Diggersdiaries: Using Text Analysis to Support Exploration and Reading in a Large Document Collection

Abstract

This work introduces Diggersdiaries, an web interface to a historical textual document collection. Digital collections are rich in content, but traditional search-based and faceted-based interfaces cannot represent their richness efficiently - e.g. for time-poor and casual browsing. This project addresses this challenge using data analysis (topic models) transparently integrated into reading-centric interface as a two-level browsing menu of semantic topics. The interface offers multiple exploration visualization tools. Its main contribution it is that the interface is fully reading-oriented. The tool is available at http://diggersdiaries.org