My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

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 langu...

 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. Ne...

 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...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/750     Rembrandt van Rijn, Two African Men, 1661 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) In the 17th Century, there was a community of people of color living in Amsterdam. This community was linked to the maritime industry: black women established permanently in the city were married to black men who worked as sailors for the VOC and the WIC, the Dutch West and East India Companies. Mark Ponte , who has been studying this community's traces in the collection of notary deeds at the Amsterdam City Archives, explains: From the moment the Dutch became active in the Atlantic world, people of African descent came to Amsterdam. Their presence is evident from baptismal and marriage registers and from seventeenth-century notarial deeds. ( via Twitter ) The painting above, made by Rembrandt in 1661, most likely depicts two men who belonged to this community of afro-descendents, which was l...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/395   La conduite des filles de joie à la Salpêtrière : le passage près de la porte Saint-Bernard Étienne Jeaurat (1699 - 1789) "Jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody, ever. Neither can I and neither can you. And that's because emotions are not what we think they are." This straightforward statement introduces the TED talk You Aren't at the Mercy of your Emotions--Your Brain Creates Them , by Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist, psychologist, and professor at Northwestern University (and one of my nerdy heroes!) I first got to know Barrett's work back in 2017 when I read How Emotions Are Made (a book that covers the TED talk topics in more detail). I picked up her book after reading Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust and A.D. (Bud) Craig’s How do You Feel? . Having been captivated for years by the study of emotions—as an actor...