The journal to which the following is a contribution has, since its inception, been commendably open to different approaches to the history of concepts, and since its first volume in 2005 it has significantly contributed to the heterogenous development of the field across national and disciplinary boundaries. As it moves into its second decade, calls for a “transdisciplinary history of concepts” and for “comparative transnational” approaches feature more prominently in its pages, and this might be taken to imply that some of the earlier head-scratching around the methodological grounding of the field is no longer appropriate, or even very common. In spite of this trend the following paper goes back to some grounding questions in order to provide an example of how some experimental methodologies which adapt computational and statistical techniques developed in both information extraction and computational linguistics might contribute to the heterogeneity of the field.