=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2810/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Modelling Resolutions of the Dutch States General for Digital Historical Research
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2810/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2810
|authors=Marijn Koolen,Rik Hoekstra,Ida Nijenhuis,Ronald Sluijter,Esther van Gelder,Rutger van Koert,Gijsjan Brouwer,Hennie Brugman
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/colco/KoolenHNSGKBB20
}}
==Modelling Resolutions of the Dutch States General for Digital Historical Research==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2810/paper4.pdf
Modelling Resolutions of the Dutch States
General for Digital Historical Research
Marijn Koolen1,2 , Rik Hoekstra1,2 , Ida Nijenhuis1 , Ronald Sluijter1 ,
Esther van Gelder1 , Rutger van Koert2 , Gijsjan Brouwer2 , and Hennie
Brugman2
1
Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, Netherlands
ida.nijenhuis,ronald.sluijter,esther.van.gelder@huygens.knaw.nl
https://www.huygens.knaw.nl
2
KNAW Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam, Netherlands
{marijn.koolen,rik.hoekstra,
rutger.van.koert,hennie.brugman,gijsjan.brouwer}@di.huc.knaw.nl
https://huc.knaw.nl
Abstract. The Resolutions of the Dutch States General (1576-1796) is
an archive covering over two centuries of decision making and consists
of a heterogeneous series of handwritten and printed documents. This
archive has rich potential for historical research, but the heterogeneity
and dispersion of information makes using it for research a challenge. In
this paper we describe how we deal with the challenges of structuring
and connecting the information contained within this archive, and how
this results in a computational platform that allows users to explore and
analyse the archive through many connected layers of metadata.
Keywords: Information Extraction · Digital History · Data Modelling
1 Introduction
The Resolutions of the Dutch States General (1576-1796) constitute an archival
series that covers more than two centuries of continuous decision making and
consists of more than 500,000 pages, handwritten and printed resolutions, in
separate, chronologically ordered series. The Resolutions of the States General
in the Dutch Republic are a key resource to the political history of this period
as they contain all decisions made by the States General (SG), the central ruling
body in the Republic. It was designated as a key resource when in 1905 the
work of publishing the resolutions started [8]. The manual editing resulted in
two series of analogue publications of (a selection of) the resolutions, divided in
an old series (14 volumes running from 1576 – 1609), a new series (7 volumes,
1610 – 1625), and a digital edition (1626-1630).3 . The resolutions reveal the
decision making process and are relevant for both high and low politics. They
allow researchers to answer many different research questions about politics -
3
http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/statengeneraal
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
38 M. Koolen et al.
but not only politics - in the Dutch Republic and its position in the world. The
resolutions are also key to all the other records of the SG (about 1 mile) and form
a backbone with which these other records can be connected and contextualised.
Many research questions require working your way through hundreds of large
volumes of text without adequate indexes. The relevant data are hidden and
scattered across millions of paragraphs of dense and repetitive text. Moreover,
different research questions require different selections, reorganisations and re-
orderings of the records to bring together and connect the dispersed information.
It is therefore crucial to extract high-quality metadata from the corpus of resolu-
tions on various levels, including the meetings, dates, attendants, the individual
resolutions and their topics. Many archives and libraries have experimented with
giving access to their collections by means of their digitised inventories and some
have gone a step further, using existing indexes of serial collections [9,2,5]. But
these archival referential systems are too coarse for access beyond the document
level. Moreover, the existing scholarly apparatus consists of many more reference
systems and tools that can be put to good use. Centuries of dealing with these
complications have led to a number of convenient and often-employed structures
that are part of the printed culture but are often ignored in the translation to
digital access [16,12].
In this paper, we describe our work on identifying and extracting several
of these reference systems and structure as layers of data and metadata to en-
hance access to all the resolutions in an online computational environment that
supports a broad range of digital historical research. We combine established
information extraction techniques with a workflow in which we iteratively build
models of the structure of the corpus and the many standard phrases used in
the resolutions. With these phrase models, we can exploit both expert knowledge
and the fact that the resolutions contain highly repetitive language to improve
the extraction process.
