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This paper aims to amplify the retrieval and utilization of historical newspapers through the application of semantic organization, all from the vantage point of a fine-grained knowledge element perspective. This endeavor seeks to unlock the latent value embedded within newspaper contents while simultaneously furnishing invaluable guidance within methodological paradigms for research in the humanities domain.

According to the semantic organization process and knowledge element concept, this study proposes a holistic framework, including four pivotal stages: knowledge element description, extraction, association and application. Initially, a semantic description model dedicated to knowledge elements is devised. Subsequently, harnessing the advanced deep learning techniques, the study delves into the realm of entity recognition and relationship extraction. These techniques are instrumental in identifying entities within the historical newspaper contents and capturing the interdependencies that exist among them. Finally, an online platform based on Flask is developed to enable the recognition of entities and relationships within historical newspapers.

This article utilized the Shengjing Times·Changchun Compilation as the datasets for describing, extracting, associating and applying newspapers contents. Regarding knowledge element extraction, the BERT + BS consistently outperforms Bi-LSTM, CRF++ and even BERT in terms of Recall and F1 scores, making it a favorable choice for entity recognition in this context. Particularly noteworthy is the Bi-LSTM-Pro model, which stands out with the highest scores across all metrics, notably achieving an exceptional F1 score in knowledge element relationship recognition.

Historical newspapers transcend their status as mere artifacts, evolving into invaluable reservoirs safeguarding the societal and historical memory. Through semantic organization from a fine-grained knowledge element perspective, it can facilitate semantic retrieval, semantic association, information visualization and knowledge discovery services for historical newspapers. In practice, it can empower researchers to unearth profound insights within the historical and cultural context, broadening the landscape of digital humanities research and practical applications.

This paper aims to construct a spatio-temporal emotional framework (STEF) for digital humanities from a quantitative perspective, applying knowledge extraction and mining technology to promote innovation of humanities research paradigm and method.

The proposed STEF uses methods of information extraction, sentiment analysis and geographic information system to achieve knowledge extraction and mining. STEF integrates time, space and emotional elements to visualize the spatial and temporal evolution of emotions, which thus enriches the analytical paradigm in digital humanities.

The case study shows that STEF can effectively extract knowledge from unstructured texts in the field of Chinese Qing Dynasty novels. First, STEF introduces the knowledge extraction tools – MARKUS and DocuSky – to profile character entities and perform plots extraction. Second, STEF extracts the characters' emotional evolutionary trajectory from the temporal and spatial perspective. Finally, the study draws a spatio-temporal emotional path figure of the leading characters and integrates the corresponding plots to analyze the causes of emotion fluctuations.

The STEF is constructed based on the “spatio-temporal narrative theory” and “emotional narrative theory”. It is the first framework to integrate elements of time, space and emotion to analyze the emotional evolution trajectories of characters in novels. The execuability and operability of the framework is also verified with a case novel to suggest a new path for quantitative analysis of other novels.