Fields, Patchworks and Semantic Fingerprints

CAS Digital Humanities Seminar: "Fields, Patchworks and Semantic Fingerprints"

A seminar from Dr Marc Alexander, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/marcalexander/

The database of the Historical Thesaurus of English (Kay et al 2009) is the world’s largest thesaurus and the most complete thesaurus of English, arranging into hierarchical semantic categories all the recorded meanings expressed in the language from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. This talk uses this dataset in order to visualize change in the history of English from a range of perspectives; by combining digital humanities visualization techniques with the data provided in the Thesaurus, it is now possible to take a long-range view of change in the culture and history of the English-speaking peoples. This includes investigating areas of trauma in the history of the language, areas of rapid growth, and areas of relative stability, through taking ‘slices’ of the data at various points in the history of English (such as in the time of Chaucer or Shakespeare in addition to the present day).

The seminar will be followed by refreshments in the Highfield House Cloisters.