Visualizing and Analyzing Networks of Named Entities in Biographical Dictionaries for Digital Humanities Research

EasyChair Preprint 888

Abstract

This paper shows how named entity extraction and network analysis can be used to examine biographies individually and in groups to aid historians in biographical and prosopographical research. For this purpose a reference network of 13100 biography entries in the collections of the Biographical Centre of the Finnish Literature Society was created, based on links between the biographies as well as automatically extracted named entities found in the texts. The data was published in a SPARQL endpoint as a Linked Data knowledge graph on top of which network analytic tools were created and analysis were done showing the usefulness of the approach in Digital Humanities. The reference graph has been utilized for network analysis to examine egocentric networks of individual persons as well as networks among groups of people in prosopography. The data and tools presented are in use in the new national semantic portal BiographySampo published in the autumn of 2018.

Keyphrases: Biographies, Information Extraction, Linked Data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis

@booklet{EasyChair:888,
  author    = {Minna Tamper and Eero Hyvönen and Petri Leskinen},
  title     = {Visualizing and Analyzing Networks of Named Entities in Biographical Dictionaries for Digital Humanities Research},
  doi       = {10.29007/zqs5},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 888},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}