(Posted on behalf of Ted Howell)<\/p>\n
As a HASTAC scholar this semester, I\u2019m working on a network visualization project under the title \u201cLinking Literary Ecology, 1859-1962.\u201d In short, I\u2019m mapping social, ideological, and textual connections between early ecologists and late Victorian and modernist writers. Life-science at the turn of the century was dominated by a debate between two positions (roughly): mechanism and holism\/vitalism. It was during this period that ecology emerged as a unique discipline, and what I\u2019m working to establish are the connections between life-scientists (ecologist, especially), literary authors, and the various other thinkers\u2014philosophers, social activists\u2014who popularized and wrote about scientific and\/or literary issues. My ultimate goal is to demonstrate the strong presence in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries of ecological thinking, as well as its diversity and its relevance to literary history. The seven figures pictured above represent a nice cross-section of the type of shared intellectual concerns that my project seeks to map. Here\u2019s a too-brief intro to each that should give you a sense of where the project is going.<\/p>\n Top left: Henry Salt<\/strong>, English writer and social reformer. Famously a vegetarian and pacifist. Influenced by (and wrote a life of) H.D. Thoreau, and introduced Gandhi to Thoreau\u2019s work. Also wrote studies of Percy Bysshe Shelly and Richard Jefferies.<\/p>\n Top center: E.M. Forster<\/strong>, English novelist, critic, and broadcaster. Advocate of rural conservation and, at one point in his long life, a devotee of the figure to his right, Edward Carpenter.<\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/files\/2015\/02\/figure_collage_7-1024x731.jpg\")
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