This posting describes a number of Python scripts used to enhance a lexicon, where a lexicon is defined as a list of desirable, meaningful words. Compare a lexicon to a stop word list where stop word lists contain words of little use or interest, and a lexicon is a set of words of great significance.

The first script -- keywords2lexicon.py - takes the name of a Distant Reader study carrel and an integer (N) as input. It then computes the N most frequent keywords and outputs them to the carrel's etc/lexicon.txt file. This is a decent way to jumpstart a lexicon. Alternatively, create a list of words by hand.

Once you have a lexicon, you may want to enhance it, and there are three supported methods:

Used in different orders, with different parameters, and compounded between themselves, this tiny system of scripts will generate lists of words that may be of interest to the student, researcher, or scholar.

Given a refined lexicon, it is possible to create sophisticated full-text database queries, map the lexicon's words in a networked space, feed the words to a concordance for quick reading, etc. One might even calculate weights of individual documents based on the occurances of lexicon words. Hmmm...

As an example, here is a tiny lexicon generated from the list of computed keywords in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey:

Here is a list of these words and their variants found in the corpus:

Here is a list of these words and their semantically related words:

Here is a list of these words and their synonyms:

Finally, and very importantly, the output of these scripts are not intended to be taken whole cloth. Instead one is expected to get the output, peruse it, and then season it to your own taste. Computers are stupid. You are not.