Ran some simple LSA stuff against Volume 1 of Thomas Cromwell's letters (1523-1535, collected by R.B. Merriman) to see what I could uncover!

For a brief overview of LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), see here. Very, very broadly, it can be understood as a way to pull out semantic themes from a corpus.

I wanted to see what I could learn from running some very basic LSA tools in open source python repositories against a collection of Thomas Cromwell's letters, compiled by R.B. Merriman. I originally attempted a similar project against Thomas Cranmer's collected letters, but there was no fully digitized source and as a private citizen I did not have easy access to some of the higher end OCR technologies enabled by recent LLM advances. From the digitized text, I separated the letters and run their content through some basic LSA paces; of course, one major issue with such efforts is the discrepancies between early modern English spelling and our own, not to mention the discrepancies between spellings of the "same" word in different documents, which can make stop words (words that carry no semantic content) difficult to identify with an untrained, open source LSA tool. Nonetheless, I found the exercise intriguing, and it gave me good practice in a private research setting of what I might want to pursue in the future.

I was inspired, in part, by Leif Weatherby's Language Machines: Cultural AI and the end of Remainder Humanism, which dove into the way LLMs have revealed the formal construction of meaning through structure in language. I highly recommend the book, as it is phenomenal, but I also am encouraged by the ideas it proposes to take a similar look at not just modern texts but pre-modern (or early modern, if you prefer) ones.

The theme that jumps out in these top four semantic groupings is a clear reflection of the preoccupations of Cromwell's early life. He served, first to Cardinal Wolsey, then to the King, as an expert on "getting stuff done", hence his overwhelming concern with his highness' desires and pleasures. His primary job in a technical sense was the dissolution of monasteries (not the great '36-41 project but a more piecemeal process) in order to fund the new Cardinal's College, which would be renamed as King's College upon the death of Wolsey.

Click any topic below to see its key terms and representative letters that best exemplify that theme.