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Research Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research

MTSR 2019: Metadata and Semantic Research pp 354–366Cite as

Curatr: A Platform for Semantic Analysis and Curation of Historical Literary Texts

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1057))

Abstract

The increasing availability of digital collections of historical and contemporary literature presents a wealth of possibilities for new research in the humanities. The scale and diversity of such collections however, presents particular challenges in identifying and extracting relevant content. This paper presents Curatr, an online platform for the exploration and curation of literature with machine learning-supported semantic search, designed within the context of digital humanities scholarship. The platform provides a text mining workflow that combines neural word embeddings with expert domain knowledge to enable the generation of thematic lexicons, allowing researches to curate relevant sub-corpora from a large corpus of 18th and 19th century digitised texts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    British Library Labs: https://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs.

  2. 2.

    http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.

  3. 3.

    Ricorso: Database of Irish writers http://www.ricorso.net.

  4. 4.

    Farjeon features more prominently in histories of Australian literature as he emigrated there.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Susan Leavy, Gerardine Meaney, Karen Wade & Derek Greene

Authors
  1. Susan Leavy
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  2. Gerardine Meaney
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  3. Karen Wade
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  4. Derek Greene
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susan Leavy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Emmanouel Garoufallou

  2. Guglielmo Marconi University, Rome, Italy

    Francesca Fallucchi

  3. Georg Eckert Institute – Leibniz Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany

    Ernesto William De Luca

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Leavy, S., Meaney, G., Wade, K., Greene, D. (2019). Curatr: A Platform for Semantic Analysis and Curation of Historical Literary Texts. In: Garoufallou, E., Fallucchi, F., William De Luca, E. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1057. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36599-8_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36599-8_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36598-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36599-8

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