Cultural text mining: using text mining to map the emergence of transnational reference cultures in public media repositories

This paper discusses the research project Translantis,
which uses innovative technologies for cultural text mining to
analyze large repositories of digitized public media, such as
newspapers and journals.1 The Translantis research team
uses and develops the text mining tool Texcavator, which is
based on the scalable open source text analysis service xTAS
(developed by the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam). The
text analysis service xTAS has been used successfully in
computational humanities projects such as Political Mashup,
WAHSP, BILAND, and DutchSemCor. Within the context of
the Translantis project, xTAS, coupled to Elasticsearch, will
be further developed. Future versions will include clustering
concepts and sentiment mining of issues in public debates.
Translantis researchers are using Texcavator to detect and
track cultural references in large textual corpora.