Sorry for cross-postings

Centre for e-Research Seminar:

Digital recovery and intellectual history: the case of James Mill and 
Robert Fenn
Kristopher Grint, University of Sussex

26 February 2013, 6.15pm Anatomy Museum Space, Strand Campus
Directions: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/atm/location.aspx

Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is requested: 
www.eventbrite.com/event/5177044680

Abstract

My seminar proposal focuses on the methodology and findings of my recent 
DPhil thesis on the intellectual history of James Mill (1776-1836), the 
Scottish philosopher and journalist, most famous as a disciple of the 
Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the father of John Stuart Mill. But my 
research for this thesis began in earnest with a focus on an altogether 
different man, Robert Fenn, a Canadian professor of political science, 
who spent the majority of his academic career engrossed in the 
transcription of a corpus of Mill’s manuscripts, known as the common 
place books. These books – five thick ledger volumes of tiny, scrawled 
writing collated by Mill over a period of about 15 years – were 
painstakingly recreated by Fenn on his 1980s-era Apple IIe. After 
completing his efforts, in 1994, he tragically died before finding a 
publisher, his work assumed lost. I intend to cover three topics in this 
seminar. First, the story of my search and recovery of Fenn’s work, the 
technical challenges it produced, and its transformation into a 
searchable electronic resource which was published in 2010. Second, how 
an accessible transcript of the common place books has initiated a 
radical transformation in my understanding of several key areas of 
Mill’s thought. Mill’s politics, ideas about educational reform, and his 
religious belief all come to life through a study of his manuscript 
writings, which were composed away from the difficult and at times 
hostile atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Britain. A common theme 
running through my thesis is that Mill practiced the art of 
‘dissimulation’ – he never said publicly exactly what he thought in 
private. Finally, and most importantly, I want to address how advances 
in digital research techniques, even rather basic ones such as 
manuscript digitisation, impact upon, and have the potential to improve, 
a field such as intellectual history. Intellectual history – very 
broadly the study of the history of ideas – is at its foundation a 
discipline fascinated with texts and contexts. It therefore appears ripe 
for a digital revolution in approach, since so much detail about a text 
can be extracted by technical advances. But what do such advances mean 
for the exploration of contexts? Is there a danger here of separating 
text from its all-important contextual background? And are intellectual 
historians even willing to accept such radical changes to their practices?

Biography

Kris Grint holds degrees in history from the University of Manchester 
and King’s College London, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the 
University of Sussex. He is a member of the Sussex Centre for 
Intellectual History and works on several of its digitisation 
initiatives. Broadly interested in the history of political and 
religious thought in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, his current 
research focuses on the Utilitarian philosopher James Mill (1773-1836). 
In 2010, Grint published online, in collaboration with the London 
Library, Mill’s common place books, an extensive archive of manuscript 
material that aims to reinvigorate debates about his legacy.

The seminar will be followed by wine and nibbles.

-- 
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Dr. Stuart Dunn
Lecturer
Centre for e-Research, Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL

Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel. +44 (0)20 7848 2709
Fax. +44 (0)20 7848 2980

Blog: http://stuartdunn.wordpress.com