How to Analyse Non-Digital Historical Archives of Large Organizations — A Text-Mining Case Study

Abstract

In modern case study-based research projects, the emerging technological possibilities of computer-aided content analysis are becoming increasingly prominent. Especially in the fields of sociology, history and management and organization sciences (MOS), the amount of available data is constantly increasing, which complicates or limits manual analysis. Emerging techniques open up possibilities for analysis, and they need to be explored. In a research project on a large, non-digital archive of a large utility company, we tried several approaches to digitally analyse the documents. Through this task, we identified the possibilities and limits of digital analysis. In this paper, we present these with a case study and give other researchers concrete solutions for use in comparable projects, including the digitization, interpretation and visualization of results.

Keywords: text mining, digital text analysis, big data analysis, archival research, archival documents, case studies, digitization, data cleaning

JEL Classification: C80, C88, N01, Y20