MITAO: a tool for enabling scholars in the Humanities to use Topic Modelling in their studies

TL;DR

MITAO is a user-friendly, web-based tool that enables Humanities scholars to perform Topic Modelling without extensive coding, promoting reproducibility and collaborative research.

Contribution

This paper introduces MITAO, a visual workflow tool that simplifies Topic Modelling for non-technical Humanities researchers, enhancing accessibility and reproducibility.

Findings

MITAO successfully applied to analyze article abstracts from 'Umanistica Digitale'

Dynamic visualizations provided insights into topic evolution over time

Results and workflows are openly shared for further research

Abstract

Automatic text analysis methods, such as Topic Modelling, are gaining much attention in Humanities. However, scholars need to have extensive coding skills to use such methods appropriately. The need of having this technical expertise prevents the broad adoption of these methods in Humanities research. In this paper, to help scholars in the Humanities to use Topic Modelling having no or limited coding skills, we introduce MITAO, a web-based tool that allow the definition of a visual workflow which embeds various automatic text analysis operations and allows one to store and share both the workflow and the results of its execution to other researchers, which enables the reproducibility of the analysis. We present an example of an application of use of Topic Modelling with MITAO using a collection of English abstracts of the articles published in "Umanistica Digitale". The results returned by MITAO are shown with dynamic web-based visualizations, which allowed us to have preliminary insights about the evolution of the topics treated over the time in the articles published in "Umanistica Digitale". All the results along with the defined workflows are published and accessible for further studies.