The Anatomy of a Search and Mining System for Digital Humanities

Samtla (Search And Mining Tools with Linguistic Analysis) is an online integrated research environment designed in collaboration with historians and linguists to facilitate the study of digitised texts written in any language. It currently supports the research of two corpora: the Genizah collection held by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit in Cambridge University, and a collection of Aramaic incantation texts from late antiquity. In contrast to standard search engines and text mining systems that rely on the bag-of-words representation of text, Samtla provides the retrieval and discovery of fuzzy text patterns/motifs (aka "formulae" to historians), which is achieved through applying a character-based n-gram statistical language model built on top of a powerful generalised suffix tree data structure. This paper briefly describes the major components of Samtla and their underlying techniques.