A spatio-temporal emotional framework for knowledge extraction and mining in digital humanities

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.