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: [log in to unmask], or [log in to unmask], or [log in to unmask]
Deadline for submitting a proposal: 31 March 2024
Pisa, January 2024