Semantic Document Selection - Historical Research on Collections That Span Multiple Centuries

The availability of digitized collections of historical data, such as newspapers, increases every day. With that, so does the wish for historians to explore these collections. Methods that are traditionally used to examine a collection do not scale up to today’s collection sizes. We propose a method that combines text mining with exploratory search to provide historians with a means of interactively selecting and inspecting relevant documents from very large collections. We assess our proposal with a case study on a prototype system.