On 14 January, literary historian Els Stronks held the annual KB Lecture, marking the end of her KB/NIAS Fellowship. The text of her lecture, Jeugdige overmoed: Denkbeelden over jongeren digitaal duiden is now available online.
About the Lecture: Analysing Conceptualizations of Youth in Early Modern Textual Culture (1500-1800) the Digital Way
The central question the lecture departs from, has a methodological and substantive component: how can digital technologies help us uncover the emergence of conceptualizations of youth in the textual culture of the early modern Dutch Republic?
Stronks’ objectives are to show how the growing visibility of youth in textual culture intensified and changed the interaction between generations, redefining the roles, values and beliefs with regard to young people. Early modern children and adolescents were seen not just as subjects that needed to be controlled and disciplined by adults. They were also perceived – by themselves and others, in intergenerational dynamics – as a population group with specific physical characteristics, with cognitive and emotional potentials and with innovative capacities.
The tension between regulation and stimulation in the discourses on youth are mapped and analysed using the new opportunities of the large-scale digitization efforts to the max. But what is ‘the max’, at this point in time?
Read the full KB lecture “Jeugdige overmoed: Denkbeelden over jongeren digitaal duiden” (pdf, in Dutch)
The Digital Way
During the Fellowship, Els Stronks and her colleagues developed a tool to search for specific words in all documents of the Digitale Bibliotheek Nederlandse Letteren. The tool is accessible via www.kbresearch.nl/dbnl/ngram-viewer.
More
About Els Stronks
Els Stronks blogged about her experiences and findings
Els Stronks’ seminar at NIAS
Read and download all previous KB Lectures
About the KB Fellowship (NIAS)
About the KB Fellowship, including more information about each fellow (KB)