Portraying the life cycle of ideas in social psychology through functional (textual) data analysis: a toolkit for digital history

Abstract This paper presents a method for the digital history of discipline (social psychology in this application) through analysis scientific publications. The titles comprehensive set papers published Journal Personality and Social Psychology (1965–2021) were collected, yielding total 10,222 items. corpus thus constructed underwent several stages preprocessing until final conversion into terms x time-points matrix, where are stemmed words multi-words. After normalizing frequencies via chi square-like transformation, clusters portraying similar temporal patterns identified by functional (textual) data distance-based curve clustering. Among best candidates number clusters, solutions with six, nine thirteen (from lower to higher resolution) have been chosen nesting relationship demonstrated. They reveal—at different levels granularity—increasing, decreasing, stable keywords trends, highlighting methods, theories, application domains that become more popular recent years, lost popularity, or remained common use. Moreover, allows highlight historical issues (such as crises debates over use terms). results core topics social past today, underlying crucial contribution discipline.