What Does "Dignity" Mean? Different Meanings in a jurisprudential Analysis from a Distant Reading

Abstract

This paper analyses the use of the signifier "dignity" (and others related) in the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the year 2018 in order to detect and show different meanings. To do so, two ways of approaching are used: a distant reading tool (Voyant Tools) that will let characterize the corpus and a database and an app created by a research team that facilitate the graphical visualization and the systematization of literal formulas. The aim is to show how a distant reading and informatics resources may let us to have a quick image of a large number of texts and pages before deciding a deep read. The paper describes: 1) the corpus and the criteria to select documents and the analysis methodology; 2) the description of the corpus according to the distant reading made by Voyant Tools; 3) the uses of the term “dignity” and related 4) frequent formulas that show in context how “dignity” (and related terms) is used. Finally, we discuss the utility of a distant reading for doing research with a large corpus.