St. Louis, Scott. “Big Data and the
Search for Balanced Insight in the Digital Humanities: Macroscopic and Microscopic Reading of Citation Strategies in the Encyclopédie of Diderot (and Jaucourt), 1751-1772.” Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts, Jan. 2016, https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/sss/181.
Continuing the pattern of growing interest in the application of Digital Humanities to plagiarism and the Encyclopédie, St. Louis comments on particular strategies used in the past while emphasizing that technology does not always give a concrete, correct answer. Referring to Edelstein et al.’s previous data mining attempt (To Quote or Not to Quote…, 2013) to determine where in the Encyclopédie outside texts were used (often without citation), St. Louis detects an error in authors’ claims. The software Edelstein et al. employed led them to state that John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was copied, but not explicitly named in any Encyclopédie article. St. Louis reports the results of his close reading of the Encyclopédie by naming two articles where Locke’s work is in fact mentioned. He posits that this error provides insight into the citation strategies of the Chevalier de Jaucourt while also making it imperative to include “micro-analysis” of articles in any “macro-analysis”. Attempts to analyze the Encyclopédie as a whole, especially in a technological manner, must be accompanied by close reading in the actual text to gain accurate results.
Basic Information
Country of Publication: United States
Language: English
Decade: 2000s
Main Classification: Digital Humanities
Related Sources
*In Progress*
Notes
None
Updates
7/14/2020: Created page.