scholarly journals An Eighteenth-Century Ecology of Knowledge: Patronage and Natural History

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1275-1297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Andersson Burnett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Client Relationships ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Local Minister

This article analyses the construction and dissemination of natural-history knowledge in the eighteenth century. It takes the mapping and narration of Orkney as a case study, focusing on the local minister and amateur natural-historian George Low and his network of patron-client relationships with such prominent natural historians as Joseph Banks and Thomas Pennant. It focuses too on Low‘s network of informants and assistants among local island farmers, and argues that canonical natural-history texts were the products of collaborative and interdependent processes that included a large number of actors from all strata of society. To conceptualise how natural-history knowledge was created in this period, the article applies the metaphoric description ‘an ecology of knowledge’. This approach enables a focus on a large number of actors, their collaboration and influence on each other, while also paying attention to asymmetrical power relationships in which competition and appropriation took place.

Commercialization of Creative Videos in China in the Digital Platform Age

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642095358
Author(s):  
Zhongxuan Lin
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Product Placement ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Case Study Design ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Depth Interviews

With a special focus on the commercialization of creative videos, this article explores the research question of how digital platforms’ affordances simultaneously allow and constrain video producers’ commercialization activities in the platform era. This study adopts a case study design that focuses on the Chinese digital video producer Zheng Yun, founder of Zheng Yun Studio, using ethnographic participant observations and in-depth interviews. It explains how creative producers such as Zheng Yun struggle to survive in the context of intensified platformization and how they benefit from the digital platforms by employing various commercialization mechanisms, including the Revenue Sharing Program (RSP), Embedded Product Placement (EPP), Franchise Chains, Agent-commission, and Crowd-funding. This research also demonstrates the asymmetrical power relationships between platforms and video producers, which prompt us to rethink the political nature of platforms and the diversified nature of platformization in the digital platform age.

‘Just put it online’: The Taylor White Project as a digitization case study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zinger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Interactive Visualizations ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Materials

Creating access to digital surrogates of primary source materials has spurred the growth of history of science as a field. Enabling and supporting virtual access requires an understanding of the behind-the-scenes requirements of a digitization project. Using McGill's Taylor White Project as a case study, this article reveals how such a project is managed, to result in a unique digital collection that supports research in both the humanities and the sciences. The workflows described transformed a collection of 938 eighteenth-century natural history drawings from a relatively inaccessible archive to a searchable and browsable digital collection, complete with contextualizing interactive visualizations. Understanding this process reveals some of the ways in which digitized data can create new avenues for questioning and examining information.

scholarly journals “Apostles and men of learning”: Miguel Venegas, Andrés Marcos Burriel, and the Jesuit Vocation for Natural History

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-55
Author(s):  
Bryan Green
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Ascetic Ideal ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Mission ◽  
Natural Histories

The transformation of the Empressas apostólicas (1739), a manuscript history of the Jesuits’ missions in Lower California written by the novo-Hispanic Jesuit Miguel Venegas, into the Noticia de la California (1757), a thoroughly revised version of Venegas’s original prepared by the Spanish Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel, provides a case study in how the enactment of the Jesuit ascetic ideal exercised on the Spanish-American mission frontier was closely linked to Enlightenment natural history and ethnography. Through an analysis of both works, as well as Burriel’s correspondence with his Jesuit confrères in New Spain, this article aims to demonstrate the underlying tension in eighteenth-century Jesuit writing between traditional, providential narratives and the skeptical, scientific discourse of secular natural histories. Burriel’s work, which was widely translated and disseminated throughout Europe, aimed to bridge these two discourses by employing the Society’s apostolic-ascetic vocation and global missionary network in the service of natural histories that would appeal to a secular reading public and inform Spanish colonial administration.

Natural history books in the library of Dr Richard Richardson

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edgington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Books

During the first decades of the eighteenth century the wealthy Yorkshire naturalist Richard Richardson acquired a large library, particularly strong in natural history, medicine and antiquarianism. Virtually all the natural history component was dispersed before the library was catalogued, so its contents have been unknown. Richardson's unpublished correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane and William Sherard contains many references to his books and shows that they and other leading naturalists were the source of most of them, by donation and purchase. Of about 700 books in natural history that he possessed, 425 have been identified; an Appendix lists 300 of the more significant titles. Comparison is made with other natural history libraries, and the eventual fate of Richardson's is discussed.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

The Riddle of Freedom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Power Relationships ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Personal Status ◽  
Asymmetrical Power

This chapter looks at the concept of freedom and its articulation in ancient Greek texts. It shows that in the Homeric period, the terminology of slavery and freedom was used only for personal status. In the centuries that followed, these terms were appropriated and applied metaphorically to a variety of asymmetrical power relationships. However, Greeks were able to maintain clear distinctions between slavery as a legal concept and slavery as a metaphor. The chapter concludes with critiques of the methods of M. I. Finley and R. Zelnick-Abramovitz, who do not make clear distinctions between law and metaphor when analysing this terminology, and whose methods have led to convoluted analyses of aspects of Greek slavery.

Poetics and subjectivities between classicism and Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Russian Poetry ◽  
Development Of Identity ◽  
Further Development

In the context of Sentimentalism in the 1770s, literary culture opened up to representations of human subjectivity. The chapter considers genres of poetry devoted to the themes of pleasure, death, and posterity. It also considers the spaces of poetry and modes of exchange, whether through the album, the salon, and the verse epistle. Two case studies explore the use of different literary forms in the further development of identity, individual and also authorial. The first looks at Radishchev’s experiment in writing a fictional diary as a psychological exercise. The second examines the tradition of imitation of Horace’s Monument poem in Russian poetry in the eighteenth century as well as by later poets, such as Pushkin and Brodsky. The case study shows how these Russian versions express changing ideas about imitation and originality as well as poets’ concern with posterity.

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