NaCTeM

Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER) – Digging into Social Unrest

ISHER is one of the fourteen projects that won the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. 67 international teams competed in the challenge.

Summary

Social historians and other researchers rely on text data for their research. These data are increasingly available in electronic form, but researchers are hampered in discovering information and answers to questions, as available exploratory tools are inadequate: research questions currently take much manual effort to answer or remain un(der)answered. To mitigate this, we shall develop an integrated environment using sophisticated text mining tools.

In particular, we will develop a digital humanities toolkit to facilitate basic knowledge discovery in social history research. Our text mining-based search system will supply a powerful new transformational research tool for the exploration and discovery of patterns and facts in primary historical sources originating from the digitised historical newspaper archives of the New York Times (NYT) and the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). It will provide social historians and social scientists with the means to detect and associate events, trends, people, organisations, and other entities of specific interest to social historians, related to social unrest.

Objectives

ISHER aims to enhance search over digitised resources for social history. Enhancement comes through text mining-based rich semantic metadata extraction for collection indexing, clustering and classification. This then allows semantic search while reducing the manual costs currently involved in such activities.

Interoperability of text mining tools is a key objective and an organizing principle for the software architecture of our project. IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) forms the basis of our interoperable text mining platform U-Compare, which has over 50 text mining components in its library, and is extensible so can accommodate ISHER’s requirements by including also text mining tools from third parties.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

The output of the project will be an integrated social history environment for research (ISHER) - which will also be re-usable for other types of humanities research. The outcome for social historians will be a transformation in their work, due to enrichment of digital archives with text mining semantic metadata, enabling users to investigate collections through advanced semantic search, in ways they could not do before.

Block diagram describing the architecture of ISHER

Project information

The project started in January 2012 and is funded by JISC until July 2013.

Project Partners

Prof. Sophia Ananiadou, The University of Manchester

Prof. Antal van den Bosch, Radboud University Nijmegen

Prof. Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign