Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon off-sets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). Concern with the morality of consumption is not new to capitalist societies; we can find debates on the ethics of consumption in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A team of students led by Dr. Astrid Giugni (English, Duke) and Dr. Jessica Hines (English, Birmingham Southern College) will analyze approximately 60,000 Medieval and Renaissance digitized texts by performing topic modelling, which will allow them to track associations between the languages of consumer culture and ethical practice.The team will organize their results in a series of visualizations that trace the development of the ethics of ‘consumerism’ in terms of frequency of use, timeline of relevant events, authorship, location of publication and name of printer/printing press, and genres.