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Search Results
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2021
Journal article
MapReader: A Computer Vision Pipeline for the Semantic Exploration of Maps at Scale
We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i)...Hosseini, Kasra ; Wilson, Daniel C.S. ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine
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2020
Conference paper (published)
Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy
This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it,...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Nanni, Federico ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Ahnert, Ruth …
nineteenth-century English, living machines, BERT, and animacy
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2020
Abstract
Using smart annotations to map the geography of newspapers
Geographic information is a key component in the description of collection objects, and yet its format is often unsuited for use with methods of geographic analysis. Catalogue entries are often inconsistent, in plain text, and without geographic coordinates (much less coordinates linked to authority records). Georesolution of the relevant fields...Ryan, Yann ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; van Strien, Daniel ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar …
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2018
Journal article
Babbage among the insurers: Big 19th-century data and the public interest
This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of...Wilson, Daniel C.S.
big data, Thomas Rowe Edmonds, Charles Babbage, public interest, and insurance
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2020
Dataset
Living Machines atypical animacy dataset
Atypical animacy detection dataset, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English extracted from an open dataset of nineteenth-century books digitized by the British Library (available via https://doi.org/10.21250/db14, British Library Labs, 2014). This dataset contains 598 sentences containing mentions of machines. Each sentence has been annotated according to the animacy and humanness... -
2019
Conference paper (published)
Resolving places, past and present: toponym resolution in historical British newspapers using multiple resources
Newspapers and their metadata are richly geographical, not only in their distribution but also their content. Attending to these spatial features is a prerequisite in newspaper research. Following other projects to have geoparsed place names in newspapers, we describe our approach to linking historical geospatial information in text to real-world...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; McDonough, Katherine ; Krause, Amrey ; Wilson, Daniel C.S. ; Hosseini, Kasra …