Digitisation and Network Research

The Austrian Biographical Dictionary and the APIS project

Abstract

Digitisation methods have significantly evolved in recent years and made it possible for all types of digital humanities projects, among them biographical projects to gain ground. One of the aims of a biographical research is to transform the texts of already digitized encyclopaedias (e.g. the Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, ÖBL, which consists of structured and unstructured data) to a machine readable format, and to perform network-, statistical- and computational linguistic analysis on the transformed data. The biographical research of ÖBL started in 2015 in the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research [Institut für Neuzeit- und Zeitgeschichtsforschung (INZ)] of the Austrian Academy of Sciences within the project Mapping historical networks: Building the new Austrian Prosopographical, Biographical Information System (APIS). The project is aimed at the digital processing of the ÖBL and the creation of a virtual research environment which is implemented in cooperation with the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and the Institute for Urban and Regional Research [Institut für Stadt- und Regionalforschung (ISR)]. This paper discusses the technical and natural language processing solutions used in the APIS web application to open up biographical data for the researchers by processing and representing them in a structured format.