The Voice of Wittgenstein? An exploration of a corpus of Kirchberg contributions 2001- 2010

At the time of Wittgenstein’s death in 1951 only the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had been published. Since then, a vast amount of material has been made available and put to use by scholars in a growing mass of commentary and secondary literature. In this article, we introduce and take some first steps in exploring a digital corpus which may be used to investigate the use of Wittgenstein’s work and other aspects of the writing of Wittgenstein scholars.Which sources do scholars cite, and how? On what themes are Wittgenstein’s own words mostly used? What do citation practices of Wittgenstein scholars reveal about the implicit conventions of our research community?The corpus of Kirchberg Wittgenstein-related conference pre-proceedings papers, published by the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 2001-2010, were digitized, marked up in XML format, and re-published Open Access by the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen in 2013. Digital methods of structuring and searching the corpus bring new perspectives on Wittgenstein scholarship within reach.