Studentship: ‘Slavery and Race in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1860): A Text Mining Approach’
Qualification Type: PhD English Literature
Funding for: Home and international students
Funding amount: Annual stipend of £15,690 per year and tuition fees
Duration: 3.5 years FTE
The University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland are seeking a doctoral student for an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award, “Slavery and Race in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1860): A Text Mining Approach”.
The student will be based at the University of Edinburgh, but will also spend considerable time at the National Library of Scotland. There will be a period of funded work placement at the National Library of Scotland, which will be co-determined with the student: for example, highlighting authors of articles relating to slavery and race in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and exploring how these link to Library Collections in innovative ways.
Project Details
How is the impact and outcomes of Atlantic slavery represented or alluded to in historical information sources? What is the legacy of slavery in our printed information environment? What text-mining approaches can be used to identify, analyse, and visualise these diverse and problematic histories? This research will use advanced digital approaches to understand how race and slavery feature in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB). The first eight editions of the EB, published 1768-1860, from the height of the UK’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, to the abolition of British slavery in 1838, and to ongoing subsequent debates about slavery and race, contains rich content related to Atlantic slavery and to forms of racialisation that developed from it. Utilising data from the newly digitised 143 volumes of the EB from the National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry (comprising 167m words), this research will both provide insight into the explicit and implicit representation of slavery, the slave trade and race in this key reference material, but also develop a best-practice methodology for others wishing to use text mining to analyse race and slavery within other historical information sources.
This CDA will involve learning (well established) text and data mining approaches, applying them to the EB, involving unique corpus analysis that would need to consider the intellectual and cultural context in which eighteenth and nineteenth-century encyclopaedias were produced and published, and also linking and cross-referencing to other information sources available within the National Library of Scotland collection. By searching, analysing, and visualising the ways in which terms related to slavery appear in this essential reference material, using a variety of methods including GIS, accurate geoparsing, and following concepts and their relationships diachronically, we will both understand more about how Atlantic slavery was understood or instantiated within our information sources, whilst also developing a methodology for research into other similar primary reference material, and the ideas that they disseminated.
This is a timely topic, of significant relevance, given increasing interest in decolonising academic and cultural institutions. This project will have scholarly impact in Digital Humanities, History, and Library and Information Science, as we consider how to analyse, deconstruct and decolonialise historical information sources using computational methods, as well as contributing to discussions and policies at the National Library of Scotland on this topic.
Application deadline: 17 May 2021
For more information on how to apply, visit: