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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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Conference paper (unpublished)
Defoe: A Spark-Based Toolbox for Analysing Digital Historical Textual Data
This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations.... -
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 …
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Research report
Data Study Group Final Report: Smart monitoring for conservation areas
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) monitors over 250,000 protected areas (e.g. national parks and nature reserves) and thousands of other sites and critical habitats. These sites are the foundation of global natural assets and are central to the preservation of biodiversity and human well-being. Unfortunately, they face increasing pressures... -
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 …