Extending defoe for the Efficient Analysis of Historical Texts at Scale

Rosa Filgueira, Claire Grover, Vasilios Karaiskos, Beatrice Alex, Sarah Van Eyndhoven, Lisa Gotthard, Melissa Terras
2021 2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on eScience (eScience)  
This paper presents the new facilities provided in defoe, a parallel toolbox for querying a wealth of digitised newspapers and books at scale. defoe has been extended to work with further Natural Language Processing () tools such as the Edinburgh Geoparser, to store the preprocessed text in several storage facilities and to support different types of queries and analyses. We have also extended the collection of XML schemas supported by defoe, increasing the versatility of the tool for the
more » ... is of digital historical textual data at scale. Finally, we have conducted several studies in which we worked with humanities and social science researchers who posed complex and interested questions to large-scale digital collections. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to conduct their studies and obtain results faster, while all the large-scale text mining complexity is automatically handled by defoe.
doi:10.1109/escience51609.2021.00012 fatcat:xgmjtxjmgrhu5cyyealv6bjuyq