This document discusses a project to digitize over 5,000 secondary sources on the history of Venice from the past 200 years. The goals are to extract all citations from these texts, populate a database, and analyze citation patterns to develop a new framework for citation analysis in the humanities. Key differences from traditional scientific citation analysis include the use of primary sources and variability in how citations are used. The methods will involve OCR, citation detection, network analysis of bibliographic couplings and co-citations over time, and classification of publications to map intellectual influences and scholarly debates.

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Giovanni Colavizza EPFL

2. Motivation: a question
How to find sources for a humanities research?
How to find literature for a research in “hard” sciences?

3. Motivation: the differences between humanities and
“hard” sciences
• Primary and secondary sources
• Citation history (e.g. Google Scholar)
• Citation semantics

4. Motivation: primary and secondary sources
Approx. half of the citations in humanities are to
primary sources [Wiberley (2009)].
Their use has hardly ever been studied with
citation analytic methods.
“For
scholarship
in
the
humanities
there
are
three
kinds
of
literature:
primary
literature
that
contains
the
evidence
on
which
humanists base
their
scholarship,
secondary
literature
in
which
humanists
write
up
their
scholarship,
and
access
services
that
describe
and
index
the
publications
written
by
humanists.”
(Wiberley,
2009)

5. Motivation: citation history
Lack of data [Sula and Miller (2014)], why?
• Sparse and local sub-fields
• Nationality (language and schools)
• Proliferation of editorial practices

6. Motivation: citation semantics
•Humanists are less prone to credit each other than scientists [Heinzkill,
1980; Swales, 1990; Hellqvist, 2010]
•They are less prone to work together. Avg. authors per publication of
1.06 in a study by Linmans (2010)
•They use citations with a great variety of meanings and ways: agree,
disagree, full association, minor reference, etc. [Harwood (2008), Cano
(1989)]
Examples:
Strongly negative: “Professor Epstein’s comment presents no new
findings and ignores the theoretical issues I raise.” and quote to Epstein
2008. Ogilvie (2008).
Association: “non basta ridimensionare gli aspetti strutturali del declino
economico, che per Venezia fu comunque solo “relativo”, ..” and quote
to Rapp 1979. Trivellato (2000).

7. Motivation: our answer
Citation analysis for humanities is an almost non-existent
field, yet the results could be very rich:
We cannot simply use traditional citation analysis
methods on humanities data. We need new questions
and methods.

8. The project: goals
• Digitise all historiography on Venice we can (i.e.,
for now, history).
• Extract all citations and populate a database.
• Analyse the history of the history of Venice and
develop a framework for citation analysis for
humanities.
• Publish an open access search engine for scholars
and general public.

9. The project: goals
“Side effects”, we have the full text of
most publications on Venice,
considering we are also digitising
documents at the Archive..
• Indexes of keywords (e.g. named
entities)
• Direct link publication-sources
• Topic modelling and fine-grain
classification of publications
(currently at most Dewey subjects..)
• Enhanced library catalogue

10. The project: partners and materials
Partnership with Ca’ Foscari Library System (humanities
library) and discussion with major Venetian libraries.
Digitisation goal: digitise all secondary literature on
Venice for the last 200y (monographs, journals, editions,
etc.). Currently circa 5000 estimated items (there are
many more). Digitisation ongoing (1513 done last
Friday).

11. Methods: overview

12. Methods I: data extraction

13. Methods I: data extraction

14. Methods I: data extraction
The steps:
• OCR
• Citation detection
• Citation parsing
• Model and populate the db (ontologies for citations)
Basic tools:
• Active annotation for supervised learning (minimise
training data to annotate)
• Conditional Random Fields for parsing
• RDF and triple stores as database

15. Methods II: citation analysis, networks
Network-based models. Remember primary and
secondary sources, how many graphs can we
build?
Bibliographic coupling and co-citation

16. Methods II: citation analysis, networks

17. Methods II: citation analysis
Network-based models:
• Global analysis
• Local analysis (communities and nodes)
• Temporal analysis
• Publication classification and analysis
Big questions:
• Key works, authors, sources
• Disciplinary segmentations
• Measure intellectual influence and schools of thought
• Map scholarly debates

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Thank you
Giovanni Colavizza EPFL