A Digital Humanities Approach to the History of Culture and Science: Drugs and Eugenics Revisited in Early 20th-Century Dutch Newspapers, Using Semantic Text Mining

Abstract

Human language technology developed and used in CLARIN demonstrator projectsWAHSP and BILAND supports advanced forms of (multi-lingual) text mining of large datasets of newspapers. We argue that the combination of exploratory search and text mining offers an innovative research approach to systematically set up search trails in the historical sciences. We describe the development, use, andmethodological challenges of theWAHSP and BILAND text-mining tools and the successor tool, Texcavator, to support alternating forms of distant reading and close reading in newspaper collections. We will show how semantic text mining speeds up the heuristic process and thus helped to provide new and challenging perspectives on the circulation of ideas and notions regarding drugs and eugenics in Dutch newspapers in the first four decades of the 20th century.