Theme 1: Visualizing Actors, Ideas and Places

Mapping historical events and contextualizing them is often a challenging task, particularly when facing a large number of archival documents. While technology will not replace the valuable work of researchers and scholars, it nonetheless has the potential to help and facilitate the quest for knowledge and for better understanding our past.

Understanding our past requires us to explore the content of historical documents and artifacts, notably if living sources, such as individuals or institutions, are no longer available for research purposes. These documents contain layers of information, ranging from relationship between key actors, but also insights on ideas, concepts and broader theoretical knowledge that is sometimes hidden in plain sight. Making sense of these different layers and links between different entities is crucial to capturing historical turning points and explaining complex issues to a wider audience, including decision-makers, scholars and society at large.

This multi-disciplinary, international project draws on powerful digital analysis tools based on an open source platform called histograph, which supports research on large data sets of multimedia files. The software is capable of linking automatic annotation to the collaborative work of crowds, such as research collaborations, and uses graphs to display relations between documents. It combines tools for the automatic detection of named entities, such as people, places, institutions and dates and was created by an earlier European Union-funded research project CUbRIK  find new pathways for the combination of human and machine computation in multimedia search.