In every discipline there are topics or subject areas that gain prominence and, after a while, begin to fade. Experienced scholars are aware of this phenomenon. They have intuitive insight into the life cycle of ideas in the histories of their own discipline. This book seeks to quantify the growth and decline of topics in a variety of disciplines. Although the book’s title includes the terms “humanities and social sciences,” the methods can be applied to any discipline, including the physical and natural sciences and the computing disciplines. The editor and contributing authors come from Italian universities, primarily the University of Padova, where the program of research was first developed.

An introductory chapter to the research methodology contains a short example. Two main parts follow. Part 1 (five chapters) describes investigations from diverse disciplines: philosophy, sociology, social psychology, linguistics, and statistics. The second part (five chapters) details the concepts and methods used to conduct the investigations.

The methodology begins with a “distant reading” of journals significant to a discipline. In distant reading, software identifies individual words and associated word strings and then tallies their use in journal titles, abstracts, and even full-text papers. The words and word strings can then be clustered into sets representing different topic areas. The frequency with which the words in a cluster appear over time is an indicator of the historical significance of the topics. For example, the history of the turn of philosophy toward analytical philosophy used clusters of words and word phrases characteristic of analytical philosophy (plus other clusters characteristic of other areas in philosophy). The relative word frequencies in these clusters show how analytical philosophy captured the attention of philosophers over the past century. Likewise, other subdisciplines in philosophy can be tracked.

The primary beneficiaries of this methodology include historians and philosophers. Although the only scientific/mathematical discipline represented in the book is statistics, it could be applied to any discipline as long as the scholars employ the process carefully, define the scope of the study, and use clustered terms that correctly and carefully characterize the topic. This is a new tool for historians and philosophers, and I expect it will be more widely used going forward.