Tuesday 2 February – Katrina Navickas – Political Meetings Mapper with British Library Labs: mapping the origins of British democratic movements with text-mining, NLP, geo-parsing and crowd-sourcing
Political Meetings Mapper with British Library Labs: mapping the origins of British democratic movements with text-mining, NLP, geo-parsing and crowd-sourcing from Digital History
Venue: Room SH246, 2nd floor, South block, Senate House
Abstract
Political Meetings Mapper (http://politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk) was one of the two winning entries to the British Library Labs competition in 2015 ( http://labs.bl.uk/). The project designed a tool to text-mine the British Library 19thcentury newspapers for records of Chartist meetings of the 1840s, and geo-parse the results, plotting them on geo-referenced historic maps. This paper discusses how the experience of the collaboration as a ‘digital beginner’ holds lessons for both library professionals and academic historians in how to expand historians’ skills in digital history.
