Formalized historiography, the structure of scientific and literary texts: Part I. some issues posed by computational methodology

Abstract

The examination of theorizing and techniques for scientific language analysis applied to ‘history’ clearly generalizes to imply a domain of applicability potentially coextensive for behavioral scientists with the scope of cultural behavior. It is argued that the computer and related science and technology are moving toward a relationship vis-à-vis symbolic acts analogous to microscopy for the ‘sub-visual’ in scale and telescopes for astronomic phenomena. Content analysis is one of the points of departure, as also contemporary syntactic analysis, from which present ideas and algorithms have moved on. How ‘far’ — both at present and in prospect — is the subject of these articles.