| Abstract |
The sheer amount of digital historical material available on sites such as archive.org or JSTOR raises a momentous question for the humanities scholar: is it possible to scale up our methods while compromising as little as possible of the nature of our traditional investigations? How?
In this talk I address that question from the viewpoint of the history of philosophical ideas - a broadly interdisciplinary, large-scale humanities-based approach to the history of human thought rather than a discipline. I divide the talk into four parts. I (1) introduce my own, novel qualitative approach to the longitudinal study of the (meaning of) concepts, 'the model approach to the history of ideas', according to which concepts are modelled as networks of related terms with stable and variable parts to account for change-in-continuity; (2) touch upon how the approach scales up to big corpora lending itself to quantitative analysis by adopting an annotation method rather common in the social sciences but new for my field; (3) mention recent work that adds to this (mixed, qualitative-qualitative) method full-blown computational techniques based on bottom-up information retrieval/distributional semantics; (4) describe current work in which we endeavour to combine a powerful top-down modelling approach using formal ontologies and bottom-up information retrieval/distributional semantics, and conclude with a number of challenges arising from this effort.
(based on joint work with Veruska Zamborlini & Jan Wielemaker (4); Jelke Bloem & Annapaola Ginammi (3, 4); Antske Fokkens, Pia Sommerauer & Francois Meyer (3); Yvette Oortwijn, Shenghui Wang & Rob Koopman (2, 3); Maria Chiara Parisi, Caspar Treijtel (2); Hein van den Berg, Thijs Ossenkoppele (1, 2)).
Some further readings for the points I discuss:
Towards a Computational History of Ideas (preprint at the link below!)
https://bibbase.org/network/publication/betti-vandenberg-towardsacomputationalhistoryofideas-2016
History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros (preprint at the link below!)
https://bibbase.org/network/publication/betti-vandenberg-oortwijn-treijtel-historyofphilosophyinonesandzeros[inpresspublicationexpectedmarch2019]-2019
Bolzano, Kant and the Traditional Theory of Concepts - A Computational Investigation (under review, available on request)
https://bibbase.org/network/publication/ginammi-bloem-koopman-wang-betti-bolzanokantandthetraditionaltheoryofconceptsacomputationalinvestigation[underreview][commissionedforvolumeundercontract]-2019 |