JISC: Trading Consequences

Aaron Quigley is working with colleagues in the Universities of Edinburgh and York on a project called Trading Consequences. In this project we are examining the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents. The project has a global scope while using Canadian natural resource flows as a way of testing the reliability and efficacy of the data produced. The sources for our study include a large collection of digitised documents from the period in question, and we will use text mining – more specifically, information extraction – to transform unstructured text into structured data. This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses, both through structured query and through visualisation.
Aaron is leading WP5, the work package on Information Visulisation in this project.