The 18th-Century Common offers a public space for sharing the research of scholars who study eighteenth-century cultures with nonacademic readers.  We present short accounts of scholarly research in accessible, non-specialized language, along with links to original texts, objects, and images, as well as resources for further reading.

Jerid Francom is currently working with the ACTIV-ES corpus to develop an online interface to facilitate the classification and exploration of documents written in Spanish. Combining the Spanish language data and computational methods from information retrieval, the site will allow the public to upload a document of unknown origin, have that document classified as being from […]

Jerid Francom has recently released a novel corpus of ‘everyday’ Spanish language from TV/film dialogues from Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. Initially supported by an NEH Digital Start-up grant, the ACTIV-ES corpus is now available to scholars, instructors, and the general public to use to explore dialect variation in colloquial Spanish.  The data from this project […]

On the eve of its 75th anniversary, St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church (located on East 12th Street in Winston-Salem) invited Michelle Gillespie to help write and preserve its history.  Michelle partnered with Tanya Zanish-Belcher (ZSR Library’s Director of Special Collections & Archives), as well as her students in Honors 391, to help preserve the church’s […]

The students worked with a small group of African-American Vietnam veterans from rural, eastern North Carolina and explored how shared personal experience, the bonds of brotherhood, and the healing power of storytelling allowed these vets to break their years of silence. The students produced a transmedia project that examines the theme of silence through aural, […]

Graduate and undergraduate students explored social, cultural and political expression in Filipino Street Art and created a series of I-books containing short films, graphic art, etc. to support a larger film project on this subject being produced by Wake Forest alums.

In a partnership with Yad Vashem, the world’s premiere Holocaust memorial museum, graduate and undergraduate students worked with animators, composers, artists and dancers on the production of short films and electronic study guides on artists of the Holocaust.  One of these films is now part of a Yad Vashem international traveling exhibit.

Laura Aull’s American Generalizations: The Development and Dangers of the Essay, 1910-2010 aims to offer a corpus-driven look at the relationship between 20th century American generalist essays and the use of overly generalized/universalized claims in U.S. public and student writing today. To do so, the project will (1) explore how the 20th century general readership […]

First-Year University Writing by Laura Aull (with Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) offers a corpus-based analysis of incoming college student writing compared with expert academic writing in a 90-million-word online database of published academic texts. First, the book offers an institution history of why digital, corpus-based analysis has been rare in North American writing studies to date. […]

Laura Aull uses corpus-based analysis tools and online databases to analyze student writing and advanced academic and published magazine writing, with URECA fellows the previous three summers. Students have gone on to present at campus and regional research days and, in the case of two URECA fellows, to present work related to patterns of argumentative […]