Genealogies of Knowledge Corpus

Overview Corpus design Corpus contents Corpus text preparation Research avenues User manual

 

The Genealogies of Knowledge corpus is designed to enable researchers to trace the trajectory of key concepts as they enter different cultural and temporal spaces, predominantly but not exclusively through the mediation of various forms of translation.

The current focus of the project is on Greek as a starting point, plus three historical lingua francas (Arabic, Latin and English), and on concepts relating to the body politic and to scientific, expert discourse. However, the research team is developing a set of resources and a range of methodologies that can support future studies involving different lingua francas (French being an obvious choice in the European context), different historical moments (perhaps the Enlightenment), and different constellations of concepts. To this end, both the corpora we are building and the software being developed to interrogate them and visualise the findings are being made accessible to the research community, to support other types of study.

Because of legal constraints pertaining to copyright law, we offer restricted access to the corpora: we aim to allow visitors to the site to run searches, expand individual concordance lines within the limits of fair use (300 words), and download the findings. But we are unable to offer full access to individual texts.

All software tools developed for this project are available for free download, together with relevant documentation, under a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License.