Mining Literary Trends: A Tool for Digital Library Analysis

Digital Libraries, especially large ones, need advanced tools for analyzing and interpreting their content. This paper introduces a novel Web-based tool designed to support library users in browsing and examining the content of digital libraries, and in extracting and inter- preting high-level information from them. Leveraging external data and metadata repositories, our software uses state-of-the-art solutions in Nat- ural Language Processing and Visualization to analyze and identify the- matic trends and clusters over time. We describe the tool’s architecture and functionality, showing its effectiveness in tracking the evolution of topics along time within a textual corpus. We further illustrate it through a case study that analyzes two decades of scholarly articles from an estab- lished conference on Digital Libraries, showcasing the tool’s potential to help in understanding past and current academic research, and to guide future trajectories in this field.