Political vocabulary of eighteenth-century Britain

University of Helsinki (Finland)

How was politics operationalised in the print discourse of eighteenth-century Britain? This project will apply computational methods to traditional historical enquiry, exploring possible parallels and discontinuities within intellectual history. It will draw upon CASCADE expertise in techniques including concept modelling and distributional semantics, and seek to triage problems presented by historical text collections digitised using optical character recognition. The PhD candidate should: 1) map the development of political vocabulary in eighteenth-century Britain; 2) lay groundwork for developing a theory of meaning change with respect to the history of ideas. The candidate should have prior knowledge of eighteenth-century Britain. In the project, they will have access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO); the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC); Cand British Library Newspapers and different kinds of text reuse datasets compiled from these datasets.

Further information about the project, the position and how to apply is available here.

Further information can also be obtained by contacting the supervisor, Prof. Mikko Tolonen (mikko.tolonen@helsinki.fi).