A spatio-temporal emotional framework for knowledge extraction and mining in digital humanities
Aslib Journal of Information Management
ISSN: 2050-3806
Article publication date: 12 April 2022
Issue publication date: 29 September 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to construct a spatio-temporal emotional framework (STEF) for digital humanities from a quantitative perspective, applying knowledge extraction and mining technology to promote innovation of humanities research paradigm and method.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed STEF uses methods of information extraction, sentiment analysis and geographic information system to achieve knowledge extraction and mining. STEF integrates time, space and emotional elements to visualize the spatial and temporal evolution of emotions, which thus enriches the analytical paradigm in digital humanities.
Findings
The case study shows that STEF can effectively extract knowledge from unstructured texts in the field of Chinese Qing Dynasty novels. First, STEF introduces the knowledge extraction tools – MARKUS and DocuSky – to profile character entities and perform plots extraction. Second, STEF extracts the characters' emotional evolutionary trajectory from the temporal and spatial perspective. Finally, the study draws a spatio-temporal emotional path figure of the leading characters and integrates the corresponding plots to analyze the causes of emotion fluctuations.
Originality/value
The STEF is constructed based on the “spatio-temporal narrative theory” and “emotional narrative theory”. It is the first framework to integrate elements of time, space and emotion to analyze the emotional evolution trajectories of characters in novels. The execuability and operability of the framework is also verified with a case novel to suggest a new path for quantitative analysis of other novels.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Social Science Fund: “Research on Knowledge Aggregation and Discovery of Historical Archives Resources from the Perspective of Digital Humanities” (19BTQ102).
Citation
Deng, J., Zhong, C., Sun, S. and Wang, R. (2022), "A spatio-temporal emotional framework for knowledge extraction and mining in digital humanities", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 74 No. 6, pp. 1103-1125. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-09-2021-0278
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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