In 1971, Paul Fortier created a computer program to save significant time in analyzing French literary theme words connected to semantic fields. The system, aptly called THEME, harnessed the capabilities of computer-generated keyword concordances with frequency and distribution calculations to create research reports for user-defined literary themes. Fortier's system represents a significant achievement for digital humanities, not only due to its impressive capabilities but also for the precedents the system created in conceptualizing the role of the computer in text analysis. This paper discusses efforts to recover the THEME system and create a working approximation of the system in Python. This effort is part of Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell's Epistemologica project that seeks to recover, valorize, and interpret historical text analysis in the humanities
