ur group is working on two questions in particular: (1) What kinds of experiments could we design to test questions historical, textual, and/or that demand something like abductive reasoning / inference to the best explanation? (2) In designing and executing such experiments, what will we learn about doing experiments that could help us design better experiments and perhaps down the line an ‘experiment’ protocol (not necessarily an experimental protocol) for Re:Enlightenment.

Toward these ends we came up with a few preliminary experiment design ideas that would involve comparing fictional and non-fictional corpora to better understand realism as a descriptive category, among other things. We have settled on the topic of how crowds are represented historically (the rationale being it would be useful to examine representations that are inter-subjective rather than dependent on individual point of view). One idea for a hypothesis we want to test is: Crowds are represented as more hostile in fiction than in non-fictional accounts. We envision comparing fictional and non-fictional corpora that both comment on a singular event, such as the ’45 or the Whiskey Rebellion. But we also see value in ‘crowd-sourcing’ an understanding of crowds, looking at fictional and non-fictional corpora of crowd representations over time and across different events (a quick look at vector spaces for ‘crowd’ in corpora that Mark had on hand show associations with ‘multitude,’ ‘throngs,’ ‘swarms,’ ‘hordes,’ and change when one removes animal/beast/insect contexts, for example). We also envision this work leading to a ‘crowd detector’ tool that would be able to locate crowd scenes in a text or corpus.

Action items: (1) Put together an initial corpus to experiment with; (2) Yohei has been putting together a literature review of examples of experimental work outside the sciences and social sciences, and will continue work on this.