CALL FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST

The purpose of this call is to solicit the interest of scholars who wish to
collaborate with the research group engaged in the Lexecon project (
https://cipei.unipi.it/en/lexecon/) at the University of Pisa.

The LexEcon project is a documented reconstruction of the evolution of
political economy through the study of vocabulary, lexicon and
argumentation. It covers the period from 1750 to the second post-war period
and it involves 6 languages and 7 literary genres, ranging from
dictionaries to treatises.

We aim to include in the research team scholars who may be interested in
the study of the evolution of political economy through the study of
English literary production between 1750 and 1900.

They will be granted access to a corpus of digitized texts, whose
enlargement is currently in progress, and they can (and are encouraged to)
use computational linguistics tools.

The main software used so far is Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/).
Software such as LIWC and programming languages such as R and Python proved
to be equally useful in every step of our work. The project is also open to
researchers using other kinds of linguistic tools and/or more purely
quantitative techniques such as time series (of words and n-grams for
instance) analysis, econometric models and other text mining applications
using softwares like Stata. Cross-fertilization on different methodologies
is highly welcomed.

Candidates can be interested in the production of a single economic author,
groups of authors, periods, semantic evolution of a sub-sectoral vocabulary
or literary genre, single issues, etc.

Researchers will be offered support in the creation of a specific corpus,
if necessary.

The call is also open to PhD and Master students.

The tentative timeline to organize the activity is as follows:


   -

   March/April 2024: creation of the research team
   -

   June 2024: “state of the art” workshop in Pisa (online participation
   available)
   -

   October 2024: first results
   -

   January/February 2025: final conference of the project in Pisa
   -

   May 2025: submission of the papers to international journals and other
   editorial initiatives



To express your interest or ask for clarification please contact:
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Deadline for submitting a proposal: 31 March 2024

Pisa, January 2024


-- 
Marco E.L. Guidi

Dipartimento di Economia e Management
Università di Pisa
Via Cosimo Ridolfi 10
56125 Pisa, Italy