Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship

0517953 - FLÚ 2020 RIV DE eng M - Část monografie knihy
Urbánek, Vladimír - Storchová, Lucie - Trausan-Matu, S. - Dascalu, M.
Natural Language Processing: Shifting Rhetorical Strategies in Comenius’s Correspondence with Three Separate Communitites.
Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, 2019 - (Hotson, H.; Wallnig, T.), s. 428-432. ISBN 978-3-86395-403-1
Grant ostatní: COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)(BE) COST Action IS1310
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: J. A. Comenius * correspondence * rhetorical analysis * Natural language processing * qualitative analysis * quantitative analysis
Obor OECD: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

The study focuses on analysis of Comenius’s letters sent between 1630 and 1642. A total corpus was chosen consisting of thirty-three letters addressed to three distinct communities. The expansion and diversification of his correspondence in this period posed a rhetorical challenge. As Comenius developed very different relationships with several distinct scholarly communities, he needed to diversify his epistolary styles and to develop rhetorical strategies appropriate to each. This posed the key research questions. Did Comenius employ different rhetorical and stylistic strategies and discuss different major topics with each of these communities? Can Natural language processing (NLP) techniques provide a quantitative foundation for a qualitative scholarly answer to the first question? In the first step the analysis showed that Comenius used very specific styles to address three groups of his correspondence partners: German educational reformers, the Danzig circle and the Hartlib circle. After undertaking the historical, and rhetorical analysis, the same texts were analysed using the NLP framework ReaderBench. Statistical analyses focused on lexical and semantic features were performed to investigate the differences in the writing style of letters addressed to the three communities. These methods revealed significant differences between the three groups. The results are richly documented by figures. The affirmative answers to both of research questions open up a broad field for further experimentation.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0303452