Multi-perspective approach for curating and exploring the history of climate change in Latin America within digital newspapers

Abstract

This paper introduces a multi-perspective approach to deal with curation and exploration issues in historical newspapers. It has been implemented in the platform LACLICHEV (Latin American Climate Change Evolution platform). Exploring the history of climate change through digitalized newspapers published around two centuries ago introduces four challenges: (1) curating content for tracking entries describing meteorological events; (2) processing (digging into) colloquial language (and its geographic variations5) for extracting meteorological events; (3) analyzing newspapers to discover meteorological patterns possibly associated with climate change; (4) designing tools for exploring the extracted content. LACLICHEV provides tools for curating, exploring, and analyzing historical newspaper articles, their description and location, and the vocabularies used for referring to meteorological events. This platform makes it possible to understand and identify possible patterns and models that can build an empirical and social view of the history of climate change in the Latin American region.