The Dictionary project was valuable at least as much for the process of creating it as for the finished product.

As with most pedagogical experiments, the Dictionary project was valuable at least as much for the discussions generated by the process of creating it as for the usefulness of the finished product. Indeed, we have been surprised and even alarmed to hear that it has been used by some classes as a reference work. It was certainly not our goal or intention to create a polished or definitive tool to be abstracted from an experimental context and used in this way.

Nevertheless, the final step of publication and distribution of the project did play an essential role in our experinence of the Dictionary. The idea of a public audience generated for us the impulse to re-examine and re-articulate the critical and methodological commitments that we made as we built the Dictionary.

Furthermore, we do imagine that the Dictionary may be useful to others, even as a means of producing knowledge about the materials contained in it. Sifting through or even browsing the entries of the Dictionary can serve to begin the process of recapturing the discourses traced there and recalling the spirit of the age -- the basic sensibilities of thinkers from the Age of Sensibility.

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