On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the international journal “Quality & Quantity”, a congress wil be held in Bologna on 17-18th November 2017. Rachele Sprugnoli and Giovanni Moretti will participate in the congress with the following talk.
Title: Language technologies for historical documents: the case of Alcide De Gasperi’s writings
Abstract: The application of language technologies to Humanities studies is having a great impact on the way humanities research is being conducted. However, although many tools have been developed to analyse document collections, they often fail to provide a real support to humanities scholars because of a lack of communication between this research community and ICT researchers. Since 2013 a collaboration between the Digital Humanities research unit and the Italian-German Historical institute at Fondazione Bruno Kessler is carried on in order to reduce this gap and develop text mining techniques for the processing of political texts. In this presentation, we will give an overview of some of these techniques taking into consideration the work done within an interdisciplinary research project to give new insight into Alcide De Gasperi’s public figure. In particular, we will present three text processing applications designed with the help of history scholars and applied to the complete corpus of De Gasperi’s writing: i.e. the extraction of persons networks, the detection of topics based on key-concept clustering and the analysis of temporal dimension.
Location:
Aula Giorgio Prodi, Piazza San Giovanni in Monte, 2 – Bologna
