Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary…[Read more]

The term Active History was coined through a collaborative brainstorming session, four people enjoying an early morning coffee in a Toronto cafe and thinking of a catchy term for a conference. If my memory is correct, we thought about “applied history,” and we thought about history that works for a better future. In the end, the two ideas were com…[Read more]

Named entity recognition for novel domains can be challenging in the absence of suitable training materials for machine-learning or lexicons and gazetteers for term look-up. We describe an approach that starts from a small, manually created word list of commodities traded in the nineteenth century, and then uses semantic web techniques to augment…[Read more]

The intersection of local environments and global mobility transformed Maitland, Nova Scotia, and many other small villages on the Bay of Fundy into boomtowns between the 1860s and the 1880s. Maitland’s location at the mouth of a river flowing into the Bay of Fundy, along with an abundant supply of spruce and a growing global demand for the l…[Read more]

In the Trading Consequences project, historians, computational linguists, and computer scientists collaborated to develop a text mining system that extracts information from a vast amount of digitized published English-language sources from the “long nineteenth century” (1789 to 1914). The project focused on identifying relationships within the…[Read more]

This article outlines the major threads of controversy around the emerging subject of evolutionary psychology in the U.K. mass media during the 1990s. Much of this controversy centered on the role of evolution in shaping human gender roles and sexualities, contributing to the subject’s mass appeal. This case is used to illustrate the argument that…[Read more]

This paper explores the phenomena of public scientific debates, where scientific controversies are argued out in public fora such as the mass media, using the case of popular evolutionary psychology in the UK of the 1990s. An earlier quantitative analysis of the UK press coverage of the subject (Cassidy, 2005) suggested that academics associated…[Read more]

Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an emerging area of research, mostly located in the social sciences, which stresses the importance of, and seeks to investigate further, the evolutionary origins of modern human psychology and behaviour. Over the 1990s, claims made by evolutionary psychologists were extensively debated on a popular level in the UK,…[Read more]

This paper presents findings from quantitative analyses of UK press and print media coverage of evolutionary psychology during the 1990s. It argues that evolutionary psychology presents an interesting case for studies of science in the media in several different ways. First, press coverage of evolutionary psychology was found to be closely linked…[Read more]

Response to UK Government 2018 Bovine TB Strategy Review Call for Evidence: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/bovine-tb-strategy-review-2018-call-for-evidence