Supporting Exploration of Historical Perspectives Across Collections

Abstract

Abstract. The ever growing number of textual historical collections calls for methods that can meaningfully connect and explore these. Different collections offer different perspectives, expressing views at the time of writing or even a subjective view of the author. We propose to connect heterogeneous digital collections through temporal references found in documents as well as their textual content. We evaluate our approach and find that it works very well on digitalnative collections. Digitized collections pose interesting challenges and with improved preprocessing our approach performs well. We introduce a novel search interface to explore and analyze the connected collections that highlights different perspectives and requires little domain knowledge. In our approach, perspectives are expressed as complex queries. Our approach supports humanity scholars in exploring collections in a novel way and allows for digital collections to be more accessible by adding new connections and new means to access collections.

Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution

“…19 Using such approaches researchers have used automated approaches to study subjects such as conceptual history (see, e.g. Pumfrey, Rayson and Mariani 2012), perceptions of the Second World War across different text collections (Odijk et al 2015) and textbooks aimed at children in German schools in the period 1850 to 1918 (Schnober et al 2015). This book takes a different approach.…”

ArchiveWeb: collaboratively extending and exploring web archive collections—How would you like to work with your collections?

“…A few researchers have worked on providing new interfaces and visualizations for searching, exploring, and discovering insights from web archives. Odijk et al [14] present an exploratory search interface to improve accessibility of digital archived collections for humanities scholars, in order to highlight different perspectives across heterogeneous historical collections. The motivation for this work derives from the huge amount of digital material that has become available to study our recent history, including books, newspapers, and web pages, all of which provide different perspectives on people, places, and events over time.…”

ArchiveWeb: Collaboratively Extending and Exploring Web Archive Collections

“…al. [15] present an exploratory search interface to improve accessibility of digital archived collections for humanities scholars, in order to highlight different perspectives across heterogeneous historical collections. The motivation for this work derives from the huge amount of digital material that has become available to study our recent history, including books, newspapers and web pages, all of which provide different perspectives on people, places and events over time.…”