Lilypads: Exploring The Spatiotemporal Dissemination Of Historical Newspaper Articles

Today, libraries provide digitized collections of historical newspapers, which researchers in the humanities seek to analyze. An important objective of this work is to enable researchers to overview and analyze the textual, temporal and geographical dissemination of an event expressed in document corpora of interest. For this, we propose LilyPads, which permits researchers to analyze such corpora using a novel, map-inset-based approach. In contrast to previous work, LilyPads is centered around one main view, which integrates key aspects of the visualized data, thereby facilitating an explorative approach to finding relationships in data. From LilyPads' overview, researchers can select subsets of data as well as individual documents interactively, which supports detailed analysis of the corpus, combining close and distant reading methods. We show the applicability of LilyPads by demonstrating its use in a real-world analysis scenario.