We show how automatically-extracted citations in historical corpora can be used to measure direct and indirect influence of authors on each other. These measures can in turn be used to determine an author’s overall prominence in the corpus and to identify distinct schools of thought. We apply our methods to two major historical corpora. Using scholarly consensus as a gold standard, we demonstra...

In Enlightenment Europe multilingualism was an omnipresent fact. Even the correspondences of eighteenth-century writers gave clear evidence – often strategically chosen forms multilingualism. Up until today, question arises as to why early modern used (various of) in their letters. This paper investigates, for first time, hypothesis that letter writing a strategy intellectual and authorial self...

Bioethics case reports generally treat aspects of moral fathomability, characterised and addressed in different ways. This paper reads the case as a textual model of scenarios and draws attention to its structure, narrative shape, linguistic register, and the effects of tone and temporality on reader expectation and responsiveness. Such textual elements of case composition reflect authorial pur...