Developing Veritrace’s Computational Approach to Tracing the Influence of Ancient Wisdom in Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Developing Veritrace’s Computational Approach to Tracing the Influence of Ancient Wisdom in Early Modern Natural Philosophy

Summary/Abstract: This article introduces the computational approach of the VERITRACE project, which aims to trace the influence of ancient wisdom writings on early modern natural philosophy using advanced digital tools. It outlines the project’s scope, data sources, and methodology, combining distant and close reading of a large multilingual, diachronic corpus. The article describes the initial phases of data acquisition, highlighting challenges encountered and solutions developed. Key digital capabilities being implemented are discussed, including keyword search, text matching, sentiment analysis, and latent thematic analyses like Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Early results demonstrating the potential of these methods are shared through a case study examining the influence of the first English translation of The Divine Pymander in 1650. The article concludes with lessons learned so far and suggestions for shared digital humanities infrastructure to support future large-scale textual analysis projects.

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