I hate to be the lone skeptic, but I am concerned about the influence of #DH and #DigitizingEnlightenment on the field. Some projects are wonderful for research and teaching, but I worry that others place too much emphasis on an extremely select group of French philosophes.

To start with the positive: I, like so many others, reap enormous benefits from ARTFL and especially the ARTFL Encyclopédie, which is endlessly fascinating and instructive. I use it all the time for my research. #DigitizingEnlightenment https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ 

To shift to my concerns, while I have the utmost respect for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, I worry about what my students would take away from the case studies: not a single woman is named here (just "salons") and everyone pictured is white #DigitizingEnlightenment

Some of my concerns are financial. I actually can't look up the Electronic Enlightenment right now because they added $913 to the price this year, making an institutional subscription for my SLAC $3825/yr. The college library let the subscription lapse #DigitizingEnlightenment

as a result and so I can't say what sources are included in the database right now. It seems to have a broad selection -- from their site, "Read the ideas and concerns not only of thinkers and scholars, politicians and diplomats, but also butchers and housewives, servants and

...shopkeepers. With a wealth of personal detail revealed in these personal documents, you can explore as never before the relationships, correspondence networks and movement of ideas, the letters and lives of the early modern world." Which is great but that paywall <ouch>

Electronic Enlightenment offers individual subscriptions but they don't tell you how much they cost. And as the adage goes, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. #DigitizingEnlightenment

On the whole, I worry that Enlightenment-specific databases are too focused on France and Britain and pay insufficient attention to women (esp outside salons), colonialism, slavery, science, and medicine and I worry about the effect that will have #DigitizingEnlightenment

on future research questions and who will be attracted to work in eighteenth-century studies. #DigitizingEnlightenment

That said, many of the essays in the #DigitizingEnlightenment look wonderful and I'm excited to read them when my copy arrives. No volume can do everything. But we have to be cautious about what we hold up as models for future research and note what's getting left out and why.