Adaptation of Language Resources and Tools for Processing Cultural Heritage Objects

Despite the wealth of newly available digital materials, the scope of text-based inv stigations has mostly been limited to either synchronous or short-term historical analysis. In this paper, we report o n the first stage of the project that focuses on tracking long-range historical change, specifically, on the history of ideas and concepts. Th e project’s aim is to map out the history of representation of knowledge in Europe over last three centuries using as a proxy the histor y of changes in historical editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. We describe a series of corpus-analytical tasks necessary for buildin g the analytical and comparative tools for historical analysis using scanned noisy text. In this first stage of the project, we focus specifically on the tools for tracking and visualizing the relative importance of people, interconnections between them, and the rise and fall of their re putations.