The aim of the project Mining and Modeling Text is to establish an information network for the humanities built from various sources: bibliographic metadata, primary sources and scholarly publications.
In our first prototype, we gather data on the French Enlightement Novel and store it in RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples in the free and open software Wikibase. These triples include statements on authors, titles, narrative forms, narrative locations, characters, themes, style, as well as metadata on place of publication, first publication dates or pages per novel.
Below are some screenshots of the Wikibase instance, which will be published in mid-2022.
The SPARQL-endpoint enables us to query our knowledge graph and to visualise the results in a multitude of ways (table, map, bar chart, scatter chart, bubble chart, timeline, tree map etc.).
In querying the graph we can combine properties, for example a certain narrative location (“imaginary place”) with another property such as themes per novel.
RDF statements on publication dates enable us to query for developments in time, for example the occurence of the thematic concept “travel” in novels 1751-1800.