NUMEXCO: A Text Mining Approach to Thematic Analysis of a Philosophical Corpus [2005, rptd. 2008]

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a research in which our main objective was to explore text mining techniques in their application to thematical analysis of philosophical corpus. In the first part, we present the software (Numexco) used in our experiment, focusing on the modular approach of the software. The second part presents the results obtained when we applied Numexco to the thematical analysis of Descartes' Discours de la méthode and his Méditations métaphysiques. This paper also demonstrates how this computer assisted technology can allow the user to rapidly identify, explore and navigate through the different themes found in humanities texts.