Search Constraints
Search Results
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Conference paper (published)
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. MapReader allows users with little computer vision expertise to i) retrieve maps via web-servers; ii) preprocess and divide them into patches; iii) annotate patches; iv) train, fine-tune, and evaluate deep neural network models; and...Hosseini, Kasra ; Wilson, Daniel C. S. ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine
maps and ordnance survey
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Research report
Circulations and Entangled History in 19th Century Chile
The Living with Machines Digital Residences have offered our research team a remarkable opportunity to experiment with methods for extracting data from historical newspapers dating back 100 to 150 years. This interdisciplinary project aims to expand the scope of digital humanities and historical research by developing automated techniques for data...Hayward, Jennifer ; Valenzuela, Gillian ; Shakib, Khandokar
digital humanities, historical newspapers, Living with Machines, and Victorian
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Research report
UK Railway Archive (AR-UK)
Archive The Railway UK (AR-UK) is a comprehensive digital platform designed to enhance the online archives of the UK rail network. This initiative, developed in collaboration with Living with Machines, is primarily focused on research, historical preservation, and providing public access to railway history. As a centralized resource, it caters...Sheppard, Joanne
digital humanities, Victorian, rail, data visualisation, and Living with Machines
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Research report
The Devils After the Fall
This is a report by Nicola Baldwin of a Digital Residency at Living With Machines, on the dataset: Crowdsourced accidents data from Newspapers, working in line with the LWM aims for Radical Collaboration, New Perspectives, Analysing at Scale. The following document is a personal account of work done, thoughts arising...Baldwin, Nicola
Living with Machines, accidents, Victorian, film, crowdsourcing, newspaper, and digital humanities
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Research report
Visualising press politics in the United Kingdom
This project's main goal, as outlined in the initial proposal, was to develop an interactive, open-source web app that visualizes data from the Press Directories dataset alongside historical general election results. In this report, I will delve into the challenges encountered, the interesting findings uncovered, and the potential avenues for...Bonato, Nicolò
historcial newspapers, digital humanities, Victorian, politics, data visualisation, and Living with Machines
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Research report
An Etiquette For Minor Time Travel
A report documenting the Living with Machines Digital Residency project called "An Etiquette for Minor Time Travel" by Robert Sherman. Via an open call and running from to July 2023, six Digital Residencies were funded by the Living with Machines project to support researchers and practitioners devising creative approaches to...Sherman, Robert
art, Living with Machines, Victorian, rail, data visualisation, digital humanities, and poetry
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Research report
Publishing updated version of ‘R for Newspaper Data’
My Living with Machines Digital Residency, which I carried out between May and July 2023, allowed me to update and publish an online book on accessing and analysing newspaper data. The goal of the book is to make available an end-to-end set of instructions and tutorials which would allow researchers,...Ryan, Yann Ciarán
digital humanities, Victorian, historical newspapers, and Living with Machines
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Journal article
Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections?
Open access, peer-reviewed article published in Science Museum Group Journal, as part of a double-length special issue for the AHRC TaNC discovery project, 'Congruence Engine'. The article gives a critical overview of how 'scale' operates as a keyword within computational humanities as well as reviewing a number of cognate fields,...Wilson, Daniel C S
machine learning, AI for GLAM, STS, scale, computational humanities, history, and congruence engine
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Dataset
OCR and crowdsourced annotations, Language of Mechanisation, JSON files
Datasets created through crowdsourcing tasks created on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform by the Living with Machines ‘language of mechanisation’ project team. Building on earlier work classifying machines by function, we asked volunteers on Zooniverse 'how did the word x change over time and place?' and presented them with options for... -
Dataset
Frederick May's London Press Dictionary and Advertiser's Handbook (1883-1911)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Frederick May and successors, containing information on newspapers, magazines and periodicals and arranged in alphabetical and sometimes tabular order. Information for each title included price publisher office political and religious leaningFrederick May & Son ; British Library
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Dataset
May's British and Irish Press Guide and Advertiser's Handbook & Dictionary etc. (1871-1880)
Newspaper directories produced and published annually in contemporary 19th Britain by advertising agent Frederick May and successors, containing information on newspapers, magazines and periodicals and arranged in alphabetical and sometimes tabular order. Information for each title included price, publisher, office, political and religious leaning.Frederick May & Son ; British Library
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Journal article
Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English
We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance...Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Colavizza, Giovanni ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona
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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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Journal article
Maps of a Nation? The Digitized Ordnance Survey for New Historical Research
Although the Ordnance Survey has itself been the subject of historical research, scholars have not systematically used its maps as primary sources of information. This is partly for disciplinary reasons and partly for the technical reason that high-quality maps have not until recently been available digitally, geo-referenced, and in color....Hosseini, Kasra ; McDonough, Katherine ; van Strien, Daniel ; Vane, Olivia ; Wilson, Daniel C.S.
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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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Dataset
Language of Mechanisation: annotated historical newspaper articles
Datasets created through crowdsourcing tasks created on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform by the Living with Machines ‘language of mechanisation’ project team. Building on earlier work classifying machines by function, we asked volunteers on Zooniverse 'how did the word x change over time and place?' and presented them with options for... -
Journal article
Design Choices for Productive, Secure, Data-Intensive Research at Scale in the Cloud
We present a policy and process framework for secure environments for productive data science research projects at scale, by combining prevailing data security threat and risk profiles into five sensitivity tiers, and, at each tier, specifying recommended policies for data classification, data ingress, software ingress, data egress, user access, user...Arenas, Diego ; Atkins, Jon ; Austin, Claire ; Beavan, David ; Cabrejas Egea, Alvaro …
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Journal article
A Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers
We present a new dataset for the task of toponym resolution in digitized historical newspapers in English. It consists of 343 annotated articles from newspapers based in four different locations in England (Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Poole and Dorchester), published between 1780 and 1870. The articles have been manually annotated with mentions... -
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... -
Dataset
Stretford and Urmston Examiner
Stretford and Urmston Examiner. (1879 - 1880) was a weekly newspaper which has been digitised by the British Library for the Living with Machines projectBritish Library