The ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago is pleased to host the Computational Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Studies Symposium, bringing together researchers for a day and a half of papers, discussion, and exchange across digital humanities, intellectual history, literary studies, and related fields. The symposium focuses on how computational methods are reshaping research on the long eighteenth century.
Date and Location
- Dates: June 4–5, 2026
- Venue: David Rubenstein Forum, Room 601, 1201 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Registration is now open. Space is limited and registration will close once capacity is reached. Confirmations are issued on a first-come, first-served basis.
Remote attendance via Zoom is available on request: please contact Rachel Tils (rmtils@uchicago.edu).
Program
Day 1: Thursday, June 4, 2026
- 1:00 – 1:15 pm: Welcome and introduction
- 1:15 – 2:45 pm: Panel 1: Building and Reading Eighteenth-Century Corpora
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- Nicholas Cronk: “Digitising Voltaire’s Letters: What Are the Challenges?”
- Andrew Kahn: “Developing Russia18: A New Resource for 18C Scholarship in Russian Literary Culture and Thought”
- Gregory Brown: “Analyzing the metadata of the Beaumarchais correspondence: new documents and new methods”
- 2:45 – 3:15 pm: Coffee break
- 3:15 – 4:45 pm: Panel 2: Mapping the Eighteenth Century
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- Ludovic Moncla: “From Text to Graph: Mapping Geographic Knowledge in the Encyclopédie and Beyond”
- Katherine McDonough: Title TBD
- Molly Nebiolo: “Visualizing Early Anglo-Atlantic Cities”
Day 2: Friday, June 5, 2026
- 8:30 – 9:30 am: Continental breakfast
- 9:30 – 10:30 am: Panel 3: Modeling Meaning, Concepts, and Translation
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- Glenn Roe: “Modelling Semantic Change and Conceptual Innovation in 18th-Century France”
- Clément Castillon: “Using historically trained encoders for corpus labelling: a case on the ModERN ERC project”
- 10:30 – 11:00 am: Coffee break
- 11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Panel 3 (continued)
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- Mikko Tolonen: “Rethinking Intellectual History through Translation Mining and Meaning Matching”
- Filip Ginter: “Large-Scale Reuse Detection with Learnable Representations: Challenges and Opportunities”
- 12:00 – 1:00 pm: Lunch
- 1:00 – 2:30 pm: Panel 4: Networks, Visibility, and Material Constraints
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- Iiro Tiihonen: “Borders of Enlightenment: Material and Economic Constraints of Intellectual Diffusion”
- Melanie Conroy: “A Global View: Counting Eighteenth-Century Writers in Wikidata”
- Hunter Brau: “Affiliation Is Not Attention: Cross-Cultural Visibility in the Age of Empires”
- 2:30 – 3:00 pm: Coffee break
- 3:00 – 4:00 pm: Roundtable: Reading the Eighteenth Century with Large Language Models
- Chair and panelists to be announced.
4:00 – 5:00 pm: Keynote
Katherine McDonough
Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Department of History, Lancaster University
- 5:00 – 6:00 pm: Reception
Contact
For questions about the symposium, please contact Rachel Tils (rmtils@uchicago.edu) or Clovis Gladstone (clovisgladstone@uchicago.edu).