Terry Butler is at the University of Alberta. The full title of his paper is “Automated indexing using an existing thesaurus: a bridge between Coleridge and Roget.”
The project aims to usefully present a digital edition of Samuel Coleridge’s notebooks. They’ve been printed, with annotations, and published by Princeton. The notebooks are published with name and place indexes, but without a subject index (a big drawback for researchers). Current project is focusing on building an electronic subject index to the print edition.
The complexity of transforming handwritten notebooks into a printed format is staggering. Butler et al. are digitizing the printed edition, and semantically encoding it. The encoding captures not only the structure of the text, but also its dynamic nature – the deletions, insertions etc. so strongly present in Coleridge. Plus a thematic index. They’re also marking up foreign-language material as being in other languages.
Roget’s thesaurus was first published in 1852, and he’d been working on it for 30 years. So the thesaurus is roughly contemporary with Coleridge’s writings, and word similarities imply similarities in thinking and interests between the two men. They want to link up Roget’s broader categories to instances of writing in Coleridge, as a starting point to studying the notebooks.
They take all of the words from each of the notebook entries, stripping out metadata and foreign words, and now they have a “bag of words.” They then stem the words to get more matches between them and the thesaurus. They want to find out connections: which of these words also occur in Roget’s Thesaurus (25K+ words, 1K+ headings, organized into 6 large classes)? Results are displayed in both directions: all the Roget connections to a given note; and all the notes connected to a particular Roget entry.
Value of automatic linking to scholarship:
– provides access for searching that is complementary wto what the text itself says
– text is related to larger, consistent conceptual categories
– it can be developed (from the electronic text) in a few hours’ [of computer processing] time: a custom thesaurus would take hundreds of hours to create.
Limits of Roget:
– it’s a verbal construct: not really about the world, but about words
– it has a lack of proper nouns
– it contains a large quantity of rare, obscure, dated words.
Assessing effectiveness:
– a subset of the results was given to expert team members for review: will this be a useful first step to creating a Coleridge thesaurus?
– links are distributed across information space [vz: ?]
Next steps:
– develop a [complete] customized Coleridge thesaurus;
– attempt to link between Roget and another contemporary text.
