This paper has two aims. First, it questions the potential relationship between intellectual history (in particular, the methodology which emerged following Quentin Skinner’s “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” and is now referred to as the Cambridge School) and new tools and techniques in quantitative text analysis. Specifically, it asks whether a discipline which is contextual and structuralist can make use of an empiricist and positivist methodology.
To these ends, the paper examines Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s eighteenth century periodical The Spectator. This source is of interest for two reasons – first, it has been lauded as hugely important historically and politically. It has been credited with heralding in a new era and leading to the emergence of the “public sphere.”[1] To the reader today, however, The Spectator is little more than an amusing historical pamphlet, attacking contemporary affectations and superstitions, and purposefully ignoring political discussions. Thus, one may find it difficult to locate claims of profundity within it. The reason for this is the second point of interest: as Peter Gay wrote, “eloquent as it is, the Spectator does not speak to us directly; we must know something of its time before we know something of its significance.”[2] Thus, it is of particular interest to the intellectual historian interested in contextual meaning.
The paper uses a number of “distant reading” techniques (largely using R and Ken Benoit’s package Quanteda) to attempt to extract contextually relevant and historically interesting information from the corpus. The success (or failure) of these techniques, it is hoped, can lead to developing further best practices for those intellectual historians interested in the digital humanities.
[1] Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
[2] Peter Gay, “The Spectator as Actor”, Encounters (1967).