The Eurocentric Fallacy. A Digital-Historical Approach to the Concepts of ‘Modernity’, ‘Civilization’ and ‘Europe’ (1840–1990)

Abstract

According to recent literature, the idea of Europe as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided closely with the concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’. This article examines this claim by testing the existence of modernity, civilization and Europe as a conceptual ‘trinity’ by using digital history techniques. Word frequencies, collocations and word embeddings are employed to analyze four Dutch newspapers (Algemeen Handelsblad, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, De Telegraaf, De Leeuwarder Courant) spanning the period 1840–1990. It transpires that semantic relations between the three elements are hardly visible; in so far as they appear, they hardly constitute a close-knit ‘trinity’. Alternating combinations among the three components were more significant than direct connections between all three, while ‘the West’ was more central than Europe. These findings suggest that popular media like newspapers have a different take on culturalpolitical concepts than writings by the intellectual elite.

A data-driven approach to studying changing vocabularies in historical newspaper collections

“…Another approach is to identify a vocabulary based on features of single words such as 'isms' (Pivovarova et al, 2019, Marjanen et al, 2020, or sequences of words (ngrams). The latter approach constructs a vocabulary based on words that are directly preceded (Wevers, 2017;Van Eijnatten and Ros, 2019) or modified (Hill et al, 2018) by a common adjective, and subsequently focuses on the temporal changes. This leads to the quantification of conceptual extension, and gives insights into conceptual and distributional change that would go unnoticed were the focus only on specific keywords.…”

A Collection of Swedish Diachronic Word Embedding Models Trained on Historical Newspaper Data

“…Since the models span several decades, they present an interesting view of words over time, useful for researchers interested in diachronic studies such as culturomics (Michel et al, 2011), semantic change (see Tahmasebi et al (2018); Kutuzov et al (2018), for overviews), historical research (van Eijnatten & Ros, 2019;Hengchen et al, 2021a;Marjanen et al, 2020), etc. They also can be further fed as input to more complex neural networks tackling downstream tasks aimed at historical data such as OCR post-correction (Hämäläinen & Hengchen, 2019;Duong et al, 2020) or more linguistics-oriented problems (Budts, 2020).…”

News Information Decoupling: An Information Signature of Catastrophes in Legacy News Media

“…Previous studies have shown that variation in newspapers' word usage is sensitive to the dynamics of socio-cultural events [1,2,3], can detect event-driven shifts [4], and accurately can model effects of change in comprehensive collections of newspapers [5]. Furthermore, the co-occurrence structure of newspapers has been shown to accurately capture thematic development [6], and, when modelled dynamically, is indicative of the evolution of cultural values and biases [2,7].…”