Friday 13 December 2013, Meertens Institute (registration is closed)
Theme: Patterns in Narrative Texts
Many a collection of Cultural Heritage Institutions consists mainly of historical and contemporary texts. To extract information from such large corpora, various text processing techniques are available. A special challenge is formed by the large subset of textual data that take on a narrative form. What distinguishes such narrative texts from factual reports is that they are typically multi-layered, and studying these layers can tell us much about the author’s mentality and beliefs, as well as other important cultural and historical information. To explore narrative corpora and disclose the deeper information they contain, new text mining methods must be developed. The afternoon will revolve around big data of language, narratives, and folklore, with a focus on finding significant patterns, themes and motifs within these data. The data that will be discussed range from narrative journalistic texts to orally transmitted folktales. In the study of history, diachronic corpora can be mined to discover how historical events are reflected in language use. In folk narrative research, patterns of interest include the stability and variability of ‘narrative building blocks’ (motifs, memes) in oral transmission, and geographical dispersion of folk beliefs in the supernatural. Establishing links between narrative texts is a common factor in all this research.
Guest speakers: Tim Tangherlini (University of California), Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (Meertens Institute)
Detailed programme:
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch (There is an opportunity to take a guided tour through the Meertens Instituut as well)
13.30 – 13.35 Word of welcome by Hans Bennis 13.35 – 13.50 Word of welcome by Jaap van den Herik
13.50 – 14.00 Introduction on Patterns in Narrative Texts and on the Dutch Folktale Database by Theo Meder
14.00 – 14.15 Dolf Trieschnigg: Learning to Extract Folktale Keywords
14.15 – 14.30 Dong Nguyen: Folktale Classification using Learning to Rank
14.30 – 15.15 Mike Kestemont & Folgert Karsdorp: Mining the Twentieth Century’s History from the TIME Magazine
15.15 – 16.00 Tea break with poster presentations and demonstrations:
- Dutch Folktale Database/FACT
- Tunes & Tales
- TINPOT
- Nederlab
- CLARIAH
- e-Humanities
- Riddle of Literary Quality
16.00 – 17.00 Tim Tangherlini: Tools of the WitchHunter: hGIS and Network Classifiers for the Study of Folklore.
17.00 – 18.00 Drinks