Pim Huijnen

Ad Hoc Monitoring of Vocabulary Shifts over Time

Word meanings change over time. Detecting shifts in meaning for particular words has been the focus of much research recently. We address the complementary problem of monitoring shifts in vocabulary over time. That is, given a small seed set of words, we are interested in monitoring which terms are used over time to refer to the underlying concept denoted by the seed words. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for monitoring shifts in vocabulary over time, given a small set of seed terms. We use distributional semantic methods to infer a series of semantic spaces over time from a large body of time-stamped unstructured textual documents. We construct semantic networks of terms based on their representation in the semantic spaces and use graph-based measures to calculate saliency of terms. Based on the graph-based measures we produce ranked lists of terms that represent the concept underlying the initial seed terms over time as final output. As the task of monitoring shifting vocabularies over time for an ad hoc set of seed words is, to the best of our knowledge, a new one, we construct our own evaluation set. Our main contributions are the introduction of the task of ad hoc monitoring of vocabulary shifts over time, the description of an algorithm for tracking shifting vocabularies over time given a small set of seed words, and a systematic evaluation of results over a substantial period of time (over four decades). Additionally, we make our newly constructed evaluation set publicly available.

A digital humanities approach to the history of science: eugenics revisited in hidden debates by means of semantic text mining

Comparative historical research on the the intensity, diversity and fluidity of public discourses has been severely hampered by the extraordinary task of manually gathering and processing large sets of opinionated data in news media in different countries. At most 50,000 documents have been systematically studied in a single comparative historical project in the subject area of heredity and eugenics. Digital techniques, like the text mining tools WAHSP and BILAND we have developed in two successive demonstrator projects, are able to perform advanced forms of multi-lingual text-mining in much larger data sets of newspapers. We describe the development and use of WAHSP and BILAND to support historical discourse analysis in large digitized news media corpora. Furthermore, we argue how text mining techniques overcome the problem of traditional historical research that only documents explicitly referring to eugenics issues and debates can be incorporated. Our tools are able to provide information on ideas and notions about heredity, genetics and eugenics that circulate in discourses that are not directly related to eugenics (e.g., sport, education and economics).

Tolerant, liberal, populistisch?

Der Beitrag untersucht das Niederlandebild in deutschen Tageszeitungen zwischen 1946 und 2010 mit Hilfe der Text Mining Funktionen des Leipzig Corpus Miners. Nicht nur unter Historikern dominiert die Vorstellung, dass die Berichterstattung uber die Niederlande in deutschen Medien sich in den vergangenen siebzig Jahren vor allem auf sportliche Grosereignisse und konigliche Hochzeiten beschrankt hat. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass entgegen dieser weitverbreiteten Meinung aktuelle politische und gesellschaftliche Ereignisse und Debatten in den Niederlanden durchaus in deutschen Tageszeitungen besprochen worden sind. Er zeigt, dass die Niederlande vor allem bei kontroversen Themen, wie der gleichgeschlechtlichen Ehe oder Euthanasie, als Beispiel fur eine besonders liberale Politik herangezogen worden sind. Gleichzeitig zeigt er aber auch, dass das Image der Niederlande als besonders progressives und liberales Land Kratzer bekommen hat, seit die (Rechts-)Populisten Pim Fortuyn und Geert Wilders die politische Buhne betreten haben. Somit beschreibt er nicht nur den Verlauf der deutschen Debatte uber die Niederlande, sondern betrachtet auch das niederlandische Selbstbild als liberales Vorbildland kritisch.

Peter Jan Knegtmans, Geld, ijdelheid en hormonen. Ernst Laqueur (1880-1947), hoogleraar en ondernemer

Peter Jan Knegtmans, Geld, ijdelheid en hormonen. Ernst Laqueur (1880-1947), hoogleraar en ondernemer (Amsterdam: Boom, 2014, 356 pp., ISBN 978 90 8953 362 3).

Book review: Peter Jan Knegtmans, Geld, ijdelheid en hormonen. Ernst Laqueur (1880-1947), hoogleraar en ondernemer

Peter Jan Knegtmans, Geld, ijdelheid en hormonen. Ernst Laqueur (1880-1947), hoogleraar en ondernemer (Amsterdam: Boom, 2014, 356 pp., ISBN 978 90 8953 362 3).

Het wondermiddel van professor Buytendijk: het vitaminepreparaat Eviunis en de risico's van wetenschappelijke voorspraak

Professor Buytendijk’s miracle drug. The vitamin preparation Eviunis and the risks of scientists doing publicity work The discovery of vitamins at the start of the 20th century not only stimulated new areas of scientific research in the field of nutrition and pharmacy; vitamins also turned out to be profitable products for new or existing industries. Consequently, vitamins drove scientists and commercial vitamin producers into each others’ arms during the first decades of the century. Several publications – by Harmke Kamminga and Sally Horrocks for instance – deal with the causes and effects of forms of co-operation between science and industry in the nutritional and pharmaceutical sector. They mostly stress – using examples from Great- Britain – the interconnected interests from which both profited: industry-sponsored vitamin research made vitamins available to a larger public of consumers, with scientists authorizing the health claims of the products these companies tried to sell. This article shows how Dutch scientists and vitamin producers were concerned with the same issue in the inter-war period. Not only does it focus on the interconnected interests, but particularly on the conflicts of interests scientists were experiencing whilst performing advisory or research work for the industry. The article singles out F.J.J. Buytendijk, nowadays remembered for his pioneering research in the field of phenomenological psychology after the Second World War, and his involvement with the Swiss vitamin preparation Eviunis at the end of the nineteen-twenties. Buytendijk actively promoted the introduction of this particular preparation on the Dutch market. He was confronted with a growing number of critics, however, after tests demonstrated how the preparation could hardly sustain any of the claims that had been made with regard to its vitamin-like performance. Buytendijk’s strongest critics accused him of misusing his scientific authority to sell a fraudulent product – after all, he that maintained his own tests had confirmed Eviunis’ claims. A final, state-ordered counter test of Eviunis resulted in the ban of the preparation from the Dutch market. However, it did not condemn Buytendijks commitment to the product. It only concluded that the physiologist had been mistaken in his interpretation of the working of Eviunis. Buytendijk’s reputation as a vitamin researcher compromised nonetheless, because of his spirited commitment to a product that turned out to sell an illusion.