Our approach departs from the important condition that the extracted infor-
mation should both reflect the structure of the resource and the type of research
questions it is supposed to support. We illustrate this with a relatively simple
research problem for the following question:
Do the resolutions over time reflect an increasing possibility for citizens
to put forward their concerns to the SG?
To investigate this, we need to know what types of proposals and requests
were submitted that led to resolutions, when each was put forward, by whom and
what decision was reached. Moreover, answering whether access to the general
public changed over time requires that the set of resolutions is either complete
or at least representative. Just digitising the archive does not support answering
this question. A digitised archive consists only of a combination of images and
(roughly) digitised text, without structure and only very limited metadata.
This paper discusses the way we deal with a number of challenges to trans-
form a digitised archive into an online publication which supports the structured
analysis required for such historical research:
Modelling Resolutions 39
Fig. 1. Structure of the handwritten resolutions.
Text recognition challenges The corpus contains handwritten and printed
materials, and many different types of information (paragraphs, lists, tables,
marginalia). Moreover, the language use and spelling changed throughout
the covered period.
Information extraction challenges The text recognition process results in
textual representations, but without handles for using the rich structure in
the analogue documents. Rich layers of metadata need to be derived from
the text. This requires a combination of text mining expertise and domain
knowledge to identify, extract and connect the dispersed information.
Linking challenges The structure of the records is complex, with various types
of materials that are linked to each other, and identifying this structure and
making it inter-operable is crucial to making the online publication usable.
Presentation challenges Users approach the digital archive with different aims
and background knowledge and with different tasks of reading, searching,
combining and extracting information. The information system should sup-
port a broad range of methods to select, organise and order the records.
These challenges are interconnected, as errors in text recognition influence
the quality of information extraction, which in turn influences the accuracy of
linking and the possibilities for users to interact with the information system
[15]. In the rest of this paper we discuss how we deal with these challenges.
40 M. Koolen et al.
2 The Resolutions as a Historical Resource
The volumes of the resolutions embody a continuous series of day-to-day meet-
ings of the Dutch States General as the central assembly of delegates from (ul-
timately) seven sovereign provinces. Each session starts with a date and a list
of attendants and the president of the day, followed by summaries of a varying
number of proposals and requests (see Figure 1) about a wide variety of sub-
jects of both high and low politics, such as foreign policy, finance, army and
navy, pensions and patents, administrative and cultural issues. All summarised
issues contain a decision (resolution) of acceptance, rejection or deferral, pending
further investigation or requests for information. Both unresolved and decided
issues led to trails of resolutions and all of them had to be traceable for the
SG and other governing bodies, as the decisions had the force of law. Some
summaries contain copies of letters or other important incoming documents as
insertions.
2.1 Supporting Research Questions
The types of data and metadata layers we want to make operable are related to
the types of research questions and themes that we want to support:
Narrative analysis Long-term developments and shifts, both internationally
and within Dutch society (e.g. what was the relative position and wealth of
the province, how did the competition between navy and army develop, how
important were the different colonies, how did the SG deal with different
religious groups).
Thematic analysis the development of certain themes/topics over time. Do
the resolutions over time reflect an increasing possibility for citizens to put
forward their concerns to the SG?
Content analysis Quantitative analysis with regard to what or who was dis-
cussed, when and how often (e.g. financial and economic policy, nominations
for officeholders or army positions, petitions by citizens).
Network analysis How can we trace the dividing line between formal and
informal politics, and politics behind the scenes? Performing serial research
into the attendance at meetings and in committees can answer questions
like: who worked together? Who were involved in decisions around specific
topics and in larger policy issues and how were these persons related?
Linguistic analysis How did the language of decision-making develop and is
it possible to link transformation of the SG’s language with its growing
administrative competence?
