A Qualitative and Quantitative Study on Ancient Latin Texts Concerning the Concept of aether : Some Methodological Considerations

Abstract

My study focuses on the semantic analysis of an ambiguous Latin word, aether, which may roughly be translated as ‘celestial substance’. The study is carried out by utilising both qualitative and quantitative methods on a digital text corpus containing Latin literature dating from ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE. In this paper, the compilation process and the contents of the corpus are described. Beside qualitative research (close reading), various computational methods are implemented on the corpus (distant reading). Of the latter, cosine similarity and correspondence analysis are discussed in this paper. I will explicate one way of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by assigning numerical values to a table built into a concordance. The values are based on my interpretation of the relevant text passages, and they can be utilised in quantitative analyses as frequency-based entries in a term-document matrix. It seems evident that ‘sky’ is the most common denotation of aether. Human interpretation is necessary in semantic observation, but significant improvement may be gained by using quantitative methods in parallel.