Mapping the History of Knowledge: Text-Based Tools and Algorithms for Tracking the Development of Concepts

FAIN: HD-51128-10

Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)
Mikhail Gronas (Project Director: March 2010 to August 2013)

Text analysis of 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica employing natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization in order test computational methods for tracing changes in formation and evolution of concepts and ideas across domains of knowledge over time.

We propose to map out the History of European thought over last three centuries using as a proxy the history of changes in 15 editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. Editors of each new edition had to build a new consensus on what to include and what to exclude, how much volume a subject deserves, and what are the relations between subjects. These decisions may be captured and analyzed by methods of natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization, thus providing tools for identification and analysis of various historical trends within and across domains of knowledge, such as discussion of theories and ideas, evolution of concepts, growth of reputations and such.

Associated Products

Gravebook (Web Resource)
Title: Gravebook
Author: A. Gabrovski
Author: M. Gronas
Author: A. Rumshisky
Abstract: This is a browsing interface prototype that allows users to view and browse information regarding relative importance of historical personalities, their representation in historical and current editions of Britannica and Wikipedia, as well as their circle of influence and acquaintances.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.newmediacenter.ru/knowevo/gravebook/
Primary URL Description: This is a browsing interface prototype that allows users to view and browse information regarding relative importance of historical personalities, their representation in historical and current editions of Britannica and Wikipedia, as well as their circle of influence and acquaintances. Note that this website is currently in transition to another web server. Some of the functionality may not be available.

Tracking the History of Knowledge Using Historical Editions of Encyclopedia Britannica (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Tracking the History of Knowledge Using Historical Editions of Encyclopedia Britannica
Author: M. Gronas
Author: A. Rumshisky
Author: A. Gabrovski
Author: S. Kovaka
Author: H. Chen
Abstract: Despite the wealth of newly available digital materials, the scope of text-based investigations has mostly been limited to either synchronous or short-term historical analysis. In this paper, we report on the first stage of the project that focuses on tracking long-range historical change, specifically, on the history of ideas and concepts. The project’s aim is to map out the history of representation of knowledge in Europe over last three centuries using as a proxy the history of changes in historical editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. We describe a series of corpus-analytical tasks necessary for building the analytical and comparative tools for historical analysis using scanned noisy text. In this first stage of the project, we focus specifically on the tools for tracking and visualizing the relative importance of people, interconnections between them, and the rise and fall of their reputations.
Date: 05/26/2012
Conference Name: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2012, Workshop on Adaptation of Language Resources and Tools for Processing Cultural Heritage Objects.

Knowevo and Gravebook: Tracking the History of Knowledge (Report)
Title: Knowevo and Gravebook: Tracking the History of Knowledge
Author: A. Gabrovski
Abstract: This thesis develops a framework for observing the evolution of various aspects of human knowledge over time. The framework uses several editions of Encyclopedia Bri- tannica, as well as Wikipedia, to build a database for human knowledge corresponding to several time periods. The framework matches the same articles and topics across the different time periods and ranks them using various NLP and network analysis techniques. The data from Encyclopedia Britannica has been merged with Wikipedia to form a Gravebook - a website allowing scholars to query certain topics or articles and observe how the importance of the queried item evolved over time in terms of importance and content.
Date: 05/23/2012

Case Study for the course Introduction to Digital Humanities, HSE, Moscow (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Case Study for the course Introduction to Digital Humanities, HSE, Moscow
Author: Mikhail Gronas
Author: Roman Leibov
Author: Anastassia Bonch-Osmolovskaya
Author: Anna Rumshisky
Abstract: The project has been used as a case study in the course "Digital Humanities", Department of Computational Linguistics, Division of Philology, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Year: 2013
Audience: K - 12

Noise Correction Spellchecker Tool (Computer Program)
Title: Noise Correction Spellchecker Tool
Author: Matthew Digman
Abstract: Noise correction spellchecker tool, which relies on the lexical information from the clean digitized edition of Britannica (Edition 15) in order to suggest corrections of commonly misspelled words. The tool runs over frequency dictionaries compiled from different editions. The list of corrections proposed by the tool is compiled by using an algorithm similar to such iterative methods of parameter estimation as the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm in statistics.
Year: 2013
Access Model: open access
Programming Language/Platform: Perl
Source Available?: Yes

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