• Marc Alexander

University of Glasgow

This paper discusses the question of what it means to analyse data – in this example, historical data from Hansard – from both the traditional standpoint of words and also from the newer digitally-enabled perspective of categories. In DH, large textual databases are frequently explored through ever more complex means, while our understanding of meaning in these databases has lagged behind the technical advancements of clustering words together into concepts. I will provide a case study using two resources I work with often (the Historical Thesaurus of English and the Hansard Corpus), to demonstrate that we must be wary when taking our existing digital methods of analysing words (one of the most common tasks in DH) and try to apply them at a higher scale to groups of words.