FastCat Catalogues: Interactive Entity-based Exploratory Analysis of Archival Documents

TL;DR

FastCat Catalogues is a web-based tool enabling historians to explore and analyze archival transcripts interactively through entity browsing, filtering, visualization, and data export, tailored for JSON-formatted data.

Contribution

It introduces a configurable, open-source web application specifically designed for entity-based exploration and analysis of archival documents in JSON format, addressing real researcher needs.

Findings

Supports diverse entity browsing and filtering

Provides visualization and data export functionalities

Currently used by maritime historians for research

Abstract

We describe FastCat Catalogues, a Web application that supports researchers studying archival material, such as historians, in exploring and quantitatively analysing the data (transcripts) of archival documents. The application was designed based on real information needs provided by a large group of researchers, makes use of JSON technology, and is configurable for use over any type of archival documents whose contents have been transcribed and exported in JSON format. The supported functionalities include a) source- or record-specific entity browsing, b) source-independent entity browsing, c) data filtering, d) inspection of provenance information, e) data aggregation and visualisation in charts, f) table and chart data export for further (external) analysis. The application is provided as open source and is currently used by historians in maritime history research.