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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2020

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

Résumé

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. keywords topic modelling; visualisations; text mining; history of psychiatry; United Kingdom INTRODUCTION Contemporary historians face an overabundance of digitised and digital born sources. As Roy Rosenzweig pointed out more than 15 years ago "Surely, the injunction of traditional historians to look at 'everything' cannot survive in a digital era in which 'everything' has survived.'' (Rosenzweig 2003) Navigating, exploring and analysing these sources can form a major research obstacle for historians and humanists alike. In this paper we therefore want to discuss how to foster the process of corpus exploration through the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interface design while closely supporting the research process. Our case study focuses on an ongoing PhD project concerned with the dissemination of psychiatric knowledge across Europe between 1843 and 1925 through five different psychiatric journals in different languages 2 with a total of about 250000 pages. The sheer quantity of this material formed a severe obstacle to perform a valuable and thorough analysis of the sources without computational support and to provide answers to the specific research questions. To mediate this, we set up a probing exercise to explore the feasibility of potential solutions to the problem, creating at the same time an interesting challenge for computer science due to the unstructured nature of the historical sources as data. In the following we will briefly outline the specific challenges posed by historical psychiatric journals and describe the context of our case study. After this we will discuss how we performed a semi-automatic cleaning of the dataset and describe different approaches to topic modelling in order to enable the historian to find relevant material in the sources. We will then introduce histograph as an interface that enables corpus exploration. Here we will present a new type of visualisation that improves the practical usability of the topic modelling output for the sake of content exploration as well as the addition of further content lenses or
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Dates et versions

hal-02929695 , version 1 (03-09-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02929695 , version 1

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Eva Andersen, Maria Biryukov, Roman Kalyakin, Lars Wieneke. How to read the 52.000 pages of the British Journal of Psychiatry? A collaborative approach to source exploration. 2020. ⟨hal-02929695⟩
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