Event Details

From the Digital Humanities Centre ‘Data science approaches to the humanities’

Ian Gregory and Zoe Alker - ‘Data science approaches to the humanities’

Zoe Alker's: Skin and Bone: Interdisciplinary analysis of accidents, injury, and violence in industrialising London,1760-1901

Skin and Bone seeks to chart the embodied experience of work-related injury, accidents, and interpersonal violence of 173, 366 Londoners during the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1901. This British Academy-funded project explores the possibilities of studying the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on the material human body by combining methodologies from disparate but related disciplines: Osteoarchaeology, History, and Data Science and Digital Humanities. The project will merge ten disparate datasets compiled from criminal, hospital, and osteoarchaeological records to explore the relationships between trauma, injury, and accidents with social demographics, but especially, sex/gender, age and occupational status. The project will generate a new open-access multivariate database and develop innovative approaches to studying and visualising the historic material body- skin and bone- in London during the Industrial Revolution.

Ian Gregory: Understanding the geographies of poverty as represented by UK newspapers

Many textual sources contain a large amount of information about place and how places differ from each other. Understanding this is not easy as conventional corpus linguistics or natural language processing (NLP) techniques have little concept of geography, while geospatial technologies such as geographical information systems (GIS). To represent geographies in text we therefore need to bring together methods from these two (or three) disparate fields: corpus linguistics and NLP allow us to summarise and explore large volumes of text, geographical information science (GISc) provides the tools to allow us to explore sources geographically. We call this integrated approach Geographical Text Analysis (GTA).

Quantitative geographies of poverty are well known, however the geographies of the perception of poverty are far less well understood. To explore these questions we make use of two large British newspaper corpora from the period 2010-15. The Guardian gives us the opinions of left-wing broadsheet newspaper, while the Daily Mail provides a contrast from a right-wing tabloid. Together these two newspapers provide us with 380 million words of text from the period. The questions that we explore are: a) what places within the UK do these newspapers associate with poverty; b) what aspects of poverty are they associating with these places; c) how does this vary from place to place, and; d) how the two newspapers differ in their coverage.

Teams link here