On Big Data and text mining in the humanities

© 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. The analysis of texts has been central to humanists since at least the renaissance. Italian humanists like Lorenzo Valla developed critical practices of interpretation and textual analysis as they tried to recover and interpret the classical texts of Greece and Rome. This chapter has been a necessary episodic jump over the evolution of text analysis and mining in the humanities. Now humanists are experimenting with text mining to study the large collections of literary and historical texts made available by projects like Google Books. To understand how the humanities are adopting text analysis and mining techniques, the chapter explores a history of selected projects that expanded our view of how information technology can be used in textual studies and developed models for the infrastructure needed. To understand Roberto Busa's project and the origins of text analysis, one needs to understand the concordance as a tool for interpreting texts.edition: 1ststatus: publishe