How to Build a Macroscope

Timothy Bristow, a digital humanities librarian and Trading Consequences team member, and I are hosting a one day workshop on text mining in the humanities in the library at York University:

A macroscope is designed to capture the bigger picture, to render visible vastly complex systems. Large-scale text mining offers researchers the promise of such perspective, while posing distinct challenges around data access, licensing, dissemination, and preservation, digital infrastructure, project management, and project costs. Join our panel of researchers, librarians, and technologists as they discuss not only the operational demands of text mining the humanities, but also how Ontario institutions can better support this work. Read More

Trading Consequences’ First Year

Co-Authored with Beatrice Alex

Trading Consequences is a Digging Into Data funded collaboration between commodity historians, computational linguists, computer scientists and librarians. We have been working for a year to develop a system that will text mine more than two million pages of digitized historical documents to extract relevant information about the nineteenth-century commodity trade. We are particularly interested in identifying some new environmental consequences of the growing quantity of natural resources imported into Britain during the century.

During our first year we’ve gathered the digitized text data from a number of vendors, honed our key historical questions, created a list of more than four hundred commodities imported into Britain, and developed an early working prototype. In the process we’ve learned a lot about each others’ disciplines, making it increasingly possible for historians, computational linguists, and visualization experts to discuss and solve research challenges.

Our initial prototype has limited functionality and focuses on a smaller same of our corpus of documents. In the months ahead it will then become increasingly powerful and populated with more and more data. Late last year, we completed the first prototype. Here’s a picture of the overall architecture:

GIS and Time

[This is my first post for The Otter since I passed on the editorial duties to Josh MacFadyen in the summer]

One of the major weaknesses in using GIS for historical research are the limitations in showing change over time. GIS was designed with geography in mind and until recently historians needed to adapt the technology to meet our needs. Generally this meant creating a series of maps to show change overtime or as Dan MacFarlane did last week, include labels identifying how different layers represent different time periods. More recently, ArcGIS and Quantum GIS introduced features to recognize a time field in data and make it possible to include a time-line slider bar or animate the time series data in a video.


UK Tallow Imports, 1865-1904 from Jim Clifford on Vimeo.

London’s Great Smog, 60 Years On

[This post first appeared on ActiveHistory.ca]

When did the modern environmental movement begin? Did one event mark its beginning? Earlier this year we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often identified as bringing about the environmental movement. While this book’s importance is without question, focusing on it as the birth of environmentalism ignores the importance of urban environmental problems, from unsafe drinking water to severe air pollution, in raising people’s environmental awareness.

Ten years before Carson’s book, a great smog blanketed Greater London. From Friday December 5th through to the following Tuesday (Dec 9) 1952, the thick air pollution disrupted daily life and killed thousands of people. In the aftermath of the Great Smog, the British passed the Clean Air Act (1956).

Soap’s Ghost Pastures

British soap makers relied on a growing supply of fats, potash, and pine resin from overseas locations beginning in the eighteenth century. Much like the overseas “ghost acres” of wheat and sugar that augmented Britain’s food supply, soap manufacturers relied on tallow from expansive ghost pastures, which spread across much of the world’s natural grasslands at various points in the nineteenth century. Palm, coconut and cottonseed oils, which were also imported from around the world, increasingly competed with tallow in soap making, but they appear to have transformed significantly fewer acres of land when compared to the massive scale of cattle and sheep farming. In researching the global supply-chains of London’s soap industry for a recent conference paper and future journal article, I’ve become particularly interested in the changing geography of Britain’s tallow imports.

Click to enlarge.

The graph above demonstrates that the majority of Britain’s tallow imports came from Russia during the early nineteenth century. While the Argentine Republic and Uruguay became significant exporters, they did not challenged Russia’s dominance during the first half of the century.

Remembering the War of 1914

Vimy Ridge Memorial – Dedication Ceremony

[Originally published on ActiveHistory.ca]

It is very strange to celebrate the start of a war. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we have done here in Canada over the past year. The War of 1812 spanned from June of 1812 through to February of 1815, but this did not stop our government from starting their celebrations of the “Fight for Canada” during the 200th anniversary of the first months of the war. Perhaps they felt the need to keep the schedule open to celebrate the start of another war in 2014.