| The history of the socialist movement in Europe is a complex web of events and people. HITIME aims at the development of a software toolkit for historical text mining that is able to convert a heterogeneous collection of sources documenting a period in history, e.g. the history of social and labor movements, into a ?historical web of domain knowledge?, an associative network of historically relevant entities and their relations, linked to a timeline. This network is browsable and searchable with textually as well as visually oriented interfaces using timelines, maps, and network viewers. Humanities researchers can utilize the interface to obtain answers to questions that now take large, if not unrealistic amounts of human effort to answer. Development of the toolkit is driven by a case study involving the extensive archives of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the core of which pertains to the history of the European socialist and labor movements between 1850 and 1940. They constitute a heterogeneous mix of primary sources (letters, personal archives), secondary sources (biographies), and metadata (archive inventories), all carrying text as the primary medium. The secondary and metadata sources contain domain-specific annotations that could bootstrap the automated large-scale extraction of domain entities from the unannotated primary sources. The large-scale analysis provided by the HITIME toolkit would allow linking between persons, occupations, locations, events, and ideas at an unprecedented scale. Outcomes of the project will find direct application in social history research into people collectives, and in producing prosopographies (?group biographies?) and social network analyses. |
