Curatr: A Platform for Exploring and Curating Historical Text Corpora

The 5th Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN2020), Riga, Latvia, 21-23 October 2020 (cancelled due to Coronavirus outbreak)The increasing availability of digital collections of historical texts presents a wealth of possibilities for new research in the humanities. However, the scale and heterogeneity of such collections raises significant challenges when researchers attempt to find and extract relevant content. This work describes Curatr, an online platform that incorporates domain expertise and methods from machine learning to support the exploration and curation of large historical corpora. We discuss the use of this platform in making the British Library Digital Corpus of 18th and 19th century books more accessible to humanities researchers.Irish Research CouncilScience Foundation IrelandInsight Research Centr