In the main, the Greek word "philology" has been taken as meaning "bibliosophy". I argue, it shouldn't mainly or just be about books. I have tried unsuccessful searches on: "corpora research" "technologies"; "corpora research" "patents"; ... to have search engines make sense of it in their own ways, not as meaning a corpus of technologies as such.
Lewis Mumford in his worthwhile "Technics and Civilization" considers the first "eotechnic" phase of technologically civilized life approximately from AD 1000 AD 1800, a time frame during which the mechanical clock took relevance as a coordinating device. Yet, since around 600 BC Ancient Ionian/Greek philosophers had been pondering about techne and its relationship to concrete engineering and social technologies, including its intersubjective and moral aspects. Solon wondered about the relationship between techne and virtue and Plato dedicated in explicit and inferred way most of his dialogues to that theme.
Mumford also pointed out that there have always been the kind of scientists and engineers such as Archimedes, Galileo, Agricola, Euler and Franz Reuleaux; who saw their business in "techne-like" ways. Basically, they take simple physical devices such as the lever, the wheel and the pulley (already more of a mechanism), to which the pressure gradient force in air naturally making windmills move and electromagnetic forces both as they happen in fields and on a quantum mechanical level on diodes, transistors and LEDs should be also included.
Those most simple processes are seen as kinds of characters of an alphabet out of which mechanisms: "words" and "lexical bundles" of sort are contrived to create machines in a through and through "textual" way by chaining "kinematic pairs" in a way that at each juncture physical conservation laws apply. Cross correlating the pieces of such technological texts in a DAG kind of way you naturally build a corpus. So, as ancient philosophers intuited long ago the whole of society is a corpus.
Do you know of any prior art relating to such corpora research?
Please, if you do could you point me to such resources in a way that I can access them? I am what they call an independent researcher and it is virtually impossible for me to work.
lbrtchx: corpora of technologies? ...