Classifying Meanings & Documents (E3) - Klingenstein...& Dedeo 2014

[HyunkuKwon]

Post questions about the following exemplary reading here:

Klingenstein, Sara, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon Dedeo. 2014. “The Civilizing Process in London’s Old Bailey.” PNAS 111(26):9419-9424.

[WMhYang]

1. The authors divide the trials into "violent" category and "nonviolent" category. I wonder whether the "any-of" problem would exist here (Forgive me for the lack of knowledge in the field of law). To be specific, will there be any trials that are so controversial that we could hardly categorize them into any of the categories or we might want to put it in both categories?

2. Since the study covers quite a long period of time, would there be any shifts in the texts? For example, the words indicating violence in the 1900s might be different from those in the 1700s. If so, would it be better to divide the time period and examine them separately?

[DSharm]

The authors claim that state bureaucracy played a significant role in the "civilizing process" i.e. bringing the violence levels down in the 19th century. However, their methods and paper - while shedding light on this process as seen through the bureaucracy - does not seem to indicate to me that the state bureaucracy caused these changes. Am I missing something, or can we not use this as causal evidence of bureaucracy's role in the civilizing process?

[shiyipeng70]

In the discussion section, the authors declared that "having eliminated confounds such as jurisdictional changes, as well as changing language use in society at large and trial length and words per trial..." I am not quite clear about the process of eliminating the "changing language use in society at large".