ALCIDE (Analysis of Language and Content In a Digital Environment) is a web-based platform designed to assist humanities scholars in analysing large quantities of data such as historical sources and literary works. The system combines a flexible suite of tools to browse through the content of document collections and analyse them along different dimensions, including the lexical, the semantic, the geographical and the temporal level.
It is developed in the context of the ALCIDE project, a cooperation with the history research group at FBK (ISIG), whose main research topic is the study of major historical transitions.
The demo gives access to 3 corpora, two in English and one in Italian:
- Nixons speeches uttered during the U.S. presidential campaign in 1960 (282 documents – 830,000 tokens) downloaded from the American Presidency Project;
- Kennedys speeches uttered during the U.S. presidential campaign in 1960 (598 documents – 815,000 tokens) downloaded from the American Presidency Project;
- all manifestos written by Marinetti between 1909 and 1921 (42 documents – 64,000 tokens) digitized by Selena Daly.
Application cases
- Historical investigation: comparison of Nixon vs. Kennedy political campaign (Moretti et al., 2016), analysis of the De Gasperi writings (ALCIDE project);
- Social science research: comparison of different sources of information on equal opportunities (MADRE project);
- Political science study: analysis of public debate from a diachronic perspective: the case of local minimum wages (Poy, 2015).
