Dr. Ileana Baird edited the book under the title Data visualization in Enlightenment literature and culture published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Placed at the intersection of the digital humanities and Enlightenment studies, this collection is an interdisciplinary effort that showcases the significant digital work done in the field of eighteenth-century studies and its potential to transform our disciplinary practices. By addressing essential period-related themes—from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to novel ways of exploring canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics—this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its very tenets in light of new data. The essays included here demonstrate that, by translating these new findings in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

Dr. Ileana also contributed to it as an author of two chapters: (1) Introduction: “Speaking to the eyes” – Reassessing the Enlightenment in the Digital Age. This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data

visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

(2) Outliers, connectors, and textual periphery: John Dennis’s social network in The Dunciad in Four Books. This chapter uses social network analysis to visualize the fields of relations involving John Dennis, the most important critic of the first half of the eighteenth century, with other protagonists in Alexander Pope’s satire, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). By using visualizations generated by GraphViz, a program that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and ShivaGraph, a tool that helps visualize large networks and navigate through them as through a map, this chapter brings to light data that is structurally embedded in the poem but not immediately legible given the large amount and complexity of information. In Dennis’s case, they reveal the competing stories told by the poem and the apparatus and the critic’s main role as the uncrowned king of The Dunciad’s textual periphery. These visualizations also highlight Dennis’s essential position as a network connector, his camp affiliations, the role played by peripheral characters in the plot network of the poem, and the main dunces targeted by Pope, or the poem’s “hall of infamy.”