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Author Biography

Hilary Havens is Associate Professor of English and the chair of the Digital Humanities interdisciplinary program at the University of Tennessee. She is one of the editors of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project. She is also the author of Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the editor of Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1820 (Routledge, 2017). She is currently editing Frances Burney’s Cecilia for Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field that applies digital methodologies and technologies to the humanities, is an excellent lens through which to approach the eighteenth century.  I integrate digital humanities tools and workshops alongside primary source readings in all of my eighteenth-century British literature classes to help students better understand those texts and the world in which they were created.  In my upper-level undergraduate class on late eighteenth-century literature, I teach four digital humanities tools to students, two of them (StoryMapJS and Voyant) in connection with Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). These tools train students how to uncover historical and geographic contexts and focus on diction, leading to surprising discussions and analyses of Evelina.

Keywords

Evelina, Frances Burney, Digital Humanities, Computational Text Analysis, Digital Storytelling

Additional Files
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Figure 1: Example of StoryMapJS Interface
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Figure 2: Example of StoryMapJS Slide on Haymarket Theatre
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Figure 3: Voyant Interface with Frances Burney’s Evelina
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Figure 4: Voyant Toolbar Options and Word Cloud
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Figure 5: “Duval” Trends graph in Evelina (Voyant)
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Figure 6: Student “marriage*” / “blush*” comparison in Evelina (Voyant)
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