Computational Methods for Historical Psychology: A case-study in Latin ca. 200 BCE - 1700 CE

FAIN: RZ-292726-23

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
Joseph Dexter (Project Director: November 2022 to present)

Preparation of a series of peer-reviewed articles on the semantics of emotion in Latin texts from 200 BCE to 1700 CE, creation of a linguistic database and development of Latin corpora. (36 months)

We are applying for Manuscript Preparation funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Collaborative Research program for a mixed-methods study of psychology and emotion in Latin texts over two millennia. Leveraging the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our project team, which span classical philology, history of emotions, psychology, anthropology, data science, and natural language processing, we will explore key questions concerning the construction and operation of emotions in historical texts and how they reflect the psychological evolution of individuals and societies. Central to these efforts will be the creation of high-quality infrastructure and tools, including large diachronic Latin corpora, datasets profiling the semantics of emotions, and reproducible computational pipelines. Our work will be described in a coherent series of peer-reviewed articles targeted to a diverse range of audiences, all of which will be submitted by the end of the grant period in 2026.