Studi di archivistica, bibliografia, paleografia

Cracking the Historical Code

From Unstructured Correspondence Corpora to Computational Analysi

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Abstract
The chapter addresses a methodological approach to unstructured data and discusses the potential that structured data offers in the field of historical research. The dataset, which initially consists of textual content sourced from digital collections at the Portuguese Overseas Archives in Lisbon, undergoes a preprocessing phase that forms the basis for the extraction of structured data. The authors combine history, social sciences, and computer science to convert the correspondence repository into a machine‑processable form. This transformation is supported by an interdisciplinary strategy in which they weave together elements of effective content management, topic modelling, and social network analysis.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Oct. 3, 2023 | Accepted: Jan. 18, 2024 | Published May 22, 2025 | Language: en

Keywords Digital infrastructure • Colonial Portuguese Empire • Public correspondence • Structured data • Historical dataset

Copyright © 2025 Agata Bloch, Michał Bojanowski, Clodomir Santana, Demival Vasques Filho. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-919-1/006


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