Abstract:
INTRODUCTION: With the increase in the availability of digital text collections for humanities
researchers, tools to enable enhanced retrieval are required. If words with very specific
properties could be retrieved from a text collection more accurate linguistic and other
analyses can be made. There are a range of properties and metadata that could be specified
for retrieval, from morphological data up to bibliographic data. Furthermore, the
bibliographic data should not only be on item level but extended to the text-level. For
example, in an anthology each section could be encoded with the author of that section. Such
extended metadata will enable fine-grained retrieval.
METHOD: In this study, current tools were evaluated to determine to what extent they allow
users to retrieve words with specific properties from a text collection.
ANALYSIS: The analysis is limited to the following criteria: interface design, metadata, search
options, filtering and search results.
RESULTS: Currently, it is not possible for a user to retrieve words with specific properties from
a text collection.
CONCLUSION: An extended set of metadata should be used to encode text to enable retrieval of
words on a fine-grained level.
