HistText: An Application for leveraging large-scale historical textbases

Abstract

This paper introduces HistText, a pioneering tool devised to facilitate large-scale data mining in historical documents, specifically targeting Chinese sources. Developed in response to the challenges posed by the massive Modern China Textual Database, HistText emerges as a solution to efficiently extract and visualize valuable insights from billions of words spread across millions of documents. With a user-friendly interface, advanced text analysis techniques, and powerful data visualization capabilities, HistText offers a robust platform for digital humanities research. This paper explores the rationale behind HistText, underscores its key features, and provides a comprehensive guide for its effective utilization, thus highlighting its potential to substantially enhance the realm of computational humanities.

Keywords

• natural language processing
• data mining
• text analysis
• history
• chinese
• document
• [shs]humanities and social sciences
• [info]computer science [cs]