To honor our heroes: analysis of the obituaries of Australians killed in action in WWI and WWII

Marc Cheong, Mark Alfano

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular, are rich repositories of communal values, as they reflect the values and virtues that are admired and respected in individuals who are considered to be heroes in their communities. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to map the patterns of values and virtues attributed to Australian military personnel who were killed in action during World War I and World War II. Doing so reveals several clusters of values and virtues that tend to be attributed together. In addition, we use named entity recognition and geotagging the track the movements of these soldiers to various theatres of the wars, including North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of ICPR 2020
Subtitle of host publication25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
Place of PublicationMilan
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Pages6965-6972
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728188089
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2020 - Virtual, Milan, Italy
Duration: 10 Jan 202115 Jan 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1051-4651

Conference

Conference25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2020
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityVirtual, Milan
Period10/01/2115/01/21

Keywords

  • Applications of document analysis
  • Historical document analysis
  • Human behavior analysis
  • Natural language processing
  • Obituary
  • Value
  • Virtue
  • Wellbeing

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