A Textometrical Approach to Study the Transmission of Biological Knowledge in the XIXth Century
This article addresses the issue of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative analysis (i.e. computerized analysis of textual data) through experiments (and their results) conducted in a research project focusing on the impact of biological knowledge on French literary work in the XIXth century (Biolographes: http://biolog.hypotheses.org). The first part sets out the practical aspects of digital corpora, from access to the texts, to their transformation by OCR, to the storage of their metadata. The second and third parts illustrate how textometrical tools and visualizations (TXM, TreeCloud) serve as a point d’appui to many working hypotheses. In conclusion, the article emphasizes the role played by NLP in computerized tools for literary analysis.