Innovators of the Past: Modelling Novelty and Resonance in Dutch Historical Language Records

Studies in the humanities are increasingly incorporating methods from information theory, which are based on dynamics in word usage and measures of relative entropy. This paper uses windowed relative entropy to thematic text representations to generate signals that capture information novelty and resonance and, aggregated on the actor-level, shed light on the innovators of the past. Comparing early modern chronicles and twentieth-century parliamentary debate we aim to investigate several dimensions of innovation in historical language records.