Search Constraints
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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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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2021
Dataset
Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers
We present a new dataset (version 2) for the task of toponym resolution in digitised historical newspapers in English. It consists of 455 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...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Beavan, David ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Lawrence, Jon …
nineteenth-century English, dataset, newspapers, toponym resolution, and geographic information retrieval
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2021
Conference paper (published)
Station to Station: Linking and Enriching Historical British Railway Data
The transformative impact of the railway on nineteenth-century British society has been widely recognized, but understanding that process at scale remains challenging because the Victorian rail network was both vast and in a state of constant flux. Michael Quick’s reference work Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: a Chronology offers...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Lawrence, Jon ; McDonough, Katherine ; Nanni, Federico …
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2021
Dataset
StopsGB: Structured Timeline of Passenger Stations in Great Britain
Michael Quick's book _Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: a Chronology_ offers a uniquely rich and detailed account of Britain's changing railway infrastructure. Its listing of over 12,000 stations allows us to reconstruct the coming of rail at both micro- and macro-scales. However, being published originally as a book (and... -
2021
Dataset
Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers
We present a new dataset for the task of toponym resolution in digitised 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...Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Beavan, David ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Hosseini, Kasra ; Lawrence, Jon …
nineteenth-century English, geographic information retrieval, newspapers, toponym resolution, and dataset
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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...