Reference:

Petri Paju, Eric Malmi, and Timo Honkela. Text Mining and Qualitative Analysis of an IT History Interview Collection. In History of Nordic Computing 3, IFIP Publications, pages 433–443. Springer, 2011.

Abstract:

In this paper, we explore the possibility of applying a text mining method on a large qualitative source material concerning the history of information technology in one nation. This data was collected in the Swedish documentation project "From Computing Machines to IT." We apply text mining on the interview transcripts of this Swedish documentation project. Specifically, we seek to group the interviews according to their central themes and affinities and pinpoint the most relevant interviews for specific research questions. In addition, we search for interpersonal links between the interviews. We apply a method called the self-organizing map that can be used to create a similarity diagram of the interviews. We then discuss the results in several contexts including the possible future uses of text mining in researching history.

Suggested BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{PajuMalmiHonkela11,
    author = {Petri Paju and Eric Malmi and Timo Honkela},
    booktitle = {History of Nordic Computing 3},
    language = {en},
    pages = {433-443},
    publisher = {Springer},
    series = {IFIP Publications},
    title = {{Text Mining and Qualitative Analysis of an IT History Interview Collection}},
    year = {2011},
}

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