Between 2015 and 2018 researchers at the Universities of Sheffield, Sussex and Glasgow have collaborated to model conceptual change in early modern texts, using the manually transcribed portions of Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Collectively, and with extensive input from Digital Humanities developers, the Linguistic DNA team have developed a novel technique for exploring association between words, by modelling so-called ‘discursive concepts’.
This paper explores what we can learn about the ‘library’ and associated discursive concepts using the approaches and data from that research collaboration. What might the distinctive distant reading techniques developed by the Linguistic DNA project add to our understanding of bibliographic past and the scholarly future?