Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke in Digital Humanities

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

The Digital Humanities scholars Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs decided to do an experiment. In "Searching for the Victorians," Cohen talks about how they wanted to find out what kinds of books got published—and when—during the Victorian period.

So he and Gibbs went ahead and got a huge batch of data from GoogleBooks, which included 1,681,161 books that were published in Britain between 1789-1914. Cohen and Gibbs then started doing searches for specific words in the titles of books. One of those words they searched for was "revolution."

Let's look at this excerpt from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, which is totally one of the books that popped up in Cohen and Gibbs's search for "revolution."