Posts com a Tag ‘BLAXILL Luke (Aut)’

Luke Blaxill / Foto: University of Birmingham /

Luke Blaxill’s book deserves to be seminal. Its unassuming title conceals a bracing methodological challenge: an argument for the application of specific digital techniques to the study of electoral politics. It deploys ‘corpus linguistics’—the computerised compilation and interrogation of massive databases of millions of words—to intervene in a series of debates about the language of the platform in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. And it does so with enormous conviction. The War of Words builds its case so patiently, carefully, and politely, that even the most hardened traditionalists may find themselves struggling to dig up objections. Certainly, the public language of parliamentary candidates is a genre peculiarly suited to the analytical tools Blaxill deploys, and work on other spheres of politics may not be able to benefit from the sustained application of ‘text-mining’ methods to the same extent. But the book offers an object lesson in how to present an argument about method.

The War of Words has been trailed in a series of journal articles and book chapters over the last decade, so some readers will already be familiar with the techniques involved, and a number of the more striking reinterpretations the book offers. But having everything presented together—and supported by an imposing array of statistical tables (36) and figures (44), a ‘technical glossary’, and 68 pages of methodological and statistical appendices—lends the research a powerful cumulative effect. As this suggests, the volume’s embrace of digital methods goes well beyond the searches for ‘hits’ on particular keywords, and the Google Ngrams, which are already part of the historian’s armoury. What does the book mean to do? Leia Mais