Addressing these questions requires operationalising several structural ele-
ments of the written and printed texts, into multiple layers of metadata to or-
ganise and classify the resolutions and make useful selections. For instance, to
study changes in how petitions of citizens were treated, a researcher needs to
select resolutions related to petitions, categorise them according to what group
Modelling Resolutions 41
a proposer belonged to and order them temporally. For a network analysis, a
researcher needs to select the relevant resolutions, extract and classify the types
of parties involved (e.g. proposers, the attending SG members, committees in-
vestigating and reporting on issues, and financiers providing budget) and the re-
lationships between them. Adding metadata for these different aspects requires
extracting the relevant information from an estimated one million resolutions,
which requires an information extraction that is automated where possible, but
which needs to be informed by export knowledge and a human in the loop. On
top of that, each selection or reorganisation made by users creates a different
view of the data, the interpretation of which is influenced by our decision in cre-
ating the metadata layers, so it is important that our processing is transparent
and visible to the user [7].
2.2 Operationalising the Structure
In many digitisation projects for e.g. newspapers or books, the text of individual
scans is recognised using a model trained on ground truth, then metadata about
the scan is added to give ways to organise the text. For newspapers these are
typically the name of the newspaper and the date and page number. For books,
this is more difficult. The bibliographic metadata from a library catalogue can
be added, but the structure of books is often not available as metadata. The
text is accessible only as a sequence of plain text pages and maybe paragraphs,
making it hard to figure out whether the book has parts or chapters or sections,
where these start and end, and whether they have titles or headings.
For the volumes of resolutions, text recognition results in one document per
scan with the recognised words and their pixel coordinates. To access the res-
olutions of a specific date, the recognised text gives you few handles to go to
the right set of pages. Using string matching to locate dates is extremely error
prone because of the combination of recognition errors, linguistic variation and
frequent references to previous dates within a resolution. You have to select the
book with resolutions for the desired year, then browse through the roughly 1000
pages of dense text to identify the pages corresponding to the desired date. For
systematic analysis across longer periods of time, this effort is multiplied.
To improve access, we want to identify the date and start and end point of
meetings, to label resolutions with those dates, so users can search and select
resolutions by date or period. This also allows scaling the analysis of resolutions.
E.g. how many resolutions were discussed on each day? How many were ac-
cepted, rejected or postponed? When or on how many dates were certain topics
discussed? There are no standard NLP tools to help with this.
To enable the various types of research methods and questions, we extract
and operationalise the following elements of resolutions as metadata layers:
Meetings and meeting dates The specific date on which a proposition dis-
cussed and a decision reached.
Attendance lists and president The persons who were present and involved
in the decision making process of each resolution.
42 M. Koolen et al.
Resolutions The type of proposition that was submitted, e.g. a request, report
or missive, who submitted the proposition, whether it was accepted, rejected
or postponed for later discussion, and what action was decided on.
Insertions Extracts of earlier resolutions or of resolutions by one of the Provin-
cial States, or of memorandums, letters or requests submitted to the SG.
Named entities Persons who submitted propositions and persons, committees
selected to investigate and report on issues that were discussed, and other
named entities such as organisations, geographic locations and ship names.
Topics The topic of individual resolutions. This is partly provided by the con-
temporary indices, lists of index terms and marginalia. But some form of key
phrase extraction or topic modelling could provide alternative (and differ-
ently biased) topical perspectives.
Before we describe how we use this model for extract information (Section 4),
it is necessary to discuss the numerous text recognition challenges this resource
puts forward, because the quality of text recognition has a big impact on the of
information extraction process that follows it.
