5. Classifying Meanings & Documents - [E2] 2. Klingenstein, Sara, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon Dedeo. 2014.

[JunsolKim]

Post questions here for this week's exemplary readings: 2. Klingenstein, Sara, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon Dedeo. 2014. “The Civilizing Process in London’s Old Bailey.” PNAS 111(26):9419-9424.

[ValAlvernUChic]

I wanted to clarify what exactly the authors were aiming toward with this article. Unless I misunderstand, it seems like their methods show that they could plausibly link bureaucratic and policy change to the discursive shifts in how non-violent and violent crimes are discussed in court but the language of the article suggests they are making a causal claim.

[NaiyuJ]

This is a really insightful article! One question in my mind after reading it is how we can infer the cultural framing of some social concepts by only analyzing the changing pattern of words. It is fascinating to see how violent and nonviolent indictments evolved over time, but as the author said, the civilizing process was a deep-rooted and multivalent phenomenon. I mean, for this sort of topic, should we combine qualitative study and text analysis? I feel like qualitative analysis is kind of necessary in this context.

[Jasmine97Huang]

A super cool article. One thing though, when dealing with old language corpus like this, is the messiness of the data. Any tips on cleaning text like this (i.e. lemmatization versus stemming)?

[ZacharyHinds]

It is really interesting to see change in discourse around these crimes over this timescale, especially as they discuss the factors which influenced this shift apart for violent crimes. I agree with NaiyuJ that inferring the cultural context, though, seems difficult given the content they are analyzing. I wonder, how would the contexts of these crimes within other forms of text (literature, newspapers, etc.) from over the same time periods appear if given a similar analysis?