The digitization of large time-labeled bibliographies has resulted in corpora such as the Google Ngram data set (Lin et al., 2012) which are expected to reveal novel insights into the evolution of language and society. We present our project of developing a query algebra to unlock this potential, the Conceptual History Query Language (CHQL). It is inspired by the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte as exemplified by the work of Koselleck (Olsen, 2012).

Conceptual history claims that pragmatic properties of historical, cultural and economic relevance are incorporated in concepts and attempts to track any changes over time to determine how their pragmatic relevance changes (“socialism” might express hopes at some moment and fears at some other). Thus, concepts will be categorized as belonging to a particular concept type at a particular moment in time.

To determine the type of a particular concept, scholars commonly make use of word-usage frequencies, word contexts, sentiment analysis, how words refer and relate to and contrast with each other, or they look for word pairs or word families whose usage is correlated etc. (Brunner et al., 2004; Ritter and Gründer, 1971). They closely read and interpret large masses of texts, but because we want to do the same using Distant Reading techniques (Moretti, 2013), these information types need to be translated into observable data characteristics for which individual operators in the query language are defined. Finding these information types and building computable items is the main challenge of our project.

Since there is no accepted definition of information types, we describe an interpretation of them in order to map them on to data characteristics. Data characteristics are quantitative feature either directly present (e.g., the frequency of the word “socialism” in 1848), or a derived piece of information (e.g. the difference between the frequency of “socialism” and “communism” from 1848 to 1989). We describe which data characteristics are needed to simulate Koselleck’s information needs and explain our realization of all data characteristics and their implementation as operators.

The assumption is that each concept type has specific characteristics, that is, any concept type can be described using a specific combination of information types. For example, Koselleck may plausibly be read as claiming that word pairs that form parallel concepts (concept type) would have “similar” word frequencies and have a significant number of identical surrounding words (information types). By contrast, counter concepts would also have similar word frequencies yet their surrounding words would behave differently. For instance, if “enlightenment” and “reason” are parallel concepts for a particular period, their relative word frequencies should be similar, and if “emancipation” occurs near “enlightenment”, it should occur near “reason” too, and both concepts should be endorsed rather than criticized (in some sense). By contrast, if “East” and “West” are counter concepts, their word contexts should contain different words, and there should be some sort of contrast in attitude between them.

We are developing a system that finds these information types in large corpora that are not amenable to conventional close reading (Willkomm et al., 2018). We present a selection of some of the data characteristics with the information type they are intended to represent:

Using CHQL, we have tested the hypotheses that (1) “East” and “West” have acquired a political context after 1945, whereas “North” and “South” haven’t, and that (2) the former have turned into counter concepts in the political sphere, their contexts expressing diverging attitudes, whereas the latter have remained geographical parallel concepts. The operator trees 1 and 2 shown in Figures 2 and 4 illustrate how CHQL allows combining the operators mentioned to perform a single search, yielding the results shown in Figures 3 and 5.