MITAO: a tool for enabling scholars in the humanities to use Topic Modeling in their studies

Automatic text analysis methods, such as Topic Modelling, are gaining much attention in Humanities.However, scholars need to have extensive coding skills to use such methods appropriately. The needfor having this technical expertise prevents the broad adoption of these methods in Humanities re-search. In this paper, to help scholars in the Humanities to use Topic Modelling having no or limitedcoding skills, we introduce MITAO, a web-based tool that allows the definition of a visual workflowwhich embeds various automatic text analysis operations and allows one to store and share both theworkflow and the results of its execution to other researchers, which enables the reproducibility of theanalysis. We present an example of an application of the use of Topic Modelling with MITAO using acollection of English abstracts of the articles published in “Umanistica Digitale”. The results returnedby MITAO are shown with dynamic web-based visualizations, which allowed us to have preliminaryinsights about the evolution of the topics treated over the time in the articles published in “UmanisticaDigitale”. All the results, along with the defined workflows, are published and accessible for furtherstudies.