Finding Talk About the Past in the Discourse of Non-Historians

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semantically-enhanced search engine and interactive interface to identify references to historical periods in diachronic discourse corpora, supporting memory studies and humanities research.

Contribution

It presents a novel search tool that bridges conceptual information needs with term-based indexes, enabling efficient retrieval of historical references in large texts.

Findings

Effective retrieval of historical period references in corpora

User-friendly interface for sculpting search results

Potential to support linked data creation for humanities research

Abstract

A heightened interest in the presence of the past has given rise to the new field of memory studies, but there is a lack of search and research tools to support studying how and why the past is evoked in diachronic discourses. Searching for temporal references is not straightforward. It entails bridging the gap between conceptually-based information needs on one side, and term-based inverted indexes on the other. Our approach enables the search for references to (intersubjective) historical periods in diachronic corpora. It consists of a semantically-enhanced search engine that is able to find references to many entities at a time, which is combined with a novel interface that invites its user to actively sculpt the search result set. Until now we have been concerned mostly with user-friendly retrieval and selection of sources, but our tool can also contribute to existing efforts to create reusable linked data from and for research in the humanities.