# History Playground: A Tool for Discovering Temporal Trends in Massive Textual Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ArcGPT: A Large Language Model Tailored for Real-world Archival Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14852/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies have shown that macroscopic patterns of continuity and change over the course of centuries can be detected through the analysis of time series extracted from massive textual corpora. Similar data-driven approaches have already revolutionised the natural sciences, and are widely believed to hold similar potential for the humanities and social sciences, driven by the mass-digitisation projects that are currently under way, and coupled with the ever-increasing number of documents which are "born digital". As such, new interactive tools are required to discover and extract macroscopic patterns from these vast quantities of textual data. Here we present History Playground, an interactive web-based tool for discovering trends in massive textual corpora. The tool makes use of scalable algorithms to first extract trends from textual corpora, before making them available for real-time search and discovery, presenting users with an interface to explore the data. Included in the tool are algorithms for standardization, regression, change-point detection in the relative frequencies of ngrams, multi-term indices and comparison of trends across different corpora.