Haptic Texts: Connecting through Media in the Eighteenth Century

ongoing

The project, HAPTEXT, examines how periodicals - texts printed at routine intervals - circulated to create the first age of 'viral' media in the eighteenth century. Within the anglophone world, periodicals have long been recognised as a vital source of information on political, social and economic matters in a period heralded as the Age of Enlightenment. Yet periodicals are yet to be fully integrated into cultural studies of the eighteenth century and there has been no systematic study of how information circulated across titles to reach wider audiences, or how readers actively responded to public papers by annotating the printed page or writing letters for publication. The project objectives are to: 1. Establish a new methodology for periodical studies that reveals how individual readers interacted with periodicals 2. Demonstrate how content escaped the control of its authors, being remediated and transmediated to reach new audiences 3. Reveal how radical ideas circulated between publications and between readers via the periodical 4. Build the first bibliographic database dedicated to locating periodical publications Using close textual analysis, computational history and corpus linguistics, HAPTEXT reveals how interactions with and upon the printed page intersected with literary endeavour to produce ‘viral’ media. The anglophone context provides a rich cache of material for study, revealing the changing priorities and anxieties of an island nation in an increased age of globalisation and period of colonial wars (American and French Revolution, Napoleonic War). Through this Fellowship, the researcher, Dr Jennifer Buckley, will develop the training, high-impact dissemination, and experience commensurate with a leading researcher of her career stage. The researcher will be based in the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, and supervised by Prof. Matthew Sangster, a leading expert in Book History, authorship and Digital Humanities.