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Courtesy of the William
Clark Memorial Library |
Scholars meet for 'electronic enlightenment'
BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
Discussion never strayed to surfing or clogged freeways, but in other
ways the 18th century “went native” when it was revived earlier
this month in Los Angeles as nearly 1,000 scholars converged at UCLA for
the quadrennial congress of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century
Studies.
The hottest academic trends at the premier scholarly gathering for Enlightenment
researchers ended up playing into stereotypes often associated with Los
Angeles, home of the Internet, Hollywood, and unconventional philosophies
and movements.
At the event organized by UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18th-Century
Studies, interest ran hot for “The Electronic Enlightenment”
— or the movement to digitize tens of thousands of 18th-century
texts. Representatives from such leaders in the field as the commercial
publishing house Thomson-Gale and Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation unveiled
new developments that are expected to turbocharge the discipline, allowing
scholars to pursue themes across thousands of books at a time.
Lynn Hunt, a UCLA historian and immediate past president of the American
Historical Association, estimated new tech tools will allow her to accomplish
in five seconds what once consumed a graduate student’s entire summer.
Also abundant at the event, held only once before in the United States,
were seminars in the “Counter-Enlightenment,” or the mystical
and cultish underbelly of the Age of Reason. In cooperation with the UCLA
Film and Television Archive, the conference turned the klieg lights on
cinematic portrayals of the period. Scholars had access both to seminars
on the topic as well as 120 films set in the 18th century. |
