n February I would like to tell the group about a book that I have just finished, and which I am thinking about in terms of various issues Re:Enlightenment. This book charts semantic change across the eighteenth-century British corpus of texts, using distant reading methods. It is exploratory and not conclusive work, at the heart of which is a digital measure of lexical co-association that highlights patterns in the distribution of lexis throughout the corpus in different tranches of natural language data.

My hope is that semantic change may begin to inform us about how knowledge was constructed by the collective of texts that comprise Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Exactly what associations between words can tell us about knowledge is by no means securely understood or assumed, neither here, nor in any of the literature on distributional semantics, corpus linguistics or computationally-driven epistemology. Coming to a sounder understanding of how word uses produce and structure knowledge in the historical corpus is one of this book’s objectives.

In February, then, I would like to give more detail about this book, and to discuss the problems that it has. That is, to broach the strong scepticism with which a project like this is met; whether this is merited, what kind of project it has become in response to this scepticism etc.