Funding for the Methods Network ended March 31st 2008. The website will be preserved in its current state.

Workshops and Seminars

Text Mining for Historians

A workshop organized by Zoe Bliss, AHDS History, University of Essex on 17 - 18 July 2007 at University of Glasgow.

(pdf) (html) Programme
(pdf) (html) Participants
(pdf) (html) Report
(html) Workshop materials
(html) AHDS History workshop site

Texts are central to historical research and an increasing body of historical texts are becoming available in electronic format. Despite a long-standing interest in computer aided text analysis the use of computer assisted methods and tools are not widespread amongst historians. Organised by AHDS History and the Association for History and Computing UK (ACH-UK) and building upon the successful Methods Network Workshop on Historical Text Mining in Lancaster in July 2006, this workshop aimed to introduce participants to the methods and tools developed and currently employed by corpus linguists. It provided practical hands on experience of using these tools such a Wmatrix, a software tool for corpus analysis and comparison, and VARD, which matches spelling variants to their normalised equivalents. In addition it allowed participants to explore the pros and cons of employing these tools and methods in historical research.

The workshop was aimed at academic staff and post graduates whose research involves the analysis of significant bodies of textual material and who would like to know more about computerised techniques and tools that they could potentially use to aid their research.

AHDS Methods Taxonomy Terms

This item has been catalogued using a discipline and methods taxonomy. Learn more here.

Disciplines

  • History

Methods

  • Data Analysis - Data mining
  • Data Analysis - Collating
  • Data Analysis - Collocating
  • Data Analysis - Concording/Indexing
  • Data Analysis - Content analysis
  • Data Analysis - Searching/querying
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Coding/standardisation
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Lemmatisation
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - descriptive - conceptual
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - descriptive - document structure
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - descriptive - linguistic structure
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - descriptive - nominal
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - presentational
  • Data Structuring and enhancement - Markup/text encoding - referential
  • Data Capture - Usage of existing digital data
  • Data publishing and dissemination - Textual collaborative publishing
  • Data publishing and dissemination - Textual resource sharing
  • Data Analysis - Parsing
  • Data Analysis - Stemmatics/cladistics
  • Data Analysis - Stylometrics