The Textual Patterns of Political Themes: Regular Expressions and Concordancing for Digital Political Theorists

• In Event: Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Theory

Abstract

My project seeks to demonstrate the value of a multi-disciplinary and digitally-based set of tools and techniques designed to trace political concepts and their themes across collections of texts. The techniques extend beyond simple searches of an idea specified by word or phrase. Indeed, the techniques focus on the varied textual patterns by which authors express their ideas synonymously and metaphorically.

The project showcases my work on W.E.B. Du Bois. Specifically, the project extends my earlier, original scholarly research wherein I analyzed Du Bois's use of Justice Roger Taney's infamous statement in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case (1857). Du Bois applied the Taney statement to other social relationships: e.g., "the rest of the monarch's subjects had no rights which the monarch was bound to respect". The project extends my earlier work by seeking to match textual patterns evocative of the Taney statement: e.g., "Has the minority [. . .] no right to respectful consideration?"

The project provides an overview of corpus creation and concordancer software. It ultimately sets forth regular expression (regex) search procedures and workflows that other theorists can modify for their own studies. I discuss regexes applied via concordancer, such as
(?i)\brights(?:.){0,60}?\brespect
and more complex regexes including
(?:(?>(?:\brights?\b)()
|(?:\bb(?:i|ou)nd|ought|need|ha[dsv]e?
|should|must)\w*\b()|\b(?:\brespect\w*\b)()
|(?>\1|\2|\3)\w+)\b\W*?){0,20}\1\2\3

Such regex search protocols enable me to locate Taney-evocative patterns, if they exist in the corpus, thereby providing evidence for a Taney theme in Du Bois's normative critiques of social oppression.

Author

• Robert W. Williams, Bennett College