Colin M. Coates

Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration

Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary research project between environmental historians, computational linguists, and visualization specialists. It combines text mining and information visualization alongside traditional research methods in environmental history to explore commodity trade in the 19th century from a global perspective. Along with a unique data corpus, this project developed three visual interfaces to enable the exploration and analysis of four historical document collections, consisting of approximately 200,000 documents and 11 million pages related to commodity trading. In this article, we discuss the potential and limitations of our approach based on feedback from historians we elicited over the course of this project. Informing the design of such tools in the larger context of digital humanities projects, our findings show that visualization-based interfaces are a valuable starting point to large-scale explorations in historical research. Besides providing multiple visual perspectives on the document collection to highlight general patterns, it is important to provide a context in which these patterns occur and offer analytical tools for more in-depth investigations.

Geoparsing history: Locating commodities in ten million pages of nineteenth-century sources

ABSTRACT 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. The authors explain the methodology, uses, and the limitations of applying digital humanities techniques to historical research, and they argue that interdisciplinary approaches are critically important in addressing the technical challenges that arise. Collaborative teamwork of the kind described here has considerable potential to produce further advances in the large-scale analysis of historical documents.

Liberty in Time and Space: A Commentary on Ducharme

The CHR is publishing the papers presented at the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize roundtable which took place during the 2012 Canadian Historical Association’s annual congress. This is the most prestigious prize awarded each year by the Association for the best scholarly book in Canadian history. The roundtable provides the opportunity for historians in the field to discuss the winning study’s contribution from multiple perspectives. The 2011 winner was Michel Ducharme’s Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838), published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (2010). La CHR publie les communications présentées à la table ronde Sir John A. Macdonald qui est au programme du congrès annuel de la Société historique du Canada. Il s’agit du prix le plus prestigieux décerné par l’Association chaque année pour honorer la meilleure publication en histoire canadienne. La table ronde donne la chance à des historiens/nes dans le domaine d’analyser la contribution de l’ouvrage gagnant à partir de points de vue multiples. En 2011, le lauréat du prix fut Michel Ducharme pour son étude intitulée Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838), publiée par McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.

Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State (review)

medical theories are frequently at the mercy of shifting political currents. It also reminds us of a time not so long ago when medical research did not have to include informed consent, full disclosure, or the vetting of funding. Hoffer and Osmond saw themselves as part of a wave of creative researchers in psychiatry willing to cut corners and try anything as long as it seemed to work. That list of bold researchers includes Ugo Cerletti, the discoverer of electroshock, Manfred Sakel, the inventor of insulin shock therapy, and Henri Laborit, the discoverer of chlorpromazine. Some of this research paid off, some did not. Dyck’s book charts a time in medical research that, for better or worse, likely will never be duplicated. The exploits of Hoffer and Osmond might make us wonder if in the interest of protecting human subjects we have sacrificed the adventurism that down through history has led to so many beneficial scientific breakthroughs. ian dowbiggin University of Prince Edward Island