The Rivers of the Anthropocene Literature Database and the Transmission of Environmental Concepts

Abstract

The Rivers of the Anthropocene project aims to conduct a comparative study of two rivers, the Ohio in the United States and the Tyne in the United Kingdom, over the course of the industrial era and show how those rivers have been affected by anthropogenic action. Through this comparison the project aims to open a dialogue between the humanities and the sciences by breaking down barriers between what is considered historical and scientific data. A key component in this task is the creation of a database of literature published about the rivers in question. To this end, this phase of the project has collected metadata from several library catalogs operated by a number of government and non-profit agencies, filling in gaps in the metadata relevant to the project along the way. As one of the key focuses of the project is how ideas are transmitted across not only academic disciplines, but between academia, government and the public; I have analyzed a selection of government publications over time looking for changes in vocabulary and context associated with changing ideas about the environment and compared them to other textual analysis tools like Google’s N-gram. In doing this I have uncovered some interesting relationships between language and policy.