In this talk we introduce some of the techniques and methodology developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab for establishing the outlines or shapes of conceptual forms, what we call their ‘architecture’. These constructs are the product of a set of techniques applied to a digitized corpus – in this case Eighteenth Century Collections Online – which use computational and statistical means for establishing data driven descriptions of lexical behaviour which, we contend, allow us to inspect not only the linguistic but also the conceptual domain. Our project is not simply targeted at the ways in which the meanings of words in a natural language evolve over time. We are more interested in how these patterns of lexical co-association give us a window onto the underlying conceptual articulations which support the procedures and processes by which we make sense of the world. We present lexical co-association metrics derived from co-occurrences of words at different distances, varying from within the phrase level, to syntactic relations, to co-occurrences at discontinuous windows of up to 100 words. We use the connections defined by these measures to construct a network of terms, and examine this network for evidence of tightly bound sections forming cliques and or communities. We apply these methods and interactive visualisations of this distributional semantic evidence to track a bundle of terms that are important to the understanding of government in the eighteenth century, identifying a core comprised of the terms 'monarchy', 'aristocracy' and 'democracy' that has very deep foundations in our thinking polities and government within the Anglophone tradition from the Enlightenment on.