Text Mining Basics: Extracting and Organising Sets of Keywords from Texts

Requirements:

No prior experience expected. You MUST bring your own laptop and have the ability to install software on your machine.

What:

This 2.5 hour ‘masterclass’ offers a practical workshop in which participants will learn how to extract dozens of place name keywords from a series of historical texts. The keywords will then be exported to a format that could easily be ‘geo-referenced’ and then mapped. This will be useful for anyone who regularly works with digitised texts who wants to be able to identify sets of keywords for further research (eg, place names, personal names, adjectives, etc)

It is expected that once you have completed this lesson, you will be able to generalise the skills to extract custom sets of keywords from any set of locally saved historical sources.

Spaces are limited to 12 to ensure all participants receive individual attention.

The masterclass will be led by Adam Crymble, lecturer of Digital History at the University of Hertfordshire. He is an editor of The Programming Historian, an open access, peer-reviewed monograph that provides introductory digital history lessons to those looking to learn new ways to engage with the past. He is one of the convenors of the Digital History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

The Digital History Masterclass series is a joint initiative of the Digital History Research Centre (DHRC) at the University of Hertfordshire, and of IHR Digital of the Institute of Historical Research.

Schedule:

2-4:30pm: With the help of the workshop facilitator, participants will be working through the following tutorial, published on the Programming Historian:

• Adam Crymble, 'Using Gazetteers to Extract Sets of Keywords from Freeflowing Texts', The Programming Historian (2015): http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/extracting-keywords

Optional Extra:

Participants are encouraged to attend an optional seminar (5-7pm) at the IHR by Katrina Navickas, who will describe how she used similar techniques to map the pubs in London where the popular political movement the Chartists held their meetings in the nineteenth century:

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’. (https://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/)