EviDENce: Ego Documents Events Modelling, Recalling mass violence

Much of our historical knowledge is based on oral or written accounts of eyewitnesses, particularly in cases of war and violence, when regular ways of documentation and record keeping are often absent. EviDENce studies how eyewitnesses reported on violence, and how this may have changed over time.

Principle investigator

Susan Hogervorst

Disciplines

History
Linguistics

Resource types

Tools

World War 2, Liberation of The Netherlands

We use a collection of nearly 500 oral history interview transcripts about the Second World War (Getuigen Verhalen, stored at DANS) as well as the egodocuments (diaries, memoires, letters, autobiographies) available in Nederlab, covering a time span of 5 centuries.

Whereas humanities scholars are good at assessing texts for their relevance in relation to a particular topic or research question such as this, automating this assessment process, for example for distant reading or creating large corpora, is known to be problematic, especially when it comes to implicit mentions. EviDENce compares existing NLP methods to detect fragments containing mentions of such an ambiguous concept as violence, in a way that meets the standards of historical research.