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<pre>
                                                       Invited Talk




               Lovejoy’s Dream – Or How to do History of Ideas Computationally
                                 in a Methodologically Sound Way

                                                      Arianna Betti
                                                 University of Amsterdam




Abstract :

History of ideas is a discipline largely founded by Arthur O. Lovejoy in the early twentieth century. Lovejoy characterized it
as being concerned with unit-ideas, entities that retain their meaning through time and can therefore be traced in various
contexts, that is, periods, intellectual settings, and disciplinary fields (Lovejoy 1936: 3-7, 15).

Now suppose a historian of ideas wants to trace an idea such as a truth through two-thousand years. According to WorldCat,
17,843,437 books have been published only between 1700 and 1900. How is a historian of ideas even supposed to think that
such quantities of text can be studied with the historian’s traditional method of investigation, namely close reading on one’s
own?

One might think that with today’s digital means, such a study is finally possible. However, things are not that simple. First,
we are far from the universal corpus we should be able to rely on for such an enterprise. Second, even with a universal corpus
at our disposal, generic, simple and shallow bottom-up analyses of lots of diverse, ‘long’ and complex data is going to fail.
For in a field such as this, feeding a computer masses of diverse and complex texts can only yield masses of unorganized
details. Third, even if it were possible to make sense of such results computationally, there are fundamental problems with
the very method of the history of ideas. The notion of one idea traceable through centuries of thought is illusory: for ideas
cannot be studied in isolation from their context, and their meaning is in constant flux (Skinner 2002).

In this talk I elucidate a specific proposal for concept modelling to solve in particular the last two problems. I also show in
what way my proposal is able to give a theoretical foundation to answering the need for dynamic ontologies, so that a
computational turn can be effectively taken to history of ideas and related disciplines.

(based on joint work with Hein van den Berg)


	
                                      	
  




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