TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization

FAIN: HD-51705-13

Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA 30318-6395)
Lauren Frederica Klein (Project Director: October 2012 to May 2016)
Jacob Eisenstein (Co Project Director: October 2012 to May 2016)

The development of a web-based tool for the visual exploration of the themes that recur across an archive, based on the text-analysis technique of topic modeling combined with the archive's related metadata. A digitized archive of 19th-century abolitionist newspapers would serve as the initial test case.

As archives are being digitized at an increasing rate, scholars will require new tools to make sense of this expanding amount of material. We propose to build TOME, a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives. Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling--a computational method for identifying themes that recur across a collection--TOME will visualize the topics that characterize each archive, as well as the relationships between specific topics and related metadata, such as publication date. An archive of 19th-century antislavery newspapers, characterized by diverse authors and shifting political alliances, will serve as our initial dataset; it promises to motivate new methods for visualizing topic models and extending their impact. In turn, by applying our new methods to these texts, we will illuminate how issues of gender and racial identity affect the development of political ideology in the nineteenth century, and into the present day.

Associated Products

“Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in 19th-Century Activist Newspapers.” (Article)
Title: “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in 19th-Century Activist Newspapers.”
Author: Sandeep Soni
Author: Lauren Klein
Author: Jacob Eisenstein
Abstract: The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth­ century United States remains among the most significant social and political movements in US history. Abolitionist newspapers played a crucial role in spreading information and shaping public opinion around a range of issues relating to the abolition of slavery. These newspapers also serve as a primary source of information about the movement for scholars today, resulting in powerful new accounts of the movement and its leaders. This paper supplements recent qualitative work on the role of women in abolition’s vanguard, as well as the role of the Black press, with a quantitative text modeling approach. Using diachronic word embeddings, we identify which newspapers tended to lead lexical semantic innovations — the introduction of new usages of specific words —and which newspapers tended to follow. We then aggregate the evidence across hundreds of changes into a weighted network with the newspapers as nodes; directed edge weights represent the frequency with which each newspaper led the other in the adoption of a lexical semantic change. Analysis of this network reveals pathways of lexical semantic influence, distinguishing leaders from followers, as well as others who stood apart from the semantic changes that swept through this period. More specifically, we find that two newspapers edited by women—The Provincial Freeman and The Lily —led a large number of semantic changes in our corpus, lending additional credence to the argument that a multiracial coalition of women led the abolitionist movement in terms of both thought and action. It also contributes additional complexity to the scholarship that has sought to tease apart the relation of the abolitionist movement to the women’s suffrage movement, and the vexed racial politics that characterized their relation.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://culturalanalytics.org/article/18841-abolitionist-networks-modeling-language-change-in-nineteenth-century-activist-newspapers
Access Model: OA
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Cultural Analytics
Publisher: n/a

“Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies.” (Article)
Title: “Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies.”
Author: Lauren Klein
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/dimensions-of-scale-invisible-labor-editorial-work-and-the-future-of-quantitative-literary-studies/9BB30779EA9C9CF7AF176E7FEF12F484
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: PMLA
Publisher: MLA

“Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Historical Newspaper Archives.” (Article)
Title: “Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Historical Newspaper Archives.”
Author: Lauren Klein
Author: Iris Sun
Author: Jacob Eisenstein
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2015
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Publisher: Oxford Journals

“How Words Lead to Justice.” (Article)
Title: “How Words Lead to Justice.”
Author: Sandeep Soni
Author: Lauren Klein
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.publicbooks.org/how-words-lead-to-justice
Primary URL Description: n/a
Access Model: open / online
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Public Books
Publisher: Public Books

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