Visualizing and Analyzing Networks of Named Entities in Biographical Dictionaries for Digital Humanities Research

Abstract

This paper shows how named entity extraction and network analysis can be used to examine biographies individually and in groups to aid historians in biographical and prosopographical research. For this purpose a reference network of 13 100 biographies in the collections of the Biographical Centre of the Finnish Literature Society was created, based on links between the biographies as well as automatically extracted named entities found in the texts. The data was published in a SPARQL endpoint as a Linked Data knowledge graph on top of which network analytic tools were created and analysis were done showing the usefulness of the approach in Digital Humanities. The reference graph has been utilized for network analysis to examine egocentric networks of individual persons as well as networks among groups of people in prosopography. The data and tools presented are in use since autumn 2018 in the semantic portal BiographySampo that has had tens of thousands of users.