Linguistic Value Construction in 18 th -Century London Auction Advertisements: a Quantitative Approach Alessandra De Mulder 1,∗ , Lauren Fonteyn 2 and Mike Kestemont 1 1 University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium 2 Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands Abstract Georgian England was characterised by a buzzing consumer society in which advertising played a pro- gressively important role when it came to the (linguistic) value construction surrounding material goods. Increasingly, the perceived value of goods was not only determined by the intrinsic quality of the goods, but also by the socio-commercial discourse used to characterise them. Linguistic modi昀ers, such as ad- jectives, must have played an important role in this process – re昀ecting these socio-economical trends in text while also reinforcing them. Here, we focus on a diachronic corpus of over 5,000 pages of Lon- don auction advertisement pages, digitised via automated transcription and divided across four sample periods between 1742-1829. Prime methodological challenges include: (1) the noisiness of the available data because of imperfect transcription; (2) the coarseness of the available time stamps, and (3) the lack of suitable NLP so昀ware, such as lemmatizers or (shallow) syntactic parsers. Through the use of word embeddings, we try to alleviate the issue of spelling variation with reasonable success. We 昀nd that, over time, subjective or ‘evaluative’ modi昀ers have become more prominent in these advertise- ments than their objective or ‘descriptive’ counterparts – but there are di昀erent temporal patterns for di昀erent types of advertised objects Keywords advertisements, linguistic modi昀cation, frequentist statistics, spelling normalisation, time series 1. Introduction In Georgian England, a certain group, known as the beau monde, procured their place in so- ciety by publicly demonstrating their ties to one another, both in personal relationships and material expressions [17]. 1 They are considered the trailblazers of a new, fast-paced consumer society, although volumes have been written discussing the time, place and pace of consumer (r)evolution(s) [24, 36]. In any case, the interaction between people and their possessions al- tered on an unprecedented scale in eighteenth-century England. This translated into many CHR 2022: Computational Humanities Research Conference, December 12 – 14, 2022, Antwerp, Belgium ∗ Corresponding author. alessandra.demulder@uantwerpen.be (A. De Mulder); l.fonteyn@hum.leidenuniv.nl (L. Fonteyn); mike.kestemont@uantwerpen.be (M. Kestemont) 0000-0002-2612-420X (A. De Mulder); 0000-0001-5706-8418 (L. Fonteyn); 0000-0003-3590-693X (M. Kestemont) © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org ISSN 1613-0073 CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) 1 All code and data that were used for the preparation of this paper are available from the following repository under a CC-BY-NC-SA license: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7252695. 92