Mining 19th-century Belgian Medical Journals: Challenges and Results

In this paper, we present a multidisciplinary project, IMPRESS, which combines the digitization of three major 19th-century Belgian medical journals with a historical research project on the role of ideology in 19th-century Belgian medicine. We focus on the methodological choices that were made and discuss the extent to which text mining has allowed to identify and evaluate expressions of ideology in a corpus of scientific texts. In laying bare the difficulties and outcomes of both the digitization and the digital analysis (with a focus on the use of the program “AntConc”) we intend to contribute to current debate on the gains and limitations of digital methods in the humanities. We conclude that, while acknowledging the many interpretative interventions in preparing searches and qualifying outcomes, the use of the tool has allowed to reach more sophisticated research results than the exclusive use of non-digital methods would have.