Distinguishing Discourses: a Data-Driven Analysis of Works and Publishing Networks of the Scottish Enlightenment. Presentation.
Creators: name: Tiihonen, Iiro
name: Ryan, Yann
name: Pivovarova, Lidia
name: Liimatta, Aatu
name: Säily, Tanja
name: Tolonen, Mikko
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: computational history
eighteenth-century studies
economic discourse
social network analysis

description: This presentation is based on - although it only summarizes many elements and contains additional motivation and insights from the research process about others - an upcoming article with the same title. The current abstract of the article is given below:<br> <br> A key feature of the Enlightenment is the development of a discourse on commerce and economy entangled in larger discussions around politics, morality, and progress. However, this discourse was not formalised in the way it may be seen today. Instead, it was an emerging subject incorporating diverse and contested ideas. The objective of this case study, then, is to use various methods to identify the boundaries of these emerging economic, political, and moral discourses in a data driven way, using a unified version of the metadata (e.g. publisher, publication year, format of the print product) of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and full texts of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). We approach the task iteratively, first making a separation between broadly defined economic documents and other eighteenth century documents by modeling the features which separate samples from two collections of historical economic texts from the wider ECCO data. Then, based on the previous step, we distinguish works similar to Hume's \textit{Political Discourses} (a text widely seen as the epitome of the Scottish Enlightenment) from other branches of commercial and economic discourse, and analyse this set of works in more detail. We also experiment on how a purely unsupervised approach -- a contextualized topic model using BERT encodings -- groups our set of economic texts. Previous historical scholarship has taken the perspective that we ought to identify language use from large corpora of text. The aim has been to contextually understand language from the perspective of a particular group of historical actors or, as is the case with conceptual historians, detect contested and changing concepts. Our approach is different in that we closely link language use to the material and historical circumstances of the individual texts within which these uses can be found. Essentially, we combine computation and social network analysis with the study of changing concepts and word uses over time, taking individual editions rather than language abstracted from them as the basic object of study. This approach allows us to identify additional contextually relevant works by both their linguistic features, and the material and network history of their production. Jointly, the combination of iterative data-driven discourse detection and the focus on manifested editions allows us not only to extract a significant proportion of the Scottish Enlightenment discourse in a data driven manner, but to link it to the social networks and commercial context in which it was produced and evolved. This approach allows us to evaluate the existence, scope, and social and economic contexts of historical discourses (in particular, economic discourse) in the eighteenth century in a way which is both computationally state-of-the-art and relevant to historical practices and interests. It also demonstrates how data-driven analysis and the traditional hermeneutic approach of the humanities can be combined with an iterative approach to study meanings and their changes over time.