Commonplace Cultures: Mining Shared Passages in the 18th Century using Sequence Alignment and Visual Analytics

FAIN: HJ-50185-14

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Robert Morrissey (Project Director: May 2013 to June 2016)

A project to trace the practice and influence of textual and visual materials found in early modern European commonplaces, thematic organizations of quotations and other passages for later use. The project is led by humanities scholars and computer scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford's e-Research Centre and Voltaire Foundation. The UK partner is requesting £125,000 from the UK funding consortium.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the various practices associated with Early Modern commonplacing--the extraction and organization of quotations and other passages for later recall and reuse--were highly effective strategies for dealing with the perceived "information overload" of the period. But, the 18th century was also a crucial moment in the modern construction of a new sense of self-identity. Our goal is to examine this paradigm shift in 18th-century culture from the perspective of commonplaces and their textual and historical deployment in the contexts of collecting, reading, writing, classifying, and learning. These practices allowed individuals to master a collective literary culture through the art of commonplacing, a nexus of intertextual activities that we aim to explore through the concerted application of sequence alignment algorithms for shared passage detection and large-scale visual analytics on the largest collection of 18th-century works ever assembled.

Associated Products

Visualizing Text Alignments: Image Processing Techniques for Locating 18th-Century Commonplaces (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Visualizing Text Alignments: Image Processing Techniques for Locating 18th-Century Commonplaces
Author: Glenn Roe
Author: Alfie Abdul-Rahman
Author: Clovis Gladstone
Author: Mark Olsen
Author: Robert Morrissey
Author: Min Chen
Abstract: This paper examines the use of ‘visual analytic’ techniques to scrutinise and refine current approaches and algorithms for the identification of text reuse and alignment. In particular, we compare text alignment approaches using the ViTA (Visualization for Text Alignment) system we have developed in the context of a Digging into Data project that seeks to identify 18th-century commonplaces in large-scale historical datasets. By leveraging the flexibility of image processing techniques to visualize text alignments in a variety of ways and using multiple parameters, we can improve upon current alignment algorithms in an iterative and integrated process of automated text mining, multivariate visualization, and human-computer interaction.
Date: 7/1/2015
Primary URL: http://dh2015.org/abstracts/xml/ROE_Glenn_H_Visualizing_Text_Alignments__Image_Pr/ROE_Glenn_H_Visualizing_Text_Alignments__Image_Processi.html
Conference Name: Digital Humanities 2015

Early Modern Information Overload: Commonplaces and Compilations in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Early Modern Information Overload: Commonplaces and Compilations in Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Author: Clovis Gladstone
Author: Robert Morrissey
Author: Mark Olsen
Author: Glenn Roe
Abstract: This paper describes efforts at identifying commonplaces in the Gale-Cengage Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database. Given the size of this collection, as well as the state of the data in terms of its OCR output, identifying shared passages that exhibit the textual characteristics of commonplaces – e.g., are relatively short, repeated, and rhetorically significant – is a non-trivial computational task. In our previous work on text reuse, we came across numerous examples of textual borrowings and shared passages that we considered possible commonplaces. We expanded this work into a Digging into Data Round 3 project using similar methods to explore the more than 200,000 works contained in ECCO, a dataset that represents most of the printed literary and scientific output in Britain from 1700 to 1799.
Date: 11/14/2015
Primary URL: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/dhcs/dhcs-2015-program/
Conference Name: Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science

Constructive Visual Analytics for Text Similarity Detection (Article)
Title: Constructive Visual Analytics for Text Similarity Detection
Author: Alfie Abdul-Rahman
Author: Glenn Roe
Author: Mark Olsen
Author: Clovis Gladstone
Author: Robert Morrissey
Author: Nicholas Cronk
Author: Min Chen
Abstract: Detecting similarity between texts is a frequently encountered text mining task. Because the measurement of similarity is typically composed of a number of metrics, and some measures are sensitive to subjective interpretation, a generic detector obtained using machine learning often has difficulties balancing the roles of different metrics according to the semantic context exhibited in a specific collection of texts. In order to facilitate human interaction in a visual analytics process for text similarity detection, we first map the problem of pairwise sequence comparison to that of image processing, allowing patterns of similarity to be visualized as a 2D pixelmap. We then devise a visual interface to enable users to construct and experiment with different detectors using primitive metrics, in a way similar to constructing an image processing pipeline. We deployed this new approach for the identification of commonplaces in 18th-century literary and print culture. Domain experts were then able to make use of the prototype system to derive new scholarly discoveries and generate new hypotheses.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cgf.12798/abstract
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Computer Graphics Forum
Publisher: Wiley

La Littérature à l'âge des algorithmes (Article)
Title: La Littérature à l'âge des algorithmes
Author: Robert Morrissey
Author: Glenn Roe
Author: Clovis Gladstone
Abstract: No abstract.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://www.puf.com/collections/Revue_d-histoire_litt%C3%A9raire_de_la_France
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France
Publisher: Pressess universitaires de France

Commonplace Cultures Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Commonplace Cultures Database
Author: Clovis Gladstone
Author: Glenn Roe
Author: Mark Olsen
Author: Robert Morrissey
Abstract: Search interface for the Commonplace Cultures project, allowing search and retrieval of text reuses from the ECCO corpus.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://commonplacecultures.uchicago.edu/
Primary URL Description: Search interface
Secondary URL: http://commonplacecultures.org/
Secondary URL Description: Project website
Access Model: Open access

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