Linked Data Supported Content Analysis for Sociology

Abstract

Philology and hermeneutics as the analysis and interpretation of natural language text in written historical sources are the predecessors of modern content analysis and date back already to antiquity. In empirical social sciences, especially in sociology, content analysis provides valuable insights to social structures and cultural norms of the present and past. With the ever growing amount of text on the web to analyze, also numerous computer-assisted text analysis techniques and tools were developed in sociological research. However, existing methods often go without sufficient standardization. As a consequence, sociological text analysis is lacking transparency, reproducibility and data re-usability. The goal of this paper is to show, how Linked Data principles and Entity Linking techniques can be used to structure, publish and analyze natural language text for sociological research to tackle these shortcomings. This is achieved on the use case of constitutional text documents of the Netherlands from 1884 to 2016 which represent an important contribution to the European cultural heritage. Finally, the generated data is made available and re-usable as Linked Data not only for sociologists, but also for all other researchers in the digital humanities domain interested in the development of constitutions in the Netherlands.