Geoparsing History: Locating Commodities in Ten Million Pages of Nineteenth-Century Sources

In the Trading Consequences project, historians, computational linguists and computer scientists collaborated to develop a text mining system that extracts information from a vast amount of digitized published English-language sources from the “long nineteenth century” (1789 to 1914). The project focused on identifying relationships within the texts between commodities, geographical locations and dates. We explain the methodology, uses and the limitations of applying digital humanities techniques to historical research and argue that interdisciplinary approaches are critically important in addressing the technical challenges that arise. We believe that collaborative teamwork of the kind described here has considerable potential to produce further advances in the large-scale analysis of historical documents. Key Words: Digital history, Text Mining, Geoparsing, Commodities, British world