Natural Language Processing: Shifting Rhetorical Strategies in Comenius’s Correspondence with Three Separate Communitites

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F19%3A00517953" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/19:00517953 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Natural Language Processing: Shifting Rhetorical Strategies in Comenius’s Correspondence with Three Separate Communitites

Original language description

The study focuses on analysis of Comenius’s letters sent between 1630 and 1642. A total corpus was chosen consisting of thirty-three letters addressed to three distinct communities. The expansion and diversification of his correspondence in this period posed a rhetorical challenge. As Comenius developed very different relationships with several distinct scholarly communities, he needed to diversify his epistolary styles and to develop rhetorical strategies appropriate to each. This posed the key research questions. Did Comenius employ different rhetorical and stylistic strategies and discuss different major topics with each of these communities? Can Natural language processing (NLP) techniques provide a quantitative foundation for a qualitative scholarly answer to the first question? In the first step the analysis showed that Comenius used very specific styles to address three groups of his correspondence partners: German educational reformers, the Danzig circle and the Hartlib circle. After undertaking the historical, and rhetorical analysis, the same texts were analysed using the NLP framework ReaderBench. Statistical analyses focused on lexical and semantic features were performed to investigate the differences in the writing style of letters addressed to the three communities. These methods revealed significant differences between the three groups. The results are richly documented by figures. The affirmative answers to both of research questions open up a broad field for further experimentation.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship

ISBN

978-3-86395-403-1

Number of pages of the result

5

Pages from-to

428-432

Number of pages of the book

470

Publisher name

Göttingen University Press

Place of publication

Göttingen

UT code for WoS chapter

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