This paper introduces computational methods to analyze semantic change in historical texts, focusing on the period between 1720 and 1960 using the British Periodicals Online corpus. By applying word embedding models and measuring semantic distance over time, the study examines key concepts from intellectual historians like Raymond Williams and Reinhart Koselleck, including "culture," "liberty," and "revolution." The analysis reveals two periods of accelerated semantic change: one aligning with Koselleck's hypothesized Sattelzeit (1770-1830) and another in the early 20th century. These periods exhibit distinct patterns of semantic transformation, with the earlier period characterized by abstraction and nominalization of concepts, while the later period shows trends toward concretization and commodification. The paper argues that these findings both support and complicate the Sattelzeit hypothesis, suggesting the possibility of multiple "Sattelzeiten" throughout modern history. This computational approach offers new ways to quantify and visualize semantic change, contributing to new methods for conceptual history.

Speaker's info:

Ryan Heuser (University of Cambridge) is a literary historian and computational humanist with fifteen years of experience in researching and teaching in the digital humanities. His doctoral training is in eighteenth-century British literature; he completed his dissertation in 2019 in Stanford University’s English department. At Stanford, he was a founding member and Associate Research Director of the Stanford Literary Lab, where he led the computational development and experimental design of five of its publications. From 2019 to 2022, he was Junior Research Fellow in King’s College, Cambridge, where he supervised students in English literature and Practical Criticism within King’s College; taught a workshop in the Center for Digital Humanities (‘Automating the Bechdel Test: Computing Gender Bias across Media’); and helped to review and establish its MPhil program. He is now Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Cambridge Digital Humanities program.