Impresso Inspect and Compare. Visual Comparison of Semantically Enriched Historical Newspaper Articles

in Information (2021), 12(9), 348

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to ... [more ▼]

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to allow data-driven and visualisation-based search, exploration and interpretation. Most such interfaces integrate close and distant reading and represent semantic, spatial, social or temporal relations, but often lack contrastive views. Inspect and Compare (I\&C) contributes to the current state of the art in interface design for historical newspapers with highly versatile side-by-side comparisons of query results and curated article sets based on metadata and semantic enrichments. I\&C takes search queries and pre-curated article sets as inputs and allows comparisons based on the distributions of newspaper titles, publication dates and automatically generated enrichments, such as language, article types, topics and named entities. Contrastive views of such data reveal patterns, help humanities scholars to improve search strategies and to facilitate a critical assessment of the overall data quality. I\&C is part of the impresso interface for the exploration of digitised and semantically enriched historical newspapers. [less ▲]

How to read the 52.000 pages of the British Journal of Psychiatry? A collaborative approach to source exploration

in Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (2020)

Historians are confronted with an overabundance of sources that require new perspectives and tools to make use of large-scale corpora. Based on a use case from the history of psychiatry this paper ... [more ▼]

Historians are confronted with an overabundance of sources that require new perspectives and tools to make use of large-scale corpora. Based on a use case from the history of psychiatry this paper describes the work of an interdisciplinary team to tackle these challenges by combining different NLP tools with new visual interfaces that foster the exploration of the corpus. The paper highlights several research challenges in the preparation and processing of the corpus and sketches new insights for historical research that were gathered due to the use of the tools. [less ▲]