Political vocabulary of eighteenth-century Britain

University of Helsinki (Finland)

Objectives: How was politics operationalised in the print discourse of eighteenth-century Britain? As with ESR7 and ESR8, this project will apply computational methods to traditional historical enquiry, exploring possible parallels and discontinuities with Skinnerian intellectual history. It will draw upon CASCADE expertise in techniques including concept modelling and distributional semantics, and (with ESR10, Yu Wu) seek to triage problems presented by historical text collections digitised using optical character recognition. ESR9 will: 1) map the development of political vocabulary in eighteenth-century Britain; 2) lay groundwork for developing a theory of meaning change with respect to the history of ideas.  

Ke will have access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO); the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC); CERL Heritage of the Printed Book; and British Library Newspapers. They will have support from VARIENG research group.  

Expected Results: 
1) A study of political vocabulary development in 18th-century Britain.
2) Theoretical reflections on meaning change in the history of ideas.
3) Principles for effective collaborations with computer scientists.
4) Insights into the challenge of dirty OCR with different approaches to computational semantics. Ke will present research at D7.4. 

Planned secondments:  CSC IT Center For Science (Year 3, 5 months contributing to tool development, implementation and integration within CSC’s existing systems). Also visiting: USFD (concept modelling); KULEUVEN (distributional semantics).