Work

Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers

Year: 2022

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: The industrialization process associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution in 19 thcentury Great Britain was a time of profound changes, including in the English lexicon.An important yet understudied phenomenon is the semantic shift in the lexicon of mechanisation.In this paper we present the first large-scale analysis of terms related to mechanization over the course of the 19 th century in English.We draw on a corpus of historical British newspapers comprising 4.6 billion tokens and train historical word embedding models.We test existing semantic change detection techniques and analyse the results in light of previous historical linguistic scholarship.

Source: International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities (NLP4DH)

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2022.nlp4dh-1.12

Authors: Nilo Pedrazzini, Barbara McGillivray

Institutions: The Alan Turing Institute, King's College London

Language: English

Topic: Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid