This is the Appendix to my MA Thesis: “Onze Westerse Beschaving”: A Conceptual History of the Idea of the West in the Netherlands, 1875-1994.
ABSTRACT:
This research project traces the history of the idea of the West in Dutch discourse from the late 19th century up until the end of the Cold War. Through the use of quantitative methods such as word embeddings and n-gram analysis, applied to historical Dutch newspapers, the project demonstrates the Orientalist, cultural supremacist origins of the concept of the West and shows how the emphasis of the concept shifted over the course of the Cold War to become a concept of ideological superiority. Not only does this project contribute to the historiography on the idea of the West, but it also re-evaluates methodological innovations in the field of conceptual history, by incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods to mutually support each other. By performing a close reading of Johan Huizinga’s final work Geschonden wereld, we witness the discursive shift, uncovered through the quantitative methodology of the project, occurring in actual historical discourse. Onze westersche beschaving aids in deconstructing the concept, which plays a leading role in current geopolitical tensions, and can help us re-evaluate the legitimacy and meaning of this idea.
A quick overview of what is included:
- Appendix_thesis_Edo_storm.ipynb: This file is a Jupyter notebook, which contains the main code which I have used for this research project, as well as some explanation of what the code does. As I was not able to upload the raw text data or my models to github, because of their size, this code will unfortunately not run. If anyone wants to test the code with my models and text data, please get in touch:
- Onze_Westerse_Beschaving_A_Conceptual_History_Of_The_Idea_Of_The_West_In_The_Netherlands_1875-1994_Edo_Storm.pdf: This is my MA Thesis, which includes a lot more info about the project.
- ngram_outputs folder: This is where the results of the n-gram operations show up.
- plots folder: This is where the plots made using this code are stored.
- resources folder: This folder contains a list of the stop words that I used in my preprocessing step.
- spreadsheets_used_for_analysis folder: This folder contains the spreadsheets, which I have used for my analysis.
- txt_data_periods folder: Here is some example text to work with the n-gram code. These are books obtained from Project Gutenberg.
- word_embedding_outputs: This contains outputs of the word embedding procedure in the Jupyter notebook.
Edo Storm, 2022