Das Mental Maps-Interface: Erforschung von Konzepten in Raum und Zeit

Abstract

For the eAQUA sub-project Mental Maps there was a need for a practical visualization that allows discovering concept change in time and space within larger amounts of data. The new tool should help to answer the following questions: When and where was a concept born? How did it spread? What authors referred to it? What was its original meaning? Were there any discursive controversies? When and under what circumstances did it disappear?
The Mental Maps Web Frontend was developed in cooperation between the Department of Ancient History Leipzig, the Department of Natural Language Processing Leipzig, the Department of Image and Signal Processing Leipzig and the Center for Retrospective Digitization Göttingen (GDZ). A first prototype was created based on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and can be accessed under: http://www.eaqua.net/sti/. As a result of the work of the Mental Maps project the Web Frontend shows the great benefits
of interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and computer sciences. The new methods can be adapted by other humanities and social sciences for instance to analyze political, social or cultural discourses. After integrating additional corpora and associated meta-data the Mental Maps could be used for any kind of analysis of transfer and reception
processes in philosophy, literature or even art as well. The following Paper explores the possibilities of this new research tool on the eAQUAplatform.
It explains the different objects and functions of the Web Frontend and shows how to use them.