E-Periodica Next Level Access: visual depiction of personal networks
A new feature at E-Periodica enables the recognition and networked depiction of individuals who are mentioned together in journal content.
You are now able to visually depict joint mentions and links of individuals in journal articles with the help of graphs. To this end, we identified over 22 million names in external pageE-Periodica’s body of data, which numbers around eight million pages, using machine learning technologies.
Where networks are very extensive (e.g., in the case of famous people), you have the option of restricting the data displayed – for example to joint mentions of the individuals in question in the same sentence, on the same page or in the same article. You can also limit the publication period of the journals or restrict the data displayed to selected journals.
With this feature, E-Periodica Next Level Access has made information that is almost impossible to find via conventional research methods easily and intuitively accessible.
Link with the integrated authority file (“Gemeinsame Normdatei” – GND)
To make the identification process as precise as possible, names are linked to their corresponding entries in the external pageGND using a process of named entity linking.
As the journal content often does not contain contextual information that is necessary for clear identification, it is possible that a person may be linked to the wrong GND identifier or that a single person may be linked to multiple GND entries. Nonetheless, more than 800,000 data sets currently have a clear GND link.
Further development
E-Periodica Next Level Access is a prototype that the ETH Library has developed in collaboration with an external service provider. The resource – at least in part – is still at an experimental stage.
We therefore welcome your feedback, criticism and suggestions, which you can send to the following email address: .
external pageE-Periodica is the online platform for Swiss periodicals and is a service of the ETH Library. Subjects range from the natural sciences through architecture, mathematics, history, geography, art and culture to the environment and social policies. At E-Periodica you’ll find freely accessible periodicals from the 18th century through to the present. Resources are being continually expanded and supplemented by current editions.
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