Trading Consequences

image © iStockPhotos 2012

A winner of the second Digging Into Data challenge, the Trading Consequences project is a multi-institutional, international collaboration between environmental historians in Canada and computer scientists in the UK to use text-mining software to explore thousands of pages of historical documents related to international commodity trading in the British Empire, involving Canada in particular, during the 19th century, and its impact on the economy and environment.

Information will be extracted to transform unstructured text into a rich structured data resource, allowing historians to discover new patterns and explore new hypotheses.

The University of Edinburgh, the University of St Andrews, and York University, Canada (Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies) are collaborating on the project. EDINA, as part of the Edinburgh team, is leading the database design, user interaction, and marketing work packages.

Using the techniques honed in the project, historians will gain invaluable experience in how vast amounts of data can be used to answer significant economic and environmental questions related to the past. The Canadian test case will act as a well-developed prototype that will provide a model for historians interested in other regions.

Partially sponsored by JISC, the Digging Into Data Challenge seeks to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences, and challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.