Expanding the Corpus of Early Modern Natural Philosophy

Each book its own Babel

“…Here, I introduce multilayer key-word-based networks as they have been developed in the context of the ERC-project. (Sangiacomo et al 2022c;Sangiacomo and Tanasescu 2022).…”

“…Another route could be to work with ever more of the metadata that is available about the works and the authors. The aforementioned connection in terms of social factors is being done by colleagues participating in the project (Sangiacomo et al 2022c;Donker, forthcoming). In this dissertation, however, I will tie together all the works by extracting sparse vector models of word meanings.…”

“…In section four, I introduce the corpus that will be studied throughout the dissertation. The full rationale and the composition of the whole corpus have been accounted for in several collective contributions (Sangiacomo et al 2021a;2021b;2022b). The corpus is made up of early modern works on natural philosophy, often textbooks or textbook-like.…”

“…In the fifth and final section, I combine the methods discussed in section three and the corpus introduced in section four, to formulate a proposal (developed partly in Sangiacomo et al 2022c) to use vector methodology to link together different books in their specific usage of different words. Tying together all the works in the corpus results in a network representation based on their pairwise similarities.…”

“…The main thrust of Chapter 3 follows that of the article. Additionally, parts of a team paper (Sangiacomo et al 2022c) are found in section 1.6 in which parts of the co-developed method are detailed.…”