Conference article

How Can Big Data Help Us Study Rhetorical History?

Jon Viklund
Department of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden

Lars Borin
Språkbanken/Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

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Published in: Selected Papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2015, October 14–16, 2015, Wroclaw, Poland

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 123:7, p. 79-93

NEALT Proceedings Series 28:7, p. 79-93

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Published: 2016-04-11

ISBN: 978-91-7685-765-6

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

Rhetorical history is traditionally studied through rhetorical treatises or selected rhetorical practices, for example the speeches of major orators. Although valuable sources, these do not give us the answers to all our questions. Indeed, focus on a few canonical works or the major historical key figures might even lead us to reproduce cultural self-identifications and false generalizations. However, thanks to increasing availability of relevant digitized texts, we are now at a point where it is possible to see how new research questions can be formulated – and how old research questions can be addressed from a new angle or established results verified – on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than small samples, but where a methodology has not yet established itself. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) We wish to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale corpus studies (“text mining”) in the field of rhetorical history, and hopefully point to some interesting research problems and how they can be analyzed using “big-data” methods. (2) In doing this, we also aim to make a contribution to method development in e-science for the humanities and social sciences, and in particular in the framework of CLARIN.

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