Modelling Enlightenment: Reassembling Networks of Modernity through data-driven research

Introduction

The Enlightenment has long been associated with the rise of modern Europe, and more generally with the concept of a typically European Modernity that took root in its wake.

Concepts of Modernity

What it means to be modern is indelibly bound up with our understanding of the Enlightenment's core concepts:

• Reason
• Religious toleration
• Civic virtue
• Political liberty
• Scientific progress

To name but a few, these concepts have shaped our modern identity.

Philosophical vs. Political Perspectives

For some, the Enlightenment is an essentially philosophical matter; for others, it was and remains deeply political. Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain: for better or worse, it is widely accepted that the Enlightenment ushered in a new, modern era in both politics and philosophy, beginning in the 1790s and continuing today.

Scholarly Debate

The role of 18th-century ideas in this modernizing process, and by proxy, the books that came to embody them, has long been the subject of intense scholarly debate. This debate is primarily concerned with the social and intellectual causes of the French Revolution.

As a result, the field of Enlightenment studies today continues to privilege a relatively small canon of writers, primarily those that participated in the more radical strains of Enlightenment thought in France.

Dominant Narratives

This is only one version, or vision, of the Enlightenment, however, albeit one that tends to dominate contemporary discourse.

Project Aim

This project aims to fundamentally re-evaluate this interpretation of the Enlightenment and its actors by expanding the knowledge base on which these previous claims have been made. This expansion will focus on:

1. The diversity of authors and texts included
2. The development of new digital techniques for identifying and analyzing 18th-century information networks and their subsequent reception

New Directions in Enlightenment Studies

In so doing, ModERN will move Enlightenment studies in a decidedly new direction; one that is both more comprehensive and more systematic in terms of its relationship to the existing digital cultural record, and one that likely challenges subsequent narratives of European Modernity.