3 Text Recognition Challenges
The physical state of the records is heterogeneous. The corpus has a mix of
formats, with an ongoing record of handwritten resolutions, that from the 18th
century were also published as printed volumes. The collection spans 220 years
and has a large variety of handwriting, caused by differences between the suc-
cessive clerks that were employed by the SG as well as by changes in modes of
handwriting in general, that changed from 16th -century Gothic to 18th -century
roman script. Some printed volumes have single column pages, but others have
double column pages and there are more complex column splits, insertions of
letters and extracts, marginalia, tables (including multi-column and multi-page
tables) and indices organised by main terms (referred to as respecten in the
corpus).
The automatic recognition of the texts of the resolutions is performed by
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recogni-
tion). We use a typical pipeline consisting of Layout Analysis and detection of
baselines of text in the images. During the project we continuously update the
OCR and HTR models using ground truth data sets and feedback from the
information extraction process.
OCR is standard technology, but requires training because of diverging print-
ing formats and especially orthographic difficulties. The current model achieves
a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8, that is, 8 out every 100 character are incor-
rectly recognised. HTR is more difficult because of the irregularities of handwrit-
ing. Recognising the 425,000 pages of handwritten resolutions requires several
steps in a pipe line. We used the P2PaLA tool [14] on the scans without ground
truth for layout analysis of text regions and text (base)lines. Next, we created
a manual transcription of ground truth data set of 1,000 pages. Through itera-
tive recognition and correction of batches of pages in Transkribus, we currently
Modelling Resolutions 43
achieve a CER of 2.99 on a 100 page evaluation set in which the identified text
regions and baselines were manually corrected. The model is fine-tuned by cor-
rections made by volunteers in the Vele Handen crowd-sourcing platform that
uses the web version of Transkribus.
On handwritten pages with no layout corrections, we observed that misiden-
tified regions result in much more variation in the number of errors per page
and a higher CER. We continue to expand the ground truth set and plan to
train specific models for pages diverging from a ‘standard’ resolution page (e.g.
indices and tables) and for handwriting on which the HTR+-model performs
worse than the average.
In the next section we discuss the results of the information extraction process
on the OCR output of the printed resolutions.
4 Information Extraction Challenges
A typical step in extracting information from historical texts is to use general
approaches like Named Entity Recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging, and
lemmatisation to identify entities and topical words and phrases [11]. This step
is thwarted by both text recognition errors and the lack of good NLP-resources
for historical spelling and vocabulary in early modern corpora [4,13,10].
On English texts these generic approaches work to some extent. English
orthography has not changed much since the 18th century, therefore resources
for modern English can be effective [6,15]. In Dutch, changes are larger, making
generic approaches less useful. We annotated named entities in 200 pages of
manually transcribed resolutions and retrained the Spacy NER tagger4 with
90% of the pages and tested on the remaining 10%. This led to a precision of
0.49 and recall of 0.19. Although this is likely to improve by annotating more
pages, there are two hurdles. First, the upper bound for precision and recall
remains low because in the resolution texts, many nouns have uppercase initials,
which makes it hard to algorithmically distinguish them from named entities.
Second, precision and recall will be significantly lower on the vast majority of
pages that are not manually but automatically transcribed.
Moreover, such techniques do not alleviate the problem of identifying the
start and end of daily sessions in the text, the precise date of each session, the
attendance lists, the start and end of individual resolutions and the type of de-
cision reached. Generic approaches of layout analysis can detect standard struc-
tures like tables, figures, footnotes, headers and tables of content with varying
levels of success [3,1], but cannot interpret specific semantics such as temporal
orderings of meeting dates and the geographical ordering in the attendants lists.
