INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAN EDELSTEIN
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Work Habits ◽  
Google Books ◽  
First Editions ◽  
Early English ◽  
Modest Level

The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), the Making of the Modern World (formerly Goldsmiths’–Kress), or, on a more modest level, the ARTFL project's FRANTEXT, has also breathed new life into old texts. Books that lay forgotten for generations can now be rediscovered thanks to the magic of search engines. To be sure, this power has not always been wielded for good: students today can “cite anything, but construe nothing,” stringing together KWICs (keywords in context), and reading only a surrounding sentence or two (if that). But however they are used, these tools and platforms have transformed our daily work habits.

War in Social Thought

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

Book Reviews

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 957-958
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Left And Right

Murray Milgate of Queen's College, University of Cambridge reviews “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World,” by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Presents a social and intellectual history of how the ideology of European liberalism accorded a new liberty and dignity to commoners—including the bourgeois—and shaped the revaluation by society of trading and the betterment of technologies. Focuses on how a great enrichment happened, and will happen; how explanations from the left and right have proven false; how bourgeois life had been rhetorically revalued in Britain at the onset of the industrial revolution; how a probourgeois rhetoric formed in England around 1700; how England had recently lagged in bourgeois ideology, compared with the Netherlands; how reformation, revolt, revolution, and reading increased the liberty and dignity of ordinary Europeans; how nowhere before on a large scale had bourgeois or other commoners been honored; how words and ideas caused the modern world; how history and economics have been misunderstood; and how rhetoric made and can readily unmake the contemporary world.”

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES: SOCIETY AND THE HOUSEHOLD IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 1161-1172 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL F. HARRINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
German History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Ideal

Gender relations in German history: power, agency, and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey. London: UCL, 1996. Pp. x+262. ISBN 1-85728-485-2. £12.95.Adultery and divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. ix+214. ISBN 0-674-00520-1 (hb). £18.50.Housecraft and statecraft: domestic service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. By Dennis Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvi+333. ISBN 0-8018-5288-9. £37.00.The European nobility, 1400–1800. By Jonathan Dewald. New approaches to European history, ix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+209. ISBN 0-521-42528-x (pb). £12.95.Garden and grove: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600–1750. By John Dixon Hunt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xix+268. ISBN 0-8122-1604-0 (pb). £23.50.Like an ancient woodsman or a guide through the Amazonian jungle, the ideal historian possesses at least two kinds of expertise: enough familiarity with the general terrain to plan successful expeditions and enough experience in the field to make inevitable adjustments to ‘the big picture’ when underway. Of course in the real world (of both geography and history) the tasks of exploration and cartography are often bifurcated, without necessarily disastrous results. The historian who is equally skilled at both close-up description and large-scale theorizing is consequently celebrated as a rare and valued anomaly. Meanwhile, for most of us stumbling scouts, the world beyond our familiar trails remains largely one of learned lore, with connections to our own limited forays often vague at best. Unless, of course, we are fortunate enough to come across something which provides an almost magical link between the narrow and the wide, the micro and the macro.

Zionism’s Redemptions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arieh Saposnik
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
New Framework

In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious (and non-religious) redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in its cultural, social, and political history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world.

The First Industrial Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Factory Production

This chapter concerns the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution involved the transformation of organic economies by means of a complex of changes which gave birth to the modern world. In Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere those economies were agricultural. Thus the chapter discusses the replacement of an economy 80 per cent of the output of which might have been agricultural by another in which manufacturing became the dominant sector. This involved a transition in the scale of manufacturing from artisanal to large-scale workshop and then factory production. In Britain, that entailed technological innovation, but it would not have been possible in the first place without prior sustained changes in the rest of the economy and society.

scholarly journals MEGATRENDS OF DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL INNOVATION NETWORKS

2018 ◽  
pp. 93-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Rylach
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Innovation System ◽  
Innovation Systems ◽  
Innovation Activity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Innovation Networks ◽  
National Innovation Systems ◽  
Global Innovation

