My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1402     Why do we talk about privacy using the word "privacy"? English is the lingua franca of academic knowledge. We use it as a tool to communicate with each other across linguistic borders. So one of the answers to this question is that we use the word "privacy" as a way to explain to each other---in an international context---not only historical events described in English that use this English word, but also events that use other vocabulary and other languages, and that we (as researchers) recognize as being related to what in English we call privacy. But listening to the History of English Podcast , I recently caught myself pondering a second way of thinking about this question: why this particular word? Or to put it in another way, how and when did the word "privacy" (and related words, like "private") appear in the English lexicon? A

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1344 If you are starting to dip your toes into the  sea of opportunities that automated text analysis gives you but were wondering where to start, take a look at Voyant Tools . This open source application lets you quickly gather some insights about texts you might be interested in. It's also very convenient to use, because it's directly available from your browser—you simply upload or copy and paste your text onto the tool, with no need to download or install software. I tested it out with a sample from a French text I am currently working with to see how it worked. My text is the first letter from the Lettres Portugaises , an epistolary novel from the second half of the 17th century, published by Claude Barbin, whose book trade is one of the topics of my research. One quick insight that became visible for me is the importance of properly configuring stop words when doing

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1229   Privacy involves the ability of regulating access to oneself: this is the working definition that I have been using in my historical research when I focus on bodily integrity, especially when my interest is a question of sexual, reproductive, or bodily privacy more in general. I am inspired by Margulis (1977 and 2003), whose contributions focus on sociological research questions, as well as on other authors' contingent definitions of privacy for purposes of research in other disciplines (for example: Hughes, 2012). For me, this working definition has been useful for historical studies because I need to attend to the fact that the concept of privacy, as we know today with its resonance as a human right, did not exist yet in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the periods I focus on. Which does not at all mean that people then didn't need privacy! While it is rare for me

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1215   This blog post is adapted from part of a paper I would have presented at the European Social Science History Conference 2020, which was postponed to 2021 due to the measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought it would be a nice idea to share it with you here, rather than let it stay inside my proverbial drawer. This research is a small part of my larger effort to locate and contextualize concrete instances of religious advice about sexual privacy given to women throughout the seventeenth century in France. Here, I am looking into the use of the word “ privauté ” in two different versions of a very popular book, Introduction à la vie devote , by St. François de Sales. These two versions were published 76 years apart. I am comparing these two versions of the book to examine a shift in the usage for the word privauté. I am curious about how this shift affected language

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/987 In the Altona Case Team at PRIVACY, we are working with two versions of a late 18th century text by Johann Peter Willebrand. The text appears in French as Abrégé de la police, accompagné de réflexions sur l'accroissement des villes and in German as Innbegriff der Policey: nebst Betrachtungen über das Wachsthum der Städte . To make our lives easier,  our team thought that it would be a good idea to run the PDFs through OCR, to have searchable and editable texts that we could work with. However, we got huge differences in accuracy with different OCR tools. We started with the French version of the text, which we downloaded in PDF format from Google books. First, we tried Abbyy FineReader . This is a very good (proprietary) app to run OCR on scanned text written in modern languages , but when dealing with our early modern material, the results were far from acceptable. Next, w

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/921 Good health is the most basic condition for a person to live a thriving life and—as we have been witnessing for the last few weeks with the COVID-19 pandemic—countries desperately need their people to be healthy, too. Otherwise, society goes bonkers. Hence, the importance of public health measures to control and prevent the spread of disease. Le bonheur, et souverain bien de la vie consiste plus en la bonne santé qu'en tous les biens du Monde, puis qu'elle l'entretien et prolonge, et que sans icelle elle est déplaisante. (Andre le Gros, 1625) [Happiness, chief wellbeing of life, consists more in having good health than in having all goods of the world, since health maintains and prolongs life, and without health, life is unpleasant.] Last week, Anni discussed public health measures imposed during times of pandemic, which—though necessary for the greater good—can have