We decided on an alternative approach that is based on a combination of 1)
exploiting repetitive structural elements such as the layout and ordering used for
indices and attendants lists, similar to Colavizza et al. [2], 2) explicitly modelling
domain knowledge in lists of formulaic textual phrases, and 3) approximate string
4
https://spacy.io/models/nl
44 M. Koolen et al.
Text string found Frequency
Ontfangen een Miflive van 286
Ontfangen cen Miflive van 101
Ontfangen een Miffive van 65
Ontfangen cen Miffive van 31
Ontfangen een Mifive van 27
Ontfangen een Miı́live van 11
Ontfangen een Millive van 10
Table 1. OCR text string matches found for the opening formula ‘Ontvangen een
Missive van’ in the resolutions for the year 1705.
searching and matching. First, the sessions have a fixed structure and layout,
with the opening of a next session and the attendance list represented in a
different font and text alignment than the resolution summaries. Second, the
resolution texts are extremely repetitive, using the same phrasings with little
variation across decades of resolution. We use phrase models that contain lists
of frequently occurring phrases, such as the standard formulas used to announce
the next resolution or its decision, or the start of a new meeting (see Figure 2).
Formulaic phrases can be short or long, e.g. a single word or an entire sentence
including punctuation. Each phrase has a metadata category and label so that
an approximate match in the text can be tied to a metadata layer. Phrases can
also have known variants, e.g. alternative phrasings that we have encountered.
The phrase models represent knowledge of the domain and the corpus, what
information we expect to find, where and in what order.
Third, our approach exploits the fact that, even with a relatively high CER,
the majority of characters in frequently occurring phrases and names are correct
and in the right order, such that the string distance between the recognised text
and its corresponding phrase in our model is small. We have developed a fuzzy
searching algorithm that accepts one or more phrase models to find approximate
matches, and uses configurable string distance thresholds to control how much
textual variation is accepted.5
The phrase model for opening formulas contains eight different formulas,
each with a list of variant phrasings and a label for the type of proposition.
For instance, the opening formula ‘Ontvangen een Missive van’ (EN: Received
a Missive of) indicates the proposition is a missive. For the resolutions of year
1705, 950 matches are found with 315 different OCR strings (Table 1). The most
frequent OCR string occurs 286 times, so identifies only 30% of the resolutions
for missives. Other proposition types include reports, requests, memories and
(previous) resolutions. The evaluation of this approach is described below.
We exploit domain knowledge differently across multiple iterations of infor-
mation extraction. In the first iteration we focus on extracting information with
very high precision, by using high thresholds for approximate string searching, to
5
See https://github.com/marijnkoolen/fuzzy-search.
Modelling Resolutions 45
Fig. 2. Elements in the printed resolutions of 1755. A meeting starts with a date (red
box) and attendants list (green box), followed by individual resolutions with opening
propositions (blue boxes) and decision formulas (orange boxes)
46 M. Koolen et al.
build lists of e.g. the starting point of meeting sessions and names of attendants.
In later iterations, we use additional domain knowledge. For instance, if we have
found the starting points of the meeting sessions for 12 and 15 January 1725
in the first iteration, we exploit our knowledge that sessions are chronologically
ordered, therefore know that the sessions for 13 and 14 January should be in
between these starting points. In the second iteration, we can search with lower
thresholds in a much smaller amount of text and much higher chances of success.
For the names of attendants, we exploit our knowledge that the president, being a
representative of one of the provinces, rotated every week between the provinces,
and that these persons were regular attendants during the other weeks. Once
we know some of the names of presidents, we use approximate searching to find
them in the lists as either president but with recognition errors, or as regular
attendants, reducing the number of unknown and uncertain names in the list.
For the individual resolutions, we use the fact that they use extremely repet-
itive language, with typical textual formulas for the opening proposition (see
Figure 2), e.g. ’Ontvangen een missive van ...’, (English: ’Received the missive
of ...’) and the decision, e.g. ‘WAAR op gedelibereert zynde, is goedgevonden
ende verstaan ...’ (English: ’WHICH after deliberation has been accepted ...’).
Through multiple iterations of extracting resolutions, we gradually build lists
of standard formulas, which we subsequently use in approximate searching to
find variations of these formulas that may contain both text recognition errors
and slightly different spellings. For all elements we extract, we store them with
the fuzzy matches of phrases as evidence to explain how our metadata was cre-
ated. Together with the explicit phrase models that we publish in our GitHub
repository,6 this makes the decision process transparent and repeatable.
