The Many Ways to Talk about the Transits of Venus: Astronomical Discourses in Philosophical Transactions, 1753–1777

Abstract

<h2>Abstract </h2><p>This article exemplifies what kind of things can be found with topic modeling, an established text-mining methodology in the digital humanities, and critically discusses what do the topics tell about the public discussions of astronomy in the third quarter of the 18^thcentury. As it is typical in the digital humanities field, this approach combines various methods and appliesboth temporal topic modeling with a software called Mallet and the Cultural historical close reading for summarizing a large text corpus into the most common topics and analyzing the wide and also particular trends in the early communications of the Society, <i>the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London</i></p><p>Based on a cultural historical close reading of text mining results it is suggested that there were six simultaneous discourses that circulated the observing of the two Transits of Venus in the 1760s. During the 25 years prior Joseph Banks´ era as the president of the Society, the amount of causal theories lessened, and there were examples of the use of algebra as an explanation for events. Discourses commenting the weather gained a larger share in the astronomical topics by the time of the second transit. The talk about weather even allowed the responsibility from the failures to be handed out for the nature while upcoming new opportunities were propagandized. The examination of the topics also indicate a connection between the politeness and a strategic search for attention through the remarkable event.</p>