Word Clustering for Historical Newspapers Analysis

This paper is a part of a collaboration between computer scientists and historians aimed at development of novel methods for historical newspapers analysis. We present a case study of ideological termsending with -ism suffix in nineteenthcentury Finnish newspapers. We propose a two-step procedure to trace differences in word usages over time: trainingof diachronic embeddings on several timeslices and when clustering embeddings ofselected words together with their neighbours to obtain historical context. The obtained clusters turn out to be useful for historical studies. The paper also discusses specific difficulties related to development of historian-oriented tools.