4.1 Evaluation
We evaluated our approach with various ground truth data sets:
Page type identification Identifying whether a page contains resolutions, in-
dex entries or respect, and whether a page is the title page of a section (and
therefore the start of a section). Our model uses a combination of layout
and textual evidence and has an accuracy of > 0.99 on a test set of 3376
manually annotated pages. The printed volumes contain 91,302 pages with
resolutions, 10,698 index pages and 828 pages with term lists.
Meeting date identification Identifying the start of a meeting and the date
of that meeting. We created ground truth data for 500 randomly selected
meeting dates between 1703 and 1796, and annotated the starting point in
the text as well as the exact date and day of the week. We evaluated and
updated the phrase model in two iterations, using a batch of 100 meeting
dates per iteration. Our current phrase model, after a third iteration of
updating the phrase model, leads to a precision of 0.99 and recall of 0.93
on the test set consisting of the remaining 300 meetings. The extraction
6
See https://github.com/HuygensING/republic-project
Modelling Resolutions 47
algorithm detects the correct start for 100% of the extracted meetings, but
in three out of 300 cases the identified date is incorrect. For several other
dates in the test set, no meeting start is found. The 91,302 pages of printed
resolutions are thereby transformed into a new layer consisting of 23,605
meetings. Of the meeting dates that were not correctly identified (7% of the
total), the algorithm signals for 65% of them that they are appended to the
previous meeting, so we know where to focus manual effort to correct them.
Resolution identification Identifying the individual resolutions, including their
opening proposition, the decision reached and the closing summary. Based
on the annotated ground-truth, there are an estimated 311,586 resolutions
in the printed volumes (13.2 per meeting). On the ground truth test set of
198 resolutions, our phrase model currently achieves a precision of 0.94 and
recall of 0.76 in identifying the opening phrases. The relatively low recall
signals that our phrase model is incomplete. In future iterations, we will
create additional ground truth for testing, so as not to overfit our model on
the initial ground truth data.
Attendants identification Identify the names of the attendants and link re-
curring names to the correct entities. We are currently developing ground
truth data for this.
Index entry and reference identification Identify the lemma and page ref-
erence of an entry, and link the lemma to the correct resolution. We have a
first version of a model, but have not finished the ground truth data yet.
Large historical resources all have their own textual characteristics and struc-
tural features, which require the modelling of expert knowledge of these resources
and incorporating these into generic NLP techniques. To know if this phrase
model and fuzzy search approach generalises to other collections, we have ex-
perimented successfully with extraction of the dates and finding locations of
medieval charters, such that over 17,000 extracted mentions of place names can
be treated as historically dated attestations. Our goal is to continue to develop
this open and reusable toolkit as an approach for structure-driven information
extraction of digitised resources for historical research.
5 Linking Challenges
Information extraction gives us a way to navigate, select and order the the
meetings and resolutions in individual volumes through the different layers of
metadata. The next step is to connect those layers to each other and to connect
them across the hundreds of volumes. Connecting the metadata across different
layers enables queries like a) when was financing of the military discussed, b)
who were involved in the decisions made around this topic, and c) what kind of
decisions were reached. Here, connections between the topics from the indices
and the resolutions they refer to, as well as to the correct dates of the resolutions
are indispensable. The other dimension is connecting metadata elements within
a single layer but across different years and meetings found in different volumes.
48 M. Koolen et al.
For instance, to enable a good layer of topical metadata, we need to connect the
indices and marginalia across the entire period, so that all resolutions regarding
financing of the military can be retrieved for all 220 years.
The marginalia and contemporary indices were made by different people at
different times, resulting in an incoherent system over the years. Marginalia differ
in level of extensiveness, indices in level of completeness, and their individual
terms in level of scope and interpretation. This makes connecting them into a
coherent layer of information to access the entire archive a challenge.
