On 6/9/23, Serge Heiden slh@ens-lyon.fr wrote:

Hi Albretch,

For some ideas, I made something related to that more than 20 years ago: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00151838v1/document (in French sorry, just looking at the graphs at the end should be informative) Not as interactive as it could, but UI technologies have evolved now.

Best, Serge

Nothing to apologize for, last time I checked (speaking or) writing a paper in French or any other language other than Russian wasn't illegal or wrong in any way (USG has made "radioactive" even the use of any English word starting with "Vlad" or "Put"). Also, one of my Ls is Spanish, I am fairly acquainted with Latin and know or can easily infer a good chuck of French words. translate.google.com does a relatively fine job of blunt translation of the general sense of texts. For some reason I had to download your paper and upload to google translate to be able to read it in English, since it has even taken over as my preferred curse language.

I found your paper very interesting, so I gave it a first reading to think about it and reread it more carefully later when I found the time to do so. Furthermore (how do you say „darüberhinausgehend" in English? ;-)), those "face-à-faces" kinds of political debates, seen as forceful "conversations", -conversations nonetheless-, bring about a whole host of corpora research issues I am sure you/those studying such topics must have noticed. There are different kinds of "conversations". Friar Leo (Saint Francis' fioretti) and Evodius (Saint Augustine's "De libero arbitrio voluntatis") were both real persons but the conversation of sort was very one-sided with Friar Leo pretty much lending an ear to Saint Francis and Evodius who was more of an equal and Saint Augustine's personal friend. Plato, involved his teacher Socrates, Alcibiades (even a slave in his Meno which in those times was quite an affront to mock the establishment), but also the Egyptian god of writing (Thoth) in his dialogues. Shakespeare's and Dostoevsky's fictional characters have taken a voice and life of their own for many generations. However all those conversations have some aspects in common.

Conversations/dialogues are peculiar in the sense that (kind of like with music) you have more than one text realizing more or less hopefully a certain train of thought (Gedankengang), yet all participating texts reflect explicitly/lexically or implicitly in more of a connotative way on one another into some sort of more orchestral narrative, which (as the poet in me sees it) can NOT be fully reduced in a syntactically operational way to just the participating texts. Think of how music is played (when we had such thing) each instrument (in accord with some shared harmonic and rhythmic) doing its own part, but also as part of a Hegelian whole.

“Words have no meaning; they only have uses”. Wittgenstein's quip could lead to meaning, if we knew for a term all of its uses. But this set does not exist.

Actually, technically speaking and demonstrably, this is not quite the case. It hasn't been for at least two decades. A back of the envelope calculation will show that, as part of the societally-wide "monitoring" in the breath by breath surveilled societies we live in these days, recording, tracking ("every piece of tangible information" (tm) to "its source") and indexing in a cross-correlated way everything everyone says for good real time is not only feasible, but it is exactly what the NSAs of the world have been very cheaply doing with the happily willing cooperation of proles who (to George Orwell's dismay) can't take their head off from their cell phones' ass.

Because the words depend on the "situations" of use, causes and conditions of their enunciation, and we know well that these vary ad infinitum, ...

I have no way of knowing if "ad infinitum" is meant in a metaphoric way. In actual texts, seeing words as nodes in DAGs, "ad infinitum" would mean what?, six (6) words?

... in time as well as in space. The only solution consists in seizing one of these "situations" where the text is stated, precise, clearly circumscribed, dated, controllable in its essential aspects, then to make, about it, the sum of the words to be studied

... and this is what makes corpora research interesting. "These situations" don't exist ;-). The essentially locked inner- and outer-intersubjectivity of language makes impossible (and/or hopelessly senseless) to clearly circumscribe in controllable ways the essential aspects of what, when, where, how ... a text is stated, because texts don't have a life of their own, nor do they determine or are derived from "factual reality" as if they were just an object, like a piece of stone, in the physically empirical ways we have been conditioned to "rationally" think since the scientific revolution. In a Hegelian („im ,Allgemeinen' Sinne"), every one who listened to, thought about such debates and/or relates to them even in more or less indirect, marginal ways (as we do right now while we talk about it) would be part of "those situations". How could you "clearly circumscribe ..." that?

