L'archivio glottologico italiano: 150 anni di storia

This paper summarises the 150-year history of the Archivio Glottologico Italiano using quantitative methods and statistical tools to conduct a distant reading analysis. In addition, we reference the history of Linguistics in order to better grasp how the spread of various theories affected the journal, and we examine the influence exerted by the scholars who have contributed the most to its growth. The keywords of the journal were identified through text data mining procedures, including topic extraction and correspondence analysis, based on a bag-of-words approach. This method allowed us to subdivide the history of the journal into six chronological periods and associate each of them with a specific set of representative terms. Subsequently, variations in the relative frequency of each keyword were examined to reconstruct the sequence of interests and methods occurring in the journal throughout the years. Changes in the scientific terminology were interpreted with the support of textual and extratextual information, and these served as reference points for tracing the evolution of linguistic studies on the pages of the Archivio Glottologico Italiano.