This chapter characterises the beginning of the 1810s as a transitional moment for both early feminist thought and cultural conceptions of intellectual disability. Through a sustained reading of Lucy Aikin’s critically underexamined Epistles on Women (1810), the chapter argues that the long, combative poem articulates an intersectional appeal to feminine-coded weakness, idiocy, and disability. The opening question of the poem, ‘when was ever weakness in the right?’, pits a utopian matriarchal future against the overwhelming misogyny and brutality of the masculinist past. Aikin’s revisionist history begins in Eden with Eve’s assiduous care for the ‘moping idiot’ Adam and ends in the modern era with the new ideal of feminine friendship supplanting compulsory ideologies of heteropatriarchal marriage. Throughout, Aikin creatively develops a compelling feminist aesthetics and ethics grounded in the complex trope of idiocy and neurodiversity.

This chapter uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to illustrate and advance the idea of the expert knowledge commons. The IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, charged with advancing scientific knowledge about climate change in order to inform public policy decision-making. As an institution and instrument of authority grounded in scientific expertise, the IPCC has come to play a critical role in advancing political, cultural, and economic awareness of the character of climate change. The IPCC has been the subject of a great deal of research, none of which has focused directly on the manner in which its authoritative status rests both formally and informally on multiple layers of shared knowledge, information, and data. This chapter uses the IPCC’s governance of that shared knowledge to motivate and illustrate a model of expert knowledge commons.

The roots of London English go back – in the textual record – to the Middle English period and already in the 1300s exhibit features which reveal diverse and multilingual influences, e.g. from medieval French and Latin. The examination of morphological features characteristic of this urban variety in its early stages is helpful in constructing a linguistic profile for early London English. Data sources for this include guild certificates, accounts and company records, with London English in later centuries being recorded by orthoepists (in the 1600s) who list sounds characteristic of speech in the capital which later fed into supraregional varieties in the south of England in general. These phonological traits, and many which were specific to London, are attested in literary documents in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 7 discusses lawsuits in which spelling and punctuation were at the basis of the dispute. One involved the Salesforce Company, which uses the trademark SALESFORCE written as a single word, as opposed to the two-word SALES FORCE, which is generally used as a descriptive compound for a group of salespeople responsible for selling the goods or services of a company, i.e. any company. It is shown, on the basis of various corpora sensitive to spellings and word separations, that SALESFORCE has indeed achieved unique reference and source identification. The chapter then discusses MOVIEGUIDE, which was similarly claimed to be a trademark, but on this occasion semantic and corpus evidence showed that the two-word MOVIE GUIDE and the one-word MOVIEGUIDE were used interchangeably, both as generic terms. Finally, a lawsuit is discussed in which the dispute centered around who exactly was covered by insurance in the phrase THE NAMED INSURED: X, Y as a result of the comma between X and Y.

Our natural environment constitutes a complex and dynamic global ecosystem that provides essential resources for well-being and survival. Yet the environment is also subject to unprecedented threats from human activities, such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and the overexploitation of natural resources. This volume argues that such complex, multidimensional challenges demand equally complex, multidimensional solutions and calls for coordinated multistakeholder action at all scales, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals. To meet the moment effectively, such interventions require both scientific knowledge about how the environment functions and social and institutional knowledge about the actors involved in environmental governance and management. Chapters include case studies of environmental knowledge collection, management, and sharing to explore how data and knowledge sharing can inform effective multistakeholder action to combat global threats to our environment. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter explores the interplay between community, capitalism, and cultural production within Detroit’s hip-hop underground. It focuses on the women-centered collective The Foundation (2009–2014) and its contemporary counterpart We Are Culture Creators (WACC). The Foundation championed women in hip-hop and intergenerational collaboration but faced insurmountable economic challenges. WACC’s transition from nonprofit to hybrid nonprofit–LLC highlights new avenues that arts organizations are pursuing in their efforts to secure funding. The study also highlights the socioeconomic complexities of Detroit’s revitalization during the city’s municipal bankruptcy, with gentrification and neoliberal capitalism often undermining grassroots creative arts’ efforts. The chapter situates Detroit’s hip-hop underground as a microcosm of broader tensions between cultural resistance, community building, and capitalist pressures. It also advocates for the reestablishment of connections between contemporary hip-hop innovations and educational as well as community-oriented practices, which were integral to the work of the Foundation.

Our natural environment constitutes a complex and dynamic global ecosystem that provides essential resources for well-being and survival. Yet the environment is also subject to unprecedented threats from human activities, such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and the overexploitation of natural resources. This volume argues that such complex, multidimensional challenges demand equally complex, multidimensional solutions and calls for coordinated multistakeholder action at all scales, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals. To meet the moment effectively, such interventions require both scientific knowledge about how the environment functions and social and institutional knowledge about the actors involved in environmental governance and management. Chapters include case studies of environmental knowledge collection, management, and sharing to explore how data and knowledge sharing can inform effective multistakeholder action to combat global threats to our environment. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter argues that the decade of the 1810s, especially when understood as ‘the Regency’, reflects a vision of time as static and repetitive, resistant to what Walter Benjamin famously called ‘homogenous, empty time’. To this end, this chapter looks at an unusual textual archive, nineteenth-century flagellation pornography. Two works are analysed with differing connections to the decade: Venus School-Mistress, probably published in 1810, and The Rodiad, written in 1871 but masquerading as a text of the 1810s. Comparing these two texts – one an authentic product of the period, the other an erotic antiquarian hoax – reveals not just the consistent temporal multiplicity of nineteenth-century pornography. It also demonstrates how the 1810s take on a paradoxical historiographical role as a specific example of the repetitive sameness of time. In so doing, the chapter aims to recast the idea of ‘the 1810s’ as a node of reactionary resistance to the temporality of liberal progress.

Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE) encompass a wide range of socially indexed varieties, which are bound together as ‘Scottish’, and distinguished from other varieties of English, by a particular set of vowel duration patterns, the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). In this chapter, we exploit recent technological advances for automated speech corpus analysis to provide the first large-scale analysis of vowel timing in 234k tokens from Scottish SPADE, a new meta-corpus of naturally occurring speech from more than 700 speakers of regional Scots and SSE. We confirm that the SVLR is now largely limited to /i ʉ/, and show evidence consistent with subtle weakening over the twentieth century. However, at the same time, our analysis also reveals a new and unexpected general Scottish pattern of very short vowels (an Anti-Voicing Effect) where lengthening occurs in other accents of English, which serves to maintain a clearly distinctive phonological character for Scottish English.

Reality entertainment first appeared in the late 1980s, with the emergence of the TV entertainment genre – inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime talk shows hosted by Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. Yet what we now call “reality TV” emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil and borrowed its techniques – what rappers Ice Cube and Ice-T called “reality rap.” While N.W.A.’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ countered Cops’ vision of Black lives in America, subsequent reality rappers such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur embraced tabloid spectacle and the media’s obsession with Black criminality. Reality rap and reality TV, this chapter contends, were twin components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium by borrowing journalistic tropes while dispensing with the professionalism and responsibility demanded of reporting.

The 1810s saw a flurry of poems published in the Italianate form of ottava rima. This chapter focuses specifically on ottava rima poems that reflect on the role of expectation and anticipation in listening. This includes episodes of mishearing, which show how anticipation sometimes distorts perception. We hear what we expect or want to hear. The form of ottava rima, with its interlocking rhymes and closing couplet, presents an exaggerated example of the role of expectation at work in rhyme. The brief popularity of ottava rima in the 1810s also offers a neat marker for periodisation, which raises questions about how a given form was read at a given time and addresses the challenges of exemplarity and historical poetics.