Recreating the Network of Early Modern Natural Philosophy:A Mono- and Multilingual Text Data Vectorization Method

How could one create a network representation of a book corpus spanning over two hundred years? In this paper, we present a method based on text data vectorization for a complex and multifaceted network representation of an early modern corpus of 239 natural philosophy textbooks published in Latin, French, and English. On the one hand, we use unsupervised methods (namely topic modeling, term frequency – inverse document frequency, and multilingual word embeddings) to represent the broader features of this corpus, such as the homogeneity in the style and linguistic usages, both among works written in the same language, and across multiple languages. On the other hand, we use the collocate analysis of specific keywords to explore how certain concepts were understood, reshaped, and disseminated in the corpus. We call this the ‘semantic dimension.’ Each of these two dimensions provides a different way of correlating the books via text data vectorization and representing them as a network. Since each of these dimensions is in itself complex and multifaceted, the network we construct for each of them is a multiplex one, made of several layer-graphs. Furthermore, provided that there is enough information available about the authors of the works included in our inventory, this research offers the grounds for further expanding the described network representation in such a way as to create a third multiplex, one that explores some of the social features of the authors in question

Adolescent Social Media Interaction and Authorial Stance in Indonesian Teen Fiction

This article examines representations of adolescent social media interaction in two Indonesian teen novels to show how adolescent communication styles are typified. It is argued that public discourse on the potential danger of social media interaction is resounded in the novels. The article demonstrates that the authors of both novels take a similar moral stance on the issue of social media but use different rhetorical strategies for indexing that stance. Both draw on the social values of registers to communicate the stance. In Online addicted, standard Indonesian is used in narration to convey an authoritative voice and a stern moral tone, while the gaul register indexes an alignment with favourable aspects of the protagonist's character. In Jurnal Jo online, gaul is similarly given a positive value by virtue of its juxtaposition with the Alay register. In this novel, gaul is the preferred, standard register. In both novels, there is a strong orientation toward “standardness”

Programming Language Feature Agglomeration

Feature-creep is a well-known phenomenon in software systems. In this paper, we argue that feature-creep also occurs in the domain of programming languages. Recent languages are more expressive than earlier languages. However recent languages generally extend rather than replace the syntax (sometimes) and semantics (almost always) of earlier languages. We demonstrate this trend of agglomeration in a sequence of languages comprising Pascal, C, Java, and Scala. These are all block-structured Algol-derived languages, with earlier languages providing explicit inspiration for later ones. We present empirical evidence from several language-specific sources, including grammar definitions and canonical manuals. The evidence suggests that there is a trend of increasing complexity in modern languages that have evolved from earlier languages