The identification and cataloguing of documentary evidence from textual corpora is an important part of empirical research in the humanities. In this position paper, we ponder the applicability of knowledge extraction techniques to support the data acquisition process. Initially, we characterise the task by analysing the end-to-end process occurring in the data curation activity. After that, we examine general knowledge extraction tasks and discuss their relation to the problem at hand. Considering the case of the Listening Experience Database (LED), we perform an empirical analysis focusing on two roles: the 'listener' and the 'place'. The results show, among other things, how the entities are often mentioned many paragraphs away from the evidence text or are not in the source at all. We discuss the challenges emerged from the point of view of scientific knowledge acquisition
