Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration
Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration
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交易后果：结合文本挖掘和可视化以促进文档探索的案例研究
DOI：
10.1093/llc/fqv046
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Colin Coates
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Uta Hinrichs;Beatrice Alex;J. Clifford;Andrew Watson;A. Quigley;Ewan Klein;Colin Coates
大规模的数字化努力和计算方法的可获得性，包括文本挖掘和信息可视化，为历史研究提供了新的方法。然而，我们缺乏关于这些方法如何应用于实践以及它们可能产生的潜在影响的案例研究。交易后果是环境历史学家、计算语言学家和可视化专家之间的跨学科研究项目。它将文本挖掘和信息可视化与环境史的传统研究方法相结合，从全球角度探索19世纪的商品贸易。除了一个独特的数据库，该项目还开发了三个可视化界面，以便能够探索和分析四个历史文件集，其中包括大约200 000份文件和1100万页与商品交易有关的文件。在这篇文章中，我们讨论了我们的方法的潜力和局限性，基于我们在这个项目过程中从历史学家那里获得的反馈。在数字人文项目的更大背景下，我们的发现表明，基于可视化的界面是在历史研究中进行大规模探索的一个有价值的起点。除了提供文档集合的多个可视视角以突出一般模式外，重要的是提供这些模式发生的上下文，并为更深入的调查提供分析工具。
Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary research project between environmental historians, computational linguists, and visualization specialists. It combines text mining and information visualization alongside traditional research methods in environmental history to explore commodity trade in the 19th century from a global perspective. Along with a unique data corpus, this project developed three visual interfaces to enable the exploration and analysis of four historical document collections, consisting of approximately 200,000 documents and 11 million pages related to commodity trading. In this article, we discuss the potential and limitations of our approach based on feedback from historians we elicited over the course of this project. Informing the design of such tools in the larger context of digital humanities projects, our findings show that visualization-based interfaces are a valuable starting point to large-scale explorations in historical research. Besides providing multiple visual perspectives on the document collection to highlight general patterns, it is important to provide a context in which these patterns occur and offer analytical tools for more in-depth investigations.