  The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often
domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have
happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary
source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from
Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This
is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate
quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based
representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close
and a Distant Reading of the collection.
