Studies in Collective Memory: Towards Computational History through Large Scale Text Mining

Given the huge amount of data about the past, computer science will play an increasingly important role in historical studies, with computational history becoming an emerging interdisciplinary field of research. In this presentation, I will show the results of our recent study on how the past is remembered through large scale text mining. I will demonstrate that analysis of references to the past in news articles allows us to gain a lot of insight into the collective memories and societal views of different countries. At the end of the talk, I will also briefly describe my recent work on the readability of web content and historical documents.