Marten During

HistoGraph -- A Visualization Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Networks from Historical Social Multimedia Collections

This paper describes the design and development of histoGraph, an interactive tool for explorative visualization and collaborative investigation of historical social networks from multimedia collections. Developed in an interdisciplinary collaboration of computer scientists, historians, HCI researchers and interface designers, the tool aims at supporting historians in the discovery and historical analysis of relationships between people, places and events. A special focus is on the identification and interactive visualization of social relations from historical photo collections through a combination of automatic analysis and expert-based crowd sourcing. The tool design bridges the gap between established network analysis and visualization techniques and traditional hermeneutic research methods in historical research. It integrates visual exploration with hybrid social graph construction, hypothesis formulation and the consultation of digitized primary sources. A formative evaluation of the current prototype, developed as a domain-specific application for historians in the field of European integration points to opportunities and critical factors in applying this approach to support and further current research practices in digital humanities.

Mining the Twentieth Century’s History from the Time Magazine Corpus

In this paper we report on an explorative study of the history of the twentieth cen- tury from a lexical point of view. As data, we use a diachronic collection of 270,000+ English-language articles har- vested from the electronic archive of the well-known Time Magazine (1923–2006). We attempt to automatically identify significant shifts in the vocabulary used in this corpus using efficient, yet unsupervised computational methods, such as Parsimonious Language Models. We offer a qualitative interpretation of the outcome of our experiments in the light of momen- tous events in the twentieth century, such as the Second World War or the rise of the Internet. This paper follows up on a recent string of frequentist approaches to studying cultural history (‘Culturomics’), in which the evolution of human culture is studied from a quantitative perspective, on the basis of lexical statistics extracted from large, textual data sets.

Analysis of Temporal and Web Site References in History-related Tweets

Having good knowledge and comprehension of history is believed to be important for a variety of reasons. In this paper we report the initial results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-focused references in microblogs based on 11-months long snapshot of Twitter data. The results of this study can be used for designing content recommendation systems and can help to improve time aware search applications.

Documenting Social Unrest: Detecting Strikes in Historical Daily Newspapers

The identification of relevant historical sources such as newspapers and letters and the extraction of information from them is an essential part of historical research. In this work, our aim is the detection of relevant primary sources with the goal to support researchers working on a specific historical event. We focus on the historical daily Dutch newspaper archive of the National Library of the Netherlands and strike events that happened in the Netherlands during the 1980s. Using a manually compiled database of strikes in the Netherlands, we first attempt to find reports on those strikes in historical daily newspapers by automatically associating database records to the daily press of the time covering the same strike. Then, we generalise our methodology to detect strike events in the press not currently covered by the strikes database, and support in this way the extension of secondary historical resources. Our methods are evaluated against the manually constructed database of strikes.

Digital History meets Microblogging: Analyzing Collective Memories in Twitter

Having good knowledge and comprehension of history is believed to be important for a variety of reasons. Microblogging platforms could offer good opportunities to study how and when people explicitly refer to the past, in which context such references appear and what purpose they serve. However, this area remains unexplored. In this paper we report the results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-focused references in microblogs based on 11-months long snapshot of Twitter data. We are the first to analyze general historical references in Twitter based on large scale data analysis. The results of this study can be used for designing content recommendation systems and could help to improve time aware search applications.

Overview of the 4th HistoInformatics Workshop

In line with global trends, historical records are increasingly available in forms that computer can process. These ever expanding records (such as scanned books, large-scale corpora, academic papers, maps, photos, audios, videos)---either digitally born or reconstructed through digitization pipelines---are too big to be read or viewed manually. Historians, like other humanities researchers, have a keen interest in computational approaches to process and study digitized historical information for research, writing, and dissemination of historical knowledge. In Computer Science, experimental tools and methods are challenged to be validated regarding their relevance for real-world questions and applications. The HistoInformatics workshop series is focused on the challenges and opportunities of data-driven humanities and brings together scientists and scholars at the forefront of this emerging field, at the interface between History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Computer Science and associated disciplines as well as the cultural heritage sector. The 4th HistoInformatics Workshop was a half day workshop co-located with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017) in Singapore.

Netzwerkanalyse in den Geschichtswissenschaften. Historische Netzwerkanalyse als Methode für die Erforschung von historischen Prozessen

Die Potenziale der Netzwerkanalyse fur die Geschichtswissenschaft sind ebenso bekannt wie deren Grenzen und Gefahren durch Fehlinterpretationen. Die Anwendung der historischen Netzwerkanalyse ist bisher vielfach gefordert, doch kaum umgesetzt worden. Eine direkte Ubertragung aller Netzwerktheorien und Netzwerkmethoden in die Geschichtswissenschaft erscheint kaum erstrebenswert, da ein behutsamer Umgang mit der Datenerhebung und -deutung bei haufig bruchstuckhaften Quellengrundlagen dies verbietet. Historiker und Historikerinnen konnen sich vielmehr Teile der sozialwissenschaftlichen Netzwerktheorie und -methode, die ihnen fur ihr jeweiliges Forschungsprojekt geeignet erscheinen, zu Nutze machen.

histoGraph as a Demonstrator for Domain Specific Challenges to Crowd-Sourcing

histoGraph provides an integrated pipeline for the extraction of co-occurrence information in historical photos to build an exploreable social graph of relationships that can lead to new insights for historical research. The application leverages on the CUbRIK platform for human/machine computation and applies a hybrid approach to face-detection and -recognition that combines the strengths of algorithmic analysis with expert and generic crowd sourcing. Following a general overview of our approach, we explore the surplus value of human touch for the identification of identities in historical image collections through a uniform crowd-sourcing approach. We find that only a combination of generic and expert crowds yields promising results. Even though the application was designed and developed for a specific target audience, we aim not only at demonstrating the current functionality but also identify and discuss several core principles that can be transferred to other domains.

Can Network Analysis Reveal Importance? Degree Centrality and Leaders in the EU Integration Process

This paper describes ongoing work on the potential of simple centrality algorithms for the robust and low-cost exploration of non-curated text corpora. More specifically, this paper studies (1) a network of historical personalities created from co-occurrences in historical photographs and (2) a network created from co-occurrences of names in Wikipedia pages with the goal to accurately identify outstanding personalities in the history of European integration even within flawed datasets. In both cases Degree centrality emerges as a viable method to detect leading personalities.

The 2nd HistoInformatics Workshop - Introduction

The 2nd HistoInformatics Workshop (http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2014/) (the 2nd International Workshop on Computational History) was held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics (Socinfo2014) in Barcelona, Spain on the 10th November 2014. The objective of the workshop is to provide for two research communities, Computer Science and History Sciences, a place to meet and exchange ideas and to facilitate discussion and collaboration. This report briefly summarizes the workshop.