In recent years, humanities studies have been influenced by the ever-increasing availability of digitized texts over the Web: several past and ongoing digitization projects facilitate the access to documents but, on the other hand, in such a vast quantity of online material users, although expert, risk getting lost. This means that new tools, specifically designed for researchers without a technical background, are needed so to process large amounts of data and browse through the results in an intuitive way. ALCIDE (Analysis of Language and Content In a Digital Environment) is a web-based platform that meets this need by combining state-of-the-art pipelines for efficient text processing with interactive visualizations. In this talk I will highlight the main challenges we had to deal with during the development of the platform: i.e., scalable reading, flexibility, interactivity, and evaluation. In addition, I will outline functionalities and real use cases of ALCIDE.

Reference: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950705116302635