Abstract

Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast, genealogical methods attend to the entanglement of continuity and discontinuity, and focus on contingency and singularity. This article proposes to develop methods of computational genealogy to analyze multiple temporalities in historical discourses. We experiment with our proposed computational genealogy using the archive of Inaugural speeches by US presidents. In particular, we show that there is neither a linear advance to Trump’s rhetoric nor an exceptional rupture. Our analysis shows that Trump’s speech is much more the struggle of the Republicans with their own past ideas than struggles with Democrats.

摘要

断续和异议的表达对于关键的历史工作至关重要。但是，这些词汇和历史变化的分析在新兴的数字方法领域受到的关注较少。基于辨别模式的数字方法将重点放在连续性上，而中断和破裂是趋势和模式的衍生。相比之下，家谱方法会引起连续性和不连续性的纠缠，并着重于偶然性和奇异性。本文提出发展计算族谱的方法，以分析历史话语中的多个时态。我们使用美国总统就职演说的档案库对我们提出的计算族谱进行实验。特别是，我们表明，特朗普的言论既没有线性发展，也没有异常破裂。我们的分析表明，特朗普的讲话更多的是共和党人按照自己过去的想法进行的斗争，而不是与民主党的斗争。