Niggah isn't really into protagonism, but I could relate a (in an early sense the most) formative experience I have had with texts (for whatever reason I have always loved to read alternating more than one book during the same period of time since I was little). I was born into and raised in the Cuba of the 60's (during the most determining, "crazy" periods of "the revolution") as part of a family of high profile political dissidents (imprisoned before and after for political reasons), which taxed, busied the hell out of your mind.

From teachers not speaking, not even looking at me during classes (which other kids, of course, noticed and protested/asked about even to their own parents (I myself could not understand it either)), "because" as my mother explained to me, "they had to then write down all I said during classes for the police to keep as part of my profile" (in those times they didn't have cameras, sensors everywhere; people didn't have cell phones); to my mother forcing her children to go to church "because she didn't like that idea of politicians telling people what/how to think" (I could not understand what "politicians" meant, nor could I why they would mess with my wanting to play with my friends)) I could not make sense of most of the hellish weirdness happening around me but I kept thinking and asking my mother about it who would then start telling me about "the banality of evil", ... which I couldn't quite understand either, forcibly turning me into some sort child philosopher.

One day I found in a box on its way to the garbage a religious book ("Cien lecciones de historias sagradas") which included the story in "Saint Francis' fioretti" about "what 'perfect' joy consists in". The moral of that story conceptually paraphrased by yours truly as a philosophical statement with a consciousness studies slant to it would be: "the greatest of all gifts and graces that God grants us with is the capacity of overcoming oneself". That one liner overwhelmingly fascinated me (it has to this very day!, its truthfulness, its poetic import, its liberating hopefulness, …!). Later I understood Saint Francis was talking about that thing they used to call "virtue" (which, since you can’t can it and sell it it doesn’t matter much these days), ... and that the underlying aspect his true statement was based on had no explanation (kind of "pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps" not even using some sort of Archimedean lever, but one's own spirituality. How on earth is that even possible!?!) and how could something Saint Francis said to friar Leo during their wintry talk to Saint Mary's of the Angels in Perugia/Umbria/Central Italy in the XIV century as part of the medieval Zeitgeist, after going through such a long sequence of communicative realizations (from Fr. Ugolino authoring, discussions, reprints, moving the text to another continent, ...) impress so mightily a little boy in Havana some 500+ years later?

From this sum, this exploration and this exhaustive comparison of contexts, the statistical research of co-occurrences can draw an objective description. Does it put us on a track that leads to meaning?

Yes, to some extent, but we shouldn't be illusive about that kind of "objective description". The interesting aspect would be: to which extent would claims about "objectivity" demonstrably be, in some sense factual and to which extent we would be, "quite naturally", reading whatever we want into those texts in order to "logically" justify whatever we want? We should keep it real because our work is part of the "AI"-based "social control" (as freedom lovers call -repression-) thoroughly employed these days in all levels of society and against individuals they target.

Yet, there must be something to it, because we live and learn through our conscious communicative exchanges. Society at large is kind of a corpus, a hyper forest of decentralized texts (not only "texts" in the way we see them as sequences of characters consciously written on some permanent media from stone, to reed, to paper, to magnetic excitation on a hard drive, but our actions are functional "texts" through which we constantly interacting with one another ...) You buy some veggies paying with some money which you earned by functionally doing whatever with a social import, which doesn't mean the same to you as it does to the farmer growing it, the people who brought it to the store or selling it to you, ..., but it somehow all happens just fine. "Money", "texts", ... semiologically serving as multipurpose accommodating and balancing medium both outer- and inner-intersubjectively, indeed our mind-body link!

lbrtchx