Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2018)

Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of ECCO

  • Sherif Abuelwafa,
  • Sara Zhalepour,
  • Ehsan Arabnejad,
  • Mohamed Mhiri,
  • Emilienne Greenfield,
  • James P. Ascher,
  • Sofia Bach,
  • Victoria Svaikovsky,
  • Alayne Moody,
  • Andrew Piper,
  • Chad Wellmon,
  • Mohamed Cheriet

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3, no. 1

Abstract

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In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant responded to a big questionburied in a little footnote. But you wouldn’t know it, because contemporaryeditions of Kant’s famous essay no longer reproduce the parenthetical directivethat Kant’s original essay printed right under the essay’s title in the Decemberissue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784: “S. Decemb. 1783. S. 516.” (SeeDecember 1783, p. 516)