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Hauptverfasser: Provatorova, Vera, Capurro, Carlotta, Kanoulas, Evangelos
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13980
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author Provatorova, Vera
Capurro, Carlotta
Kanoulas, Evangelos
author_facet Provatorova, Vera
Capurro, Carlotta
Kanoulas, Evangelos
contents Social network analysis allows researchers to discover insights from connections between people. While the process of building a social network is relatively straightforward for contemporary social media, deriving connections from historical archives remains a challenging task, with every data collection presenting its unique challenges. Our contribution focuses on building and analysing a social network from the correspondence archive of Sybren Valkema (1916-1996), a Dutch glass artist and educator. The archive contains both typewritten and handwritten documents in multiple languages, and includes letters from glass artists, art students, art collectors and other agents. We develop an automatic pipeline approach which includes separating handwritten and typed documents, performing text recognition specific to the document modality, extracting names of people from text using named entity recognition, de-duplicating the resulting names to create actor nodes, classifying the actors using entity linking, and, finally, connecting them together and analysing the resulting network. Every part of the pipeline is evaluated against a manual analysis performed by an art historian on a subset of the data collection in order to find out which pitfalls of the automatic approach need to be resolved in future work and, on the contrary, whether using the automatic approach allows to discover any additional insights. The results show strong performance in discovering sender-receiver connections as well as additional meaningful connections in text, with the main challenge being text recognition on scanned pages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_13980
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The art of connections: constructing a social network from the correspondence archive of Sybren Valkema
Provatorova, Vera
Capurro, Carlotta
Kanoulas, Evangelos
Digital Libraries
Social network analysis allows researchers to discover insights from connections between people. While the process of building a social network is relatively straightforward for contemporary social media, deriving connections from historical archives remains a challenging task, with every data collection presenting its unique challenges. Our contribution focuses on building and analysing a social network from the correspondence archive of Sybren Valkema (1916-1996), a Dutch glass artist and educator. The archive contains both typewritten and handwritten documents in multiple languages, and includes letters from glass artists, art students, art collectors and other agents. We develop an automatic pipeline approach which includes separating handwritten and typed documents, performing text recognition specific to the document modality, extracting names of people from text using named entity recognition, de-duplicating the resulting names to create actor nodes, classifying the actors using entity linking, and, finally, connecting them together and analysing the resulting network. Every part of the pipeline is evaluated against a manual analysis performed by an art historian on a subset of the data collection in order to find out which pitfalls of the automatic approach need to be resolved in future work and, on the contrary, whether using the automatic approach allows to discover any additional insights. The results show strong performance in discovering sender-receiver connections as well as additional meaningful connections in text, with the main challenge being text recognition on scanned pages.
title The art of connections: constructing a social network from the correspondence archive of Sybren Valkema
topic Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13980