Something in a related space, http://www.vosviewer.com/ is now being used by a few publishers and it is AWESOME. You can rearrange by researcher links (who published with whom), academic area links, citation links, institution, etc.
If you had a million labelled postmodern and non-postmodern papers, you could decently identify them.
You could categorise most papers with fewer labels using citation graphs.
You can recommend papers, as you would Amazon books with a recommender system (using ratings).
There are hundreds of ways to apply machine learning to academic articles; it's a matter of deciding what you want the machine learning to do.
12Lumifer
The word "fruitfully" is doing all the heavy lifting here.
It is, of course, possible to throw an ML algorithm at a corpus of academic articles. Will the results be useful? That entirely depends on what do you consider useful. You will certainly get some results.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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