Developing Computational Models for Formalizing Concepts in the British Colonial India Corpus

The concepts embedded in humanities materials are unstructured and possess multifaceted attributes. New insights from these materials are derived through systematic qualitative study. However, for the purpose of quantitative analysis using digital humanities methods and tools, formalizing these concepts becomes imperative. The functionality of digital humanities relies on the deployment of formalized concepts and models. Formalization converts unstructured data into a more structured form. Concurrently, models function as representations created to closely examine the modeled subject, while metamodels define the structure and properties of these models. In this case, the absence of formalized concepts and models for studying the British India colonial corpus hampers the computational application to address humanities research questions quantitatively. The texts are intricate, and the format is non-standard, as colonial officials documented extensive information to govern and control the colonized people and land. In this scenario, the British India colonial corpus cannot be effectively utilized for topic-specific research questions employing advanced text mining without formalizing the concepts within it. This article addresses the questions of what the most effective approach is for identifying multifaceted concepts within the non-standard British colonial India corpus through models and how these concepts can be formalized using formal models. It also explores how metamodels can be developed based on this experiment for a similar corpus.