The practice of a ‘psychology of peoples’. A corpus-based analysis of the ‘Journal of Völkerpsychologie and Linguistics'

Series: Digital Approaches

Abstract: While modern histories of psychology largely ignore 19th century German Völkerpsychologie (psychology of peoples) and its impact, at the time it presented a new perspective on the entirety of culture and the social public sphere: A unifying nomothetic science of culture that studies language, history, art, and everyday culture from a Herbartian psychological basis. However, what Völkerpsychologie is and might be, which methods might be used and which objects might be studied, was supposed to develop in the practice of collaborating on the « Journal of Völkerpsychologie and Linguistics » (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft). Therefore, it is necessary to take the entirety of the journal and its thematic developments into account. To achieve this, the journal is analyzed with top2vec to generate Topic Models, which can then be visualized diachronically and contrasted with different metadata, such as bibliographic data and data sourced from the authority files of the German National Library. In this talk, I will present the results of these analyses and show, how these can be used as a starting point for further philosophical investigation: With the help of computational methods, we can begin to discover the practice and practitioners of Völkerpsychologie.