Firstlings: Early Results on Attitudes towards Animals in Early Modern Dutch Texts

How have Dutch attitudes towards animals changed over time? Here, we look at a time frame that has been constitutional to modern societal norms and behavior: the Early Modern Period. We present early results, not showing the attitudinal changes over time yet, but focusing on giving a proof of the technological, methodological principle for the pipeline we developed in order to chart attitudinal changes in the next stage of the research.
In short, we present (1) a pipeline to study historical attitudes towards nature at scale; (2) proof of concept, showing that this pipeline registers various, very distinctive attitudes towards animals in the cited Early Modern Dutch texts; (3) we embed this technological, methodological work in a theoretical framework connected to Environmental Humanities, demonstrating how to implement digital and computational methods in such a field.