Exploring part-of-speech profiles and authorship attribution in Early Modern medical texts

2013 ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Jukka Tyrkkö
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Part Of Speech

Towards a Historical Treebank of Middle and Early Modern Welsh, Part I: Workflow and POS Tagging

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
David Willis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Pos Tagging ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Welsh Language ◽  
Word Boundaries ◽  
Exhaustive Extraction ◽  
Grammatical Structures

This article introduces the working methods of the Parsed Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language (PARSHCWL). The corpus is designed to provide researchers with a tool for automatic exhaustive extraction of instances of grammatical structures from Middle and Modern Welsh texts in a way comparable to similar tools that already exist for various European languages. The major features of the corpus are outlined, along with the overall architecture of the workflow needed for a team of researchers to produce it. In this paper, the two first stages of the process, namely pre-processing of texts and automated part-of-speech (POS) tagging are discussed in some detail, focusing in particular on major issues involved in defining word boundaries and in defining a robust and useful tagset.

Explorations through Early Modern English Medical Texts

2010 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Anu Lehto ◽  
Raisa Oinonen ◽  
Päivi Pahta
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Early Modern English

Simulations and difficult problems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L Hoover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Number ◽  
Uncertain Evidence ◽  
N Gram ◽  
Problematic Situations ◽  
Initial Uncertainty ◽  
Number Of Authors

Abstract An authorship attribution investigation ideally begins with a well-defined set of possible authors and an adequate number of firmly attributed roughly contemporaneous long texts in the same genre by those authors. Many significant or intriguing problems, however, suffer from deficiencies or limitations that reduce the effectiveness or validity of some kinds of analysis and make others impossible. These problematic situations can be approached by creating simulations that are designed to overcome or mitigate the difficulties of the problems. The results of the simulations can be used to suggest at least tentative solutions. Here, simulations are used to investigate four difficult problems. One involves fewer and shorter texts than would be ideal–texts that are also chronologically earlier than the known texts by the target author. The second involves too small a number of well attributed texts by the authors in question, and initial uncertainty about the genres of the texts, the number of authors involved, and their genders. The third is a tricky case of co-authorship with only relatively vague and uncertain evidence about the nature and extent of each author’s contribution; here simulations with sections of well-attributed texts by the two authors are used to test Rolling Classify. The fourth addresses the sparsity of well-attributed and confidently-dated Early Modern plays, using simulations to evaluate Brian Vickers’ rare n-gram approach to the attribution of such plays.

scholarly journals Medicinal Mercury in Early Modern Portuguese Records: Recipes and Methods from Eighteenth-Century Medical Guidebooks

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1017-1042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Eastern Hemisphere ◽  
Asian Medicine ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This chapter will present and explicate rare information regarding circumstances and techniques for the application of medicinal mercury in the Portuguese medical context during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the use of Portuguese medical texts (including translated excerpts), the chapter will provide insight into how early modern Portuguese practitioners processed and employed mercury to treat various ailments. Of interest, too, will be that these remedies were developed at several disparate locations throughout the Portuguese imperial world (China, India, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal), and often drew upon, and blended, indigenous medical substances from the region where each remedy originated. Regarding the use of mercury in South Asian medicine, medical scholars have noted that, from the sixteenth century onwards, much of the intra-Asian (and global) mercury trade was conducted through Portuguese merchants and agents. This work asserts that Portuguese merchants and shippers had unique access both to mercury at the commodity’s main sources in Spain and Peru (Almadén and Huancavelica, respectively), but also to established, developed colonial trade routes throughout the eastern hemisphere. Most of the information presented here is excerpted from two little-known eighteenth-century Portuguese primary sources: a Jesuit compilation medical and apothecary guide in manuscript, and a published physician’s treatise regarding fevers and other illnesses encountered during a posting of nearly a decade in Angola.

PASCAL AND MELANCHOLY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 339-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHAD A. CÓRDOVA
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Medical Status ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Therapeutic Protocols ◽  
Theories Of Subjectivity ◽  
Large Corpus

This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal'sPensées(1670) are best known—divertissementandennui(often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholicennuiagainst the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in thePensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.

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