Under the megatrend, we mean large-scale technological, economic, social, political changes that occur slowly, but in the long run, when they are rooted, they substantially and permanently affect most of the processes in society. Such relative stability in the trajectory of the main forces of change can predict some elements of medium and long-term future changes. The article investigates such megatrends of the development of global innovation networks as the structural nature of the global innovation system, the development of systemic interconnections in the field of innovation, the interaction of national innovation systems and global, the internationalization of innovation activity, and the paradigm of "open innovation". The methodological principles and structural elements of the concept of the national innovation system are determined in the paper, the connection of national innovation systems with the phenomenon of internationalization of the innovation sphere is explored. The theoretical principles of the phenomenon of internationalization of innovation activity are investigated, as well as the preconditions for the emergence of the concept of "open innovation" and its current trends have been established. The concept of open innovation is an important precondition for the emergence and functioning of global innovation networks. The paper analyzes the genesis and specificity of the phenomenon of global innovation networks, outlines their structure and dynamics. It has been determined that global innovation networks play an important role in the development of the modern world economy, as they stimulate international cooperation in the innovation sphere, transfer of knowledge to the world economy and general scientific and technological development and growth of world production.

scholarly journals Learning for Teaching: Building Professional Knowledge on a National Scale

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hartnell-Young
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
School Communities ◽  
National Quality ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Structure Sociale ◽  
Under Performing

This paper takes a large-scale social perspective in describing a national project in Australia that was premised on local school communities working together and contributing ideas for the benefit of their students, and potentially, the whole country. The project was intended to improve schools’ capacity for educating boys, and in the long-term, the learning outcomes of under-performing boys, using evidence-based and action research methods. It was supported by the web spaces and tools of the National Quality Schooling Framework and Think.com. This paper emphasises the structures and processes teachers engaged in while building knowledge through their daily work, where the resulting ideas became the property of the whole community. Analyses focus on the extent to which an underlying social structure for knowledge building developed in various parts of the nation during the project, making it possible to characterize a process for innovations in education with commitment to continual idea improvement. Résumé Le présent article adopte une perspective sociale à grande échelle pour décrire un projet national en Australie fondé sur la collaboration des communautés scolaires locales et leur contribution d’idées au bénéfice de leurs élèves et, éventuellement, de l’ensemble du pays. Le projet avait pour but de rendre les écoles plus aptes à éduquer les garçons et, à long terme, d’améliorer les résultats d’apprentissage des garçons qui sous-performent à l’aide de méthodes de recherche-action fondées sur des données probantes. Il a bénéficié du soutien des espaces et des outils Web du National Quality Schooling Framework et de Think.com. Le présent article met l’accent sur les structures et les processus que les enseignants ont utilisés dans leur travail quotidien pour la coélaboration de connaissances; les idées qui en ont résulté sont par la suite devenues la propriété de l’ensemble de la communauté. Les analyses portent principalement sur la mesure dans laquelle une structure sociale sous-jacente de coélaboration des connaissances s’est développée en différents endroits de la nation au cours du projet, ce qui rend possible la caractérisation d’un processus d’innovation en éducation avec un engagement envers l’amélioration continue.

scholarly journals Software Developers’ Work Habits and Expertise: Empirical Studies on Sketching, Code Plagiarism, and Expertise Development

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Sebastian Baltes
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Expertise Development ◽  
Software Projects ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Quantitative Research Methods ◽  
Stack Overflow ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Work Habits ◽  
Novel Theory

AbstractAnalyzing and understanding software developers’ work habits and resulting needs is an essential prerequisite to improve software development practice. In our research, we utilize different qualitative and quantitative research methods to empirically investigate three underexplored aspects of software development: First, we analyze how software developers use sketches and diagrams in their daily work and derive requirements for better tool support. Then, we explore to what degree developers copy code from the popular online platform Stack Overflow without adhering to license requirements and motivate why this behavior may lead to legal issues for affected open source software projects. Finally, we describe a novel theory of software development expertise and identify factors fostering or hindering the formation of such expertise. Besides, we report on methodological implications of our research and present the open dataset SOTorrent, which supports researchers in analyzing the origin, evolution, and usage of content on Stack Overflow. The common goal for all studies we conducted was to better understand software developers’ work practices. Our findings support researchers and practitioners in making data-informed decisions when developing new tools or improving processes related to either the specific work habits we studied or expertise development in general.

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