Document management system for supporting historians

Document management system for supporting historians

Hiromasa
Nakatani

Shizuoka University
nakatani@cs.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp

Yukihiro
Itoh

Shizuoka University
itoh@cs.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Computer assistance in historical documents in the format of official
documents, memorandums, or personal diaries still has problems to be solved.
In this paper, we discuss the point of managing text documents in history,
and construct a system that suffices the research style of historians. We
investigate research styles of historians in view of their computer use, and
present a system for supporting researchers in history. Our system stores
historical stories and materials concerning an event called "Eejanaika"
(Fig. 1) [1-3]. The eccentric event happened from place to place in central
Japan in 1867, triggered by a scattering of protecting charms of shrines.
Clouds danced around with the refrain "Eejanaika," that means "who cares?"
in Japanese, and some of them escalated into a state of chaos [4].

Eejanaika database

Subjects and key points for computer assistance for history
By interviewing historians, we investigate the procedure that historians
follow for their research, and summarize key subjects in introducing
computers to historical research.
First key subject is in difficulty in extracting necessary information from
historical documents. Even if a historian gathered all the necessary
documents, it is difficult to find out necessary parts for his/her
particular topic. To solve this problem, we have to tackle the following subjects:
1-1 How to organize such information that can distinguish
necessary documents from unnecessary ones.
1-2 How to make a system function that can retrieve necessary
information from large volumes of those documents.

Note that historians retrieve the data based on their experiences and their
subjective judgments. Here we have two problems:
2-1 How to classify the documents based on their subjective
judgments.
2-2 How to organize the classification function in the
system.

Second problem is in difficulty in surveying the retrieved data and
extracting useful information. When we use conventional media like notebooks
or cards to manage collected information, the type of information we can
deal with is restricted, and as the volumes become larger it becomes more
time-consuming and physically difficult to grasp the whole image. Here are
three problems:
3-1 What sort of space we should use for arranging all documents.
3-2 How to locate each document in the above space.
3-3 How to organize the display function to facilitate the
observer.

Implementation and data structure
We consider those subjects and apply our system to a historical event of
Eejanaika to evaluate the effectiveness of our system by verifying the
hypothesis given by a historian. Suppose that a historian gets an idea that
"Eejanaika is such an extraordinary festival that was triggered by a
scattering of protecting charms of shrines and it came to chaos that was
inadmissible by the Establishment. At some places, on the other hand, those
phenomena were terminated in the acceptable state. Then, it is important to
classify those festivals into three types: (A) Festivals that reached chaos,
(B) Eccentric but terminated in the acceptable state, and (C) Only extension
or extra of regular festivals. It is also necessary to see the distribution
of those festivals on the map. I have an intuition that post-towns on main
roads fell into a state of chaos, but rural districts held just regular
festivals. Maybe that relates to the regional difference as regards degree
of distress, power of the Establishment, and strength of people's ego". To
verify this hypothesis, the historian has to classify the festivals judging
by corresponding documents, make a map of the distribution of the festivals,
and grasp the whole image.
We investigate the above problems 1-1 through 3-3 in the case of Eejanaika
study.
1-1 Representation of key terms for retrieving necessary documents: When a
historian hits on the above hypothesis, the concept of three types of
Eejanaika is formed in their mind. Then related documents are collected for
finding out whether there really happened Eejanaika or not. However there
are few expressions in the documents that explicitly say, "Eejanaika has
occurred." Thus we should make a criterion that can judge whether the
document is relating to Eejanaika or not. For example, if Eejanaika occurred
in an area, such expressions appear in the official documents as "protecting
charms scattered and people held a festival," "Men were disguised in woman's
clothes and women in men's," "dancing with nothing on," "rice cakes and
moneys were scattered." Thus we make a table of expressions with which the
system can determine whether or not the document is relating to the concept
that the historian has interest in.

Table of expressions

Category
expressions in documents

Scattering
scattering, protecting charms

Duration
# days

Yell
Eejanaika, Iijanaika

Mood
excited, high, crazy, mad

Degree
unheard-of, strange, amazing

Clothes
disguise, naked, loincloth

Things scattered
rice, rice cake

1-2 Retrieving contents of document: The system retrieves the document by key
terms and makes document-characteristic tables that are assigned to a
pattern that expresses one of the above categories. An example of a
document-characteristic table that the system retrieved from an official
document of Arai-Town, vol.8, pp. 884 - 445, is shown in Table 2:

Document-characteristic table

Theme
Eejanaika

Category
pattern of expression

Duration
7 days

Mood
crazy

Degree
unheard-of

Clothes
dressed as a man, loincloth

2-1 Criterion for classifying the retrieved document: The system classifies
and organizes the document of interest. Here the system classifies
extraordinary festivals into three types using a tree structure for
classification.
2-2 Classification method: The system traverses the tree from its root to the
leaves and tries matching between each document-characteristic table and a
priori given model tables (Fig. 2).

Classification tree

3-1 Space for surveying the documents: We adopt three-dimensional space with
axes of time and location (latitude, longitude) for surveying the historical
documents.
3-2 Assign the time and location of the document: The system assigns the time
and location of the document by finding those expressions that relate to
time and location.
3-3 Function for displaying the space: The system has a function for showing
the distribution of documents in three-dimensional space.

Experiments
We show the effectiveness of our system by verifying the hypothesis. We built
a document database by extracting articles that describe events in 1867 from
official documents of cities and towns in Shizuoka and Aichi prefectures,
and the database consists of 50 articles relating to Eejanaika. First, to
verify the above hypothesis, Eejanaika documents classified into three types
are plotted on the then road maps (Fig. 3). That verifies most escalated
festivals range along the route of Tokaido and its connecting routes.

Distribution of Eejanaika

Distribution of Eejanaika and Sukegou-Soudou riot

Next hypothesis given by a historian is that "Eejanaika might be caused by
public discontent that had been accumulated among people groaning under
tyranny and suffering crop failures. In that sense, Eejanaika was similar
phenomenon with 'Sukegou-Soudou' riot that happened almost at the same time
in the east of Aichi prefecture. A form of the event in the case of
Sukegou-Soudou riot is protest or subversion, while in the case of Eejanaika
it is festival."
Using our system, we plot the records of Eejanaika with Sukegou-Soudou riot
(Fig. 4). In the map, x-marks stand for Sukegou-Soudou riot, and black dots
stand for violent ones. This map can extend following knowledge:
1. Toyohashi and Kariya districts had most violent riots, and
Eejanaika in both districts escalated into a state of chaos. The
first Eejanaika happened in Toyohashi.
2. Many violent Sukegou-Soudou riots happened in the districts
west of Toyokawa river, while that kind of riots scarcely happened
in the east. The situations of the oppression and the crop failures
were almost the same in both ereas. In the east, Eejanaika, instead
of Sukegou-Soudou riots, was triggered by scatterings of protecting
charms in the course of extraordinary festivals.
3. Eejanaika first happened in rural districts, where
Sukegou-Soudou riots happened, then spread over the neighboring
towns and all over the nearby districts.
4. Though both events were caused by the same mental state of the
public, Sukegou-Soudou riots mainly happened in rural districts
while Eejanaika in urban districts.

Although historians have already pointed out the knowledge 1 to 4 without
using our system, they appreciate the functions of the system that make
their verifications clear and objective. Future work will be applications of
the system to other fields of history or the humanities.

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