Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary research project between environmental historians...

Several digital libraries and archives are emerging around the world due to the need to store, organize and make available on the Web a lot of resource collections. However, managing this information poses new challenges in order to overcome traditional data management and information browsing. Semantic Web technologies can improve digital libraries and archives by facilitating metadata storage...

This paper presents an automatic keyword extraction method from historical document images. The proposed method is language independent because it is purely appearance based, where neither lexical information nor any other statistical language models are required. Moreover, since it does not need word segmentation, it can be applied to Eastern languages where they do not put clear spacing betwe...

The analysis of historical documents is still a topical issue given the importance of information that can be extracted and also the importance given by the institutions to preserve their heritage. The main idea in order to characterize the content of the images of ancient documents after attempting to clean the image is segmented blocks texts from the same image and tries to find similar block...

In this presentation we describe a methodology we have adopted for coding the semantic structure of a historical document and the resulting semantic model. To do this, we adapted currently available methodologies for ontology engineering to the context of semantic document coding. Using Protégé-2000 we then used this methodology to develop a formal ontological model and finally to encode a hist...

The objective of our work is the development of a natural language dialogue system for information retrieval with multimodal input and multimedia output. Overall, the system consists of three phases: input analysis, information and knowledge management and output generation. The dialogue system is designed for consulting old Mexican historical documents. In this paper we describe the designed a...

We report applications of language technologies to analyzing historical documents in the Database for the Study of Modern Chinese Thoughts and Literature (DSMCTL). We studied two historical issues with the reported techniques: the conceptualization of “華人” and the attempt to institute constitutional monarchy in the late Qing dynasty. We also discuss research challenges for supporting sophistica...

In the paper several methods for the rectification of historical images, with and without reference points, will be discussed. An example will be given for each case. At least there will be shown, how rectified historical images help to visualise the authentic state of historical monuments in a three-dimensional way.

Digitization of both hand-written and printed historical material during the last 10–15 years has been an ongoing academic and non-academic industry. Most probably this activity will only increase in the current Digital Humanities era. As a result of past and current work we have lots of digital historical document collections available and will have more of them in the future. The National Lib...