MLNA – A Python package and app for MultiLingual Network Analysis

Abstract

The Python package and associated app, MLNA (MultiLingual Network Analysis), make multilingual texts accessible to humanists, addressing the Eurocentrism in humanities research caused by scholars' limited knowledge of non-European languages. MLNA processes multilingual texts and visualizes networks of their entities. By manually assigning entities and adjusting graph features, users can gain an overview of the texts' contents. This enables researchers to narrow their multilingual text collection to texts with relevant entities or relationships, which can then be translated for close reading, saving a great amount of time. MLNA empowers scholars to engage with multilingual text documents, fostering a novel synthesis of close and distant reading, and contributing to greater inclusivity in text-based humanities research.