? Well, I’m in the early stages of planning my dissertation and one use I’ve found has been to refine my topic. There are two extremes in choosing a thesis: you can start with a small topic and work your way up to finding the overall themes it will address, or start with a big theme and work your way down. If you’re choosing the former, word clouds can be a very quick and helpful way of distilling out key concepts.

As an example, I’ve cut and pasted the text for Henry Walker - one of the Civil War journalists and pamphleteers I’m hoping to study in my dissertation - from the Dictionary of National Biography.

What can you glean from this? “Perfect” and “Occurences” occur quite a lot, naturally enough given Perfect Occurences was a newsbook he edited. But what about other titles he edited? They’re less prominent. Is this something significant about Walker’s legacy, or does it also tell us something about his biographer’s priorities? “Trade” and “apprenticeship” also spring out - again, significant given that Walker started life as an ironmonger and did not spend his whole career as a parliamentary hack. This is a context sometimes ignored in his life. “Hebrew” also comes out quite strongly. Walker was fluent in it, but what significance should we read into this - is it of importance for understanding his writing?

Let’s compare this text to the biography of Walker in the early 20th century Cambridge Companion to English Literature.

Perfect Occurences is nowhere to be seen. “Cromwell” and “Charles” loom much larger in the cloud. “Drogheda” also looks quite strong, something that doesn’t emerge in the DNB’s cloud.

These are just a few of the questions that occurred to me when I generated this cloud. They’ve all given me leads to follow up or do more thinking about, both in relation to Walker and the historiography surrounding him, and I was able to do it instantly without a detailed trawl through the text. Now in Walker’s case his biography is very short, and naturally you would go through it in detail anyway - but for much longer texts, I can see Wordle having even more potential. With the set of key words it generates, you can then go trawling through other resources such as JSTOR and the RHS bibliography, looking for additional relevant secondary works. It’s not a substitute for reading and analysing a text yourself in detail. But it does provide a very useful supplement, particularly if you are trying to summarise a text.

Next time I will give some details about the uses I’ve made of text comparison tools.

Great ideas that originated in the pub - part 96

I’m reading Tim Harris’s wonderful Restoration at the moment, and I just came across a lovely anecdote of some students in Edinburgh plotting to burn an effigy of the pope after a night down the pub.¹

There happened to be hanging up in the pub a copper plate showing an engraving of the pope being burned in effigy in London - part of the Whig demonstrations against popery and arbitrary government during the Exclusion Crisis. A plan was hatched: Edinburgh too would have its pope-burning. The students had a whip-round amongst friends and raised enough to hire a carver to make an effigy with:

Cloathes, Tripple Crown, Keys and other necessary habilments.²

Edinburgh University tried to prevent it taking place by offering the students a bond:

We the students of the University of Edinburgh considering the Dangerous Consequences might attend the burning of the Pope on Christmas-Day, do bind ourselves not to do it upon that Day, or any Day hereafter.³

Unsurprisingly, not many students signed up.

News of the plan spread, and soon others in the town got wind of it. They were met by soldiers stationed round the town in an attempt to prevent it, but it went ahead, the procession noisily shouting “no Pope, no Pope”. It was eventually stopped when it got to the High Street, at which point the ringleaders decided to blow up their effigy with gunpowder. Beats Rag Week hands down…

My image is taken from the broadside The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers &c. through the City of London, November the 17th, 1679. It shows three lines of a Whig procession ending with the burning of the pope in effigy outside Temple Bar.

AN333648001
© The Trustees of the British Museum

1. Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660-1685 (Allen Lane: 2005), pp. 187-189.
2. L.L., The History of the late proceedings of the students of the colledge at Edenborough (1681), Wing / 461:05.
3. Anonymous, The Scots demonstration of their abhorrence of popery with all its adherents (1681), Wing / S2025.

Pamphlet wars

I’ve had a paper accepted for the Birkbeck Early Modern Society conference in July. The full programme can be found here. My paper will be on the pamphlet war that took place between John Taylor and Henry Walker in the summer of 1641. This dispute is quite a celebrated one, not least because of the imagery the two employed in their pamphlets. You can read more about the dispute in Bernard Capp’s biography of Taylor, and see a sample woodcut from one of the pamphlets here.

Below is an abstract for the paper.

In 1641 a pamphlet war broke out between John Taylor, a waterman, and Henry Walker, an ironmonger. The pamphlets the pair fired back and forth became increasingly graphic and offensive, dredging up old gossip and using scatological woodcut caricatures. This encounter is seen by some historians as an ideological conflict that prefigured the outbreak of the English civil war in 1642: Taylor and Walker, after all, would go on to be propagandists for king and Parliament respectively. By contrast, other historians – focusing on the offensive content of the later pamphlets – have seen Taylor and Walker as Grub Street hacks, happy to write trashy pamphlets in return for profit.

However, previous studies of this literary encounter have limited their focus to the authors and their texts. This paper sets out a more detailed analysis of the dispute. It examines every player involved in the “communication circuit” that brought the pamphlets into print – not just authors but also printers, booksellers and readers. It argues that the dispute’s form and content was shaped by the creative tensions between these groups, each of which in turn can only be understood by subjecting them to rigorous political, social and economic contextualisation. In doing so, the paper argues that the dispute operated on a number of levels. It was simultaneously both ideological and profit-driven; both a bitter feud and a literary spat between colleagues; both highbrow and crude. This more nuanced analysis has wider implications for historians’ understanding of the sophistication and complexity of print culture in the early 1640s.