We manually transcribed and merged the lists of index entries for seven
volumes of resolutions between 1742 and 1785. These turned out to contain
3934 distinct entries, with individual volumes containing between 673 and 994
entries. Geographic locations and organisations have a higher overlap between
years and are more stable across time than persons. Subjects seem more stable
as well, but it is challenging to establish whether, for instance, the index entry
on ‘declaration’ refers to the same thing over the years. The overlap of entries
between subsequent years is around 33%, but drops to 10-20% for indices that
are decades apart. This is mainly caused by the individual person entries, which
may recur in subsequent years but logically disappear from the index over time.
Yet subject terms also change, which creates a challenge for longitudinal analysis
of topics such as long-term developments of economic policies or shifts in the
accessibility of the meetings and decisions for different classes in society.
Our preliminary analysis of the overlap in index terms across volumes shows
there are two challenges in creating a single index across the whole series. One
is to link recurring terms that might have different spellings or OCR represen-
tations, the other is to link orthographically different but semantically similar
terms. For the former, we use our fuzzy search strategy. For the latter, some
combination of manual categorisation and automatic clustering will be used.
6 Presentation Challenges
The size and prominence of the corpus offers research opportunities for many
years to come, but its potential can only be reached if it is presented to end users
with relevant and easy-to-use functionality. The Resolutions need a reliable yet
flexible platform that stays in active development to publish information when it
becomes available. One problem of custom build publication environments is the
risk of stalling maintenance and further development when project finances dry
up. When development stops, stability and flexibility decrease. We use a generic
publication environment we call Docere. Several other projects are currently
being developed on the platform. Development is mostly mutually beneficial,
a generic feature realised for one project, will be instantly available to all the
others. On the one hand, this means the cost of development is split over projects.
On the other, individual projects have less influence on development decisions,
as a decision for one project will directly affect all other projects.
To offer flexibility per project some components of the user interface can be
custom built, for instance the page header and footer, which search facets are
Modelling Resolutions 49
available, or how search results are shown. Full customisability is available for
the rendering of the text. The OCR and HTR output are mapped to custom
components, which means all extracted text elements can have custom features
attached to them. A meeting or resolution is shown in relation to previous and
next meetings or resolutions. Related meetings or resolutions can be found via
topical metadata or using full-text search, giving the user extra possibilities to
navigate the set. Docere leverages a search index to create a faceted search. A
facet can represent metadata (date, president, attendee and others) or entity
(person, place, topic and others) from a meeting or resolution.
In addition, it is possible to directly query the data set through an Applica-
tion Programming Interface (API). This is especially beneficial to the growing
number of researchers for whom the user interface is not sufficient to answer
their research questions. The API will expose the raw and enriched data and
will be essential in adhering to the FAIR principles.7
7 Conclusions
One of the challenges in digitising large archives is to provide different dimensions
and levels of access, as their potential users come with many different questions,
different background knowledge and different and different needs to explore the
connections between the records. There are often several structural elements
in the analogue version that support these different information access needs,
but operationalising these structures and connecting them in the digital version
requires tackling a cascade of challenges.
This paper describes our approach of modelling, recognising and extraction
these structural elements, dealing with problems of text recognition errors, his-
torical language variation and the heterogeneity in structure and content found
in long serial publications. Instead of using generic Natural Language Processing
in a one-shot information extraction pipeline, we developed an iterative approach
in which expert knowledge of the records can be incorporated in the extraction
process, and insights from analysing the output can be transparently modelled
and fed back into the process. Evaluation of our results shows that this not only
leads to highly accurate layers of structured text, annotations and metadata,
but also to interpretable models that can be used as provenance to explain how
each algorithm came to its decisions.
Acknowledgements
This research is funded by the The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Re-
search (NWO) through the NWO Groot project REPUBLIC (an acronym for
REsolutions PUBlished In a Computational Environment) 2019-2023.
7
https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
50 M. Koolen et al.
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