Keith,
I once worked in an Institute for the study of Byzantine history
(Byzantology). One of my jobs was to type words (in Greek) on cards and
file them into a huge filing system (this was a pre computer era - all was
done by hand and paper). I was supplied by the lists of words, each on a
separate card, with the title of the book in which it was found (and all
the pages it appeared on). As you can guess, this was a true indexing job.
But I recall that, because the students who worked in the Institute were
systematically reading old texts, for years. They read those books from the
middle ages in various languages, all regarding the Eastern Empire -
Byzant, and they were indexing these texts for EACH word they found there.
The entries for each word contained incredible quantity of page numbers and
book titles of different books published at different times, even centuries.
This was a real archeology of words. I was on of the guys digging out a
pyramid with a toothbrush!
But I assume that this kind of work has been done in other philological
areas, too.
It is true that words without their contexts don't carry a lot of meaning,
but just the fact that you can follow them throughout centuries and through
different books - is already a way to trace some of their historical paths.
Another, similar work - indexing words of a "complete" language (at least
the written and published and preserved, I guess), over a specific period
of time, is an index of the Serbian language from the middle ages. It is
now on the Internet - but I'd have to dig out it's URL to give it to anyone
who would want to look it up.
Maybe we should look into these philological indexes, too.
What do you think?
Ana
At 05:29 PM 4/17/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Ana, your writings about how concepts develop, grow, and snowball reminds
>me of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" (1972 in English
>translation). My "Emergence in psychology" article is an attempt to trace
>the history/archeology of the notion of "emergence." Here is a quotation
>from Foucault that I used in a recent article about Foucault's concept of
>"discourse" (to appear in CULTURAL STUDIES):
>
>"One tries in this way to discover how the recurrent elements of
>statements can reappear, dissociate, recompose, gain in extension or
>determination, be taken up into new logical structures, acquire, on the
>other hand, new semantic contents, and constitute partial organizations
>among themselves. These schemata make it possible to describe…[a
>concept’s] anonymous dispersion through texts, books, and oeuvres"
>(1969/72, p. 60).
>
>At 11:37 PM 4/13/02 -0400, you wrote:
> >I think that ideas and concepts start like small snowballs. And for a long
> >time they don't make a difference.
> >But they grow - not like snowballs, more like fungus - linking underground
> >and spawning to seemingly great distances. No one knows who are their
> >carriers and how exactly they travel from one person (group,
> >institution...) to another.
>
>R. Keith Sawyer
>
>http://www.keithsawyer.com/
>Assistant Professor
>Department of Education
>Washington University
>Campus Box 1183
>St. Louis, MO 63130
>314-935-8724
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