How to read the 52.000 pages of the British Journal of Psychiatry? A collaborative approach to source exploration

Abstract

Historians are confronted with an overabundance of sources that require new perspectives and tools to make use of large-scale corpora. Based on a use case from the history of psychiatry this paper describes the work of an interdisciplinary team to tackle these challenges by combining different NLP tools with new visual interfaces that foster the exploration of the corpus. The paper highlights several research challenges in the preparation and processing of the corpus and sketches new insights for historical research that were gathered due to the use of the tools.