The research applies some natural language processing techniques (NLP) to the domain of history, having as object of investigation the Brazilian Historical-Biographical Dictionary (DHBB), an encyclopedic style work conceived by the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). The target is to create, from the DHBB, an annotated corpus for automatic information extraction s purpose, relevant to the Digital Humanities, enabling distant readings of Brazilian contemporary political history. The complete process goes through the morphosyntactic analysis of the material, identification of entities relevant to the domain, inclusion of semantic annotation in the corpus, definition of semantic relations of interest and mapping of lexical-syntactic patterns existing in these relations. These steps seek to prepare the texts for the identification of structures of interest, isolating the relevant information and presenting them in a structured way. To test and evaluate a set of textual patterns regarding their productivity in relation to DHBB, some specific topics were selected: age of the politician when entering public life, academic training and family ties. The assumption is that using lexical-syntactic patterns it is possible to extract high quality information from the domain of History, from an annotated corpus of the encyclopedic genre. In the evaluation of the patterns for extraction of the year of birth of the biographees, the F-measure was 99 per cent, for the extraction of family relationships, the F-measure was 84 per cent and for information on academic training, the correctness index reached 99.1 per cent. These extractions, in turn, allowed us to make a distant reading of the data in the DHBB that shows us i) a drop in the average age with regard to the entry of politicians into the public career, who start to position themselves more and more under 40 years of age, mainly those born from the 1960s; ii) sharp decline in military training, especially for the post-1920 generations, demonstrating that civilian training was replacing military training as a way to reach important political positions; and iii) family ties in politics as a phenomenon that remain over time at very significant rates, often representing more than 50 per cent of the total members of certain categories. The main contributions of the thesis are: creation of an encyclopedic genre corpus annotated and made available for linguistic and humanities studies; presentation of a methodology based on a philosophy of cyclic enrichment, in which, as more information is obtained, they are added to the corpus itself, improving extraction; and compilation of a set of productive patterns that can be adapted for any corpora containing the same type of annotations.