Coal-location-date relationships text mined from Early Canada Online (Canadiana.ca)

This video displays some new data from the Trading Consequences project (@digtrade). We use the Edinburgh Geoparser to added lat/long data for all of the locations found in the corpus. We then extract the relationship between a lexicon of commodities, in this case coal, and geogrounded location (i.e. when we find coal and a place name in the same sentence). Currently we use the publication date, but hope to text mine more precise dates in the near future. Finally, we use ArcGIS’s new time function to create a video showing the geography of coal mentions changing over time in the corpus. We’ve also added a density “heat map” showing the regions of the world where coal is mentioned most often over the whole of the long-nineteenth century.