Computational processing of French colonial texts

In laying the groundwork for understanding how white supremacy bled into French popular culture, we can more clearly understand the relationship between French cultural production, power, and race.

France established one of history’s largest overseas empires, one predicated on close liaisons between cultural imperialism, racism, and political supremacy. In exploring this empire, this project will approach ethical visualization by analyzing two key corpora:

1. the Encyclopédie created by Diderot in the late eighteenth century as a clearinghouse for French knowledge about the world, and
2. a thirty-year run (1870-1900) of a popular periodical containing heavily illustrated journalistic articles, the Journal des Voyages, that had the express purpose of teaching France about its place in the world. The Encyclopédie became the standard reference text in French homes (White, 1973). Purporting to collect all knowledge available to French scholars and artisans alike, it provides a record of what was acceptable to say and to know in eighteenth century French society about the wider world.

Endorsed by the French state’s Ministry of Education for use in schools, the Journal des Voyages reached a broad reading audience with its plain-language imperial news, accessible illustrations, and readership-grabbing colonial-themed fictional narratives. The realistic accounts interspersed with fantastic fictions open the opportunity to contrast how the French understood imperial events with how they imagined their empire and the world’s diverse inhabitants. In laying the groundwork for understanding how white supremacy bled into French popular culture, we can more clearly understand the relationship between French cultural production, power, and race. Working with these key historical corpora will allow the project directors to contribute to building a framework that provides a training model and adapts an ethical visualization workflow for this and future digital humanities projects.

 

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