Tracing conceptual change in messy data (2): Self-reliance as boon and bane

As a cultural historian with an interest in demonstrating the usefulness of an assortment of digital humanities tools and techniques to researchers, both students and colleagues, I have previously discussed a number of robust, readily available and easily accessible text-mining applications. Although excellent use can be made of these tools, they have three evident shortcomings: most lack a historical dimension, most cannot cope with multilinguality, and their 'black-box' effect is in some cases large, perhaps too much so. In this lecture I will embroider on this theme by exploring the pros and cons of becoming a little less reliant on currently available, ready-made tools.