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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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2019
Conference paper (unpublished)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.... -
2019
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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 …
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2020
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... -
2020
Conference paper (unpublished)
Assessing the Impact of OCR Quality on Downstream NLP Tasks
A growing volume of heritage data is being digitized and made available as text via optical character recognition (OCR). Scholars and libraries are increasingly using OCR-generated text for retrieval and analysis. However, the process of creating text through OCR introduces varying degrees of error to the text. The impact of...