Computational conceptual history of scientific concepts: From early digital methods to LLMs 文章

arXiv:2606.04118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article situates large language models (LLMs) within the longer history of computational approaches to concept analysis in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). We examine what LLMs add to existing methods, how they inherit longstanding problems, and review recent case studies that employ them. In the first part, we reconstruct computational conceptual history before LLMs by bringing together three strands of work: early digital methods in HPSS, distributional approaches from digital history and related research, and lexical semantic change detection. We provide an overview of the main challenges and opportunities, focusing on corpus construction, operationalization and modelling choices, and evaluation and interpretation.