publications

2024

1. Enlightenment Links: Theories of Mind and Media in Eighteenth-Century Britain

   Collin Jennings

   May 2024

   Google-Books-ID: 7ZwAEQAAQBAJ

   Abs

   In this ambitious work, Collin Jennings applies computational methods to eighteenth-century fiction, history, and poetry to reveal the nonlinear courses of reading they produce. Hallmark genres of the British Enlightenment, such as the novel and the stadial history, are typically viewed as narratives of linear progress, emerging from Britain’s imperial growth and scientific advancement. Jennings foregrounds Enlightenment links: the paratextual devices, including cross-references, footnotes, and epigraphs, that make words work differently by pointing the reader to places inside and outside the text. Writers and printers combined text and paratext to produce nonlinear paths of reading and polysemous forms of reference that resist simple, causal structures of experience or theories of mind. Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and other writers developed genres that operate diagrammatically, with different points of entry and varied relationships between the language and format of books. Revealing the eighteenth-century genealogy of the digital hyperlinks of today, Enlightenment Links argues that emergent print genres combined language and links to bring forward the associative, circular, and multi-sequential ways in which literature makes language work.

2020

1. The Language of Notation and the Space of Manuscript Notebooks

   Collin Jennings

   In After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures, Mar 2020

   Google-Books-ID: dxm1DwAAQBAJ

   Abs

   The eighteenth century has generally been understood as the Age of Print, when the new medium revolutionized the literary world and rendered manuscript culture obsolete. After Print, however, reveals that the story isn’t so simple. Manuscript remained a vital, effective, and even preferred forum for professional and amateur authors working across fields such as literature, science, politics, religion, and business through the Romantic period.The contributors to this book offer a survey of the manuscript culture of the time, discussing handwritten culinary recipes, the poetry of John Keats, Benjamin Franklin’s letters about his electrical experiments, and more. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that what has often been seen as the amateur, feminine, and aristocratic world of handwritten exchange thrived despite the spread of the printed word. In so doing, they undermine the standard print-manuscript binary and advocate for a critical stance that better understands the important relationship between the media.Bringing together work from literary scholars, librarians, and digital humanists, the diverse essays in After Print offer a new model for archival research, pulling from an exciting variety of fields to demonstrate that manuscript culture did not die out but, rather, may have been revitalized by the advent of printing.Contributors: Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University * Margaret J. M. Ezell, Texas A&M University * Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University * Kathryn R. King, University of Montevallo * Michelle Levy, Simon Fraser University * Marissa Nicosia, Penn State Abington * Philip S. Palmer, Morgan Library and Museum * Colin T. Ramsey, Appalachian State University * Brian Rejack, Illinois State University * Beth Fowkes Tobin, University of Georgia * Andrew O. Winckles, Adrian College

2019

1. Of Calendars and Graphs: Transformations of the Succession Concept in British Moral Philosophy

   Collin Jennings

   The Eighteenth Century, Mar 2019

   Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
2. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019

   Apr 2019

2016

1. “A Scientifical View of the Whole”: Adam Smith, Indexing, and Technologies of Abstraction

   Jeffrey M. Binder, and Collin Jennings

   ELH, Apr 2016

   Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

   Abs

   While numerous literary scholars have raised concerns about the capacity of computational methods to reveal unrecognized features of literary form and content, few have explored the approach of interpreting these methods in relation to historical antecedents (such as the eighteenth-century subject index) that were similarly designed for comprehending and representing large amounts of text in easily intelligible formats. This essay compares methods of mapping the contents of texts from different historical periods by examining Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) from two perspectives: that of its 1784 index and that of a topic model generated from the text. We contend that this sort of comparative interpretation of models demonstrates a new way to consider computational methods not as heralding a break from print genres like the index but, instead, as participating in a longer tradition of practices that have sought to make massive amounts of text accessible for readers, whether they are human or machine.