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Terms denoting comparison: The semantics of comparing from the sixteenth to the twentieth century

This subproject is exploring the semantics of comparing in Europe since 1500. The inquiry proceeds on three levels: terms denoting practices of comparing, explicit definitions of comparing, and speech acts (sentences) that perform comparisons. The basic hypothesis for the early modern period is that comparisons in the form of analogies were on the decline, whereas progressive comparisons, embedded in perceptions of competition, were on the increase. Finally, since 1800, there has been a growing importance of comparisons that stress equivalence in spite of difference or even complete incomparability.

Other Access

The information on this page (the dataset metadata) is also available in these formats.

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via the DKAN API

Topics

Practices of Cultural Comparison, Practices of Literary Comparison, Practices of Political Comparison

Utopias of the 15th century to present

Corpus consisting of English utopias ranging from the 15th century till the present. In total it consists of 25 different utopias as shown in the list below:

  • Adam Sternbergh - 2014 - Shovel Ready
  • Aldous Huxley - 1932 - Brave New World
  • Anthony Burgess - 1962 - Clockwork Orange
  • Edward Bellamy - 1888 - Looking Backward
  • Ernest Callenbach - 1975 - Ecotopia
  • Eugen Richter - 1893 - Pictures of a Socialistic Future
  • Francis Bacon - 1627 - New Atlantis
  • George Orwell - 1949 - 1984
  • Henry Thomas - 1877 - The American
  • Isaac Asimov - 1950 - I Robot
  • Jack London - 1998 - The Iron Heel
  • Jewgnij Samjatin - 1924 - We
  • Karin Boye - 1940 - Kallocain
  • Kurt Vonnegut - 1952 - Player Piano
  • Louis Sébastien Mercier - 1771 - Memoirs of the Year 2500
  • Mary Shelly - 1826 - The Last Man
  • Michael Young - 1958 - Rise of the Meritocracy
  • Murray Leinster - 1946 - A Logic Named Joe
  • Philipp K. Dick - 1968 - Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep
  • Phlyllis Dorothey James - 1992 - The Children of Men
  • Ray Bradbury - 1953 - Fahrenheit 451
  • Samuel Butler - 1872 - Erewhon
  • Thomas Morus - 1516 - Utopia
  • William Gibson - 1984 - Neuromancer
  • William Morris - 1890 - News from Nowhere

These 25 texts either have been collected as TXT or PDF files. Utopias that have been gathered as PDF files were subjected to optical character recognition (OCR) via tesseract. All 25 TXT files were subjected to natural language processing (NLP). NLP processes include among others part of speech tagging (POS) and semantic tagging using the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS).

Files that are the result of either an NLP or OCR process are named accordingly with "(NLP/OCR results)". The original TXT or PDF files either used for NLP or OCR processes are missing said naming convention.

Data and Resources