Historical Event Search in Digital Heritage: Studying Commemorative Practices in Diachronic Corpora

The past is an unattainable country. All access to it is mediated by myriad artifacts. To make sense of this morass of information, historians invented concepts (such as “the French Revolution” or “the Dutch Golden Age”) that bind an otherwise unconnected set of entities together. These historical periods, however, remain constructions and their meaning is a moving target. In this paper, we outline a search interface that allows researchers to explore mentions to past events or periods in digital heritage. We show how semantically-enhanced search enables users to retrieve information related to complex concepts which actually. After introducing the general architecture and the interface, we showcase it by elaborating on one pilot study, targeting the Golden Age in contemporary Dutch parliamentary discourse.

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