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Text Mining for Historians Report

Report by Ian Anderson and Zoe Bliss

Background

Texts are central to historical research, however the use of computer assisted methods and tools remains remarkably underutilised by historians. Despite a long-standing interest in computer-aided text analysis historians continue to benefit only indirectly, largely through work conducted in other disciplines. As evidenced by the successful Methods Network workshop in Historical Text Mining at Lancaster University in July 2006, the tools and methods being developed and used by corpus linguists have become increasingly sophisticated. At the same time a larger than ever body of historical texts are becoming available in electronic format. Building upon the Historical Text Mining Workshop this workshop aimed to publicise these tools and techniques to historians to encourage their use and to also explore how they could, or needed to, be adapted to more effectively meet their needs.

Read the report...

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