Latin American Philosophy Mining

Authors: Juan R. Loaiza (URosario / HU Berlin) and Miguel González Duque (ITU Copenhagen)

In this repository we track progress on a research project in which we apply text mining to philosophy journals in Latin America. Our aim is to provide insights into the history of philosophy in Latin America using a data-driven approach.

We are starting with Ideas y Valores (Colombia) and articles from 2009 to 2017. We plan on expanding later to include more years and other journals such as Crítica (Mexico) and Análisis Filosófico (Argentina).

Structure

.
├── data                # Data files (omitted from Git repository for the moment)
|   ├── raw_html        # Raw HTML files directly as scraped with metadata     
|   └── clean_json      # Parsed HTML files and metadata in JSON format
├── utils               # Helper utilities
├── notebooks           # Notebooks with preprocessing and analyses
|   └── wordlists       # Stopwords and protected words lists
└── README.md

To-Do

• Extract view information from main HTML page.
• Calibrate the number of topics for the LDA model.
  • Implement LDA in gensim and use topic coherence measures to calibrate the number of topics.

Preliminary figures and visualizations

Figure 1. Documents by document type.

Figure 2. Documents by main type per year.

Figure 3. Word cloud of the most mentioned philosophers in the corpus.

Figure 4. Word cloud of the most frequent keywords in the corpus according to article metadata.

Figure 5. Word counts by year.

Using a provisional model

The following plots are only proofs of concept. We are using a temporary LDA model with 10 topics to find which visualizations would work best. There is still work to fully optmize the LDA model though. We use a model with the following top 10 most salient words.

Topic 0	Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5	Topic 6	Topic 7	Topic 8	Topic 9
lenguaje	kant	religioso	ser	creencia	ser	político	acción	alma	político
interpretación	concienciar	religión	cuerpo	mundo	mundo	formar	moral	ser	derecho
teoría	ser	ciudad	formar	ser	hegel	vida	ser	platón	moral
experiencia	concepto	filosofía	heidegger	teoría	filosofía	ser	accionar	filosofía	ser
wittgenstein	objetar	historia	modo	propiedad	dios	filosofía	agente	conocimiento	justicia
filosofía	experiencia	siglo	aristóteles	término	bien	nietzsche	personar	sócrates	bien
ser	arte	cultura	ente	contener	vida	foucault	desear	hombre	social
problema	husserl	tradición	naturaleza	concepto	razón	social	intención	virtud	sociedad
autor	trascendental	ciencia	bien	físico	hombre	crítico	bien	bien	teoría
filosófico	modo	obrar	existencia	objeto	pensar	pensamiento	libertar	obrar	razón

Figure 6. Proportion of articles by topic

Figure 7. Word counts by topic.