Since the 1980s, popular media, literature and theory have suggested that technology has induced a newly evolved, posthuman and postmodern cyborg consciousness. This article examines the premise of human evolution towards a disembodied `post-human' state in cyberpunk literature and film, as well as some influential cyber-theory. Rather than indicating a revolutionary change in human consciousness, both cyber-lit and cybertheory incorporate and reinscribe Western Christian narratives about human identity. Images of disembodiment tend to reaffirm traditional religious concepts of human reproduction, individual (...) consciousness, spirit and body, and life after death. (shrink)

Text visualization is the technique of using graphs and charts to examine text as data. Often, these do not represent a text directly and instead display an output based on word counts, word sequences, and so on. This technique can provide insights into important keywords in a text, provide an overview of textual content, or reveal trends and patterns within one text or across many texts. This paper describes recent development of and experiments with several tools for the Grub Street (...) Project to generate visualizations of eighteenth-century texts, especially in terms of the spatial relationships of words and entities on the pages of the original documents. Two examples are discussed in this article as test cases: Edward Ward’s The London Spy Compleat, in Eighteen Parts (1703) and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. With Notes Variorum (1729). (shrink)

Scholars widely assume that the term generation, is preferable to reproduction in the context of early modern history, based on the premise that reproduction to mean procreation was not in use until the end of the eighteenth century. This shift in usage presumably corresponds to the rise of mechanistic philosophy; feminist scholarship, particularly that deriving from the hostile critique fashionable in the 1980s has claimed reproduction is associated with medical practitioners’ perceptions of women as baby-producing machines. However, this interpretation, whether (...) in the interests of gender politics or reiterated in more sympathetic histories, misrepresents the historical record. (shrink)