HDW Colloquium: A Distant Reading of Property

Join us for a lecture and workshop by Jo Guldi, Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University

Franco Moretti's call for a “distant reading” of literature has only recently been applied to history. Can the tools of text-mining be used to follow the history of property, confiscation, and eviction around the British Empire?

In this lecture, Jo Guldi draws on topic modeling, divergence measures, collocation analysis, and semantic analysis to understand the changing valences of property. Countering constitutionalist A. V. Dicey, Guldi argues that colonial resistance, in rejecting the terms of ownership codified between Locke and Malthus, effectively remade the language and understandings of property law.

Lecture on Monday, 12/7, at 4:00pm CT.

Workshop, "Bridging Archival and Digital History: An Experiment in Search of Good Framing," on Tuesday, 12/8, at 12:00pm CT.

Contact Matt Kelley to RSVP.