John Knight and Sons soap company, like other successful soap manufacturers in Greater London, grew during the nineteenth century by combining technological innovation and marketing to sell increasing quantities of a product the British public increasingly saw as a symbol of their advanced civilisation. They did not struggle with the ecological…[Read more]

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]