TY - JOUR

T1 - Digital Conceptual History and the Emergence of a Globalized Climate Imaginary

AU - Boyden, Michael

AU - Basirat, Ali

AU - Berglund, Karl

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Berghahn Books.

PY - 2022/12

Y1 - 2022/12

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - climate

KW - digital conceptual history

KW - distributional semantics

KW - environment

KW - Environmental Humanities

KW - green politics

KW - network analysis

KW - word embeddings

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85148879480&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3167/choc.2022.170205

DO - 10.3167/choc.2022.170205

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85148879480

VL - 17

SP - 95

EP - 122

JO - Contributions to the History of Concepts

JF - Contributions to the History of Concepts

SN - 1807-9326

IS - 2

ER -