Cultural text mining: using text mining to map the emergence of transnational reference cultures in public media repositories

Abstract

This paper discusses the research project Translantis, which uses innovative technologies for cultural text mining to analyze large repositories of digitized public media, such as newspapers and journals.1 The Translantis research team uses and develops the text mining tool Texcavator, which is based on the scalable open source text analysis service xTAS (developed by the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam). The text analysis service xTAS has been used successfully in computational humanities projects such as Political Mashup, WAHSP, BILAND, and DutchSemCor. Within the context of the Translantis project, xTAS, coupled to Elasticsearch, will be further developed. Future versions will include clustering concepts and sentiment mining of issues in public debates. Translantis researchers are using Texcavator to detect and track cultural references in large textual corpora.