The leveled approach. Using and evaluating text mining tools AVResearcherXL and Texcavator for historical research on public perceptions of drugs

TL;DR

This paper presents a leveled historical approach combining distant and close reading to analyze drug debates in digital archives, while evaluating two text mining tools for historical research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel leveled approach for historical analysis that integrates text mining tools with traditional reading methods.

Findings

Effective combination of distant and close reading methods.

Evaluation results of AVResearcherXL and Texcavator tools.

Insights into public perceptions of drugs in historical newspapers.

Abstract

We introduce our explorative historical leveled approach that we use to understand drug debates in the Royal Dutch Library's digital newspaper archive. In this approach we alternate between distant reading and close reading. Furthermore, we use this approach to evaluate two text mining tools: AVResearcherXL and Texcavator.