Lia van Gemert (CREATE / UvA) and Lucas van der Deijl (TOPIC) will conduct a research pilot (January – June 2017) granted by Nederlab on the dissemination of Spinozist terminology in digitised early modern texts made available for analysis by Nederlab. The pilot will evaluate Nederlab as a methodological instrument and provide a validation of early results obtained within TOPIC. More specifically, Lia and Lucas will test their assumption that the Dutch Spinozist ‘idiom’ (a set of characteristic words in 7 early Dutch translations of Spinoza’s works) constructed in TOPIC is useful to identify Spinozist ‘discourse’ in other texts. Using the interface for text search and analysis developed by Nederlab, this study will contribute to the fundamental questions posed within TOPIC, on how to trace a philosophical discourse quantitatively, on how to measure discursive ‘influence’ for this particular time and place and, more theoretically, to what extent ‘Spinozism’ can be understood as a diverse but coherent philosophical movement that inspired many texts of different nature. We will keep you posted about the results.