Digital Conceptual History and the Emergence of a Globalized Climate Imaginary
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
This article offers an exploratory quantitative analysis of the conceptual career of climate in US English over the period 1800–2010. Our aim is to qualify two, closely related arguments circulating in Environmental Humanities scholarship regarding the concept’s history, namely that we only started to think of climate as a global entity after the introduction of general circulation models during the final quarter of the twentieth century, and, second, that climatic change only became an issue of environmental concern once scientists began to approach climate as a global model. While we do not dispute that the computer revolution resulted in a significantly new understanding of climate, our analysis points to a longer process of singularization and growing abstraction starting in the early nineteenth century that might help to nuance and deepen insights developed in environmental history.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Contributions to the History of Concepts |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 2 |
Pages (from-to) | 95-122 |
ISSN | 1807-9326 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© Berghahn Books.
- climate, digital conceptual history, distributional semantics, environment, Environmental Humanities, green politics, network analysis, word embeddings
Research areas
ID: 366045976