Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.
Through a combination of web crawling and the application of Natural Language Processing methodology the project will create a non-intrusive, distanced tagging of the data within those distributed sources to facilitate more sophisticated and structured searching.
Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between resources.
I am extremely interested in this project, but live in Boston, USA. I understand that the scope is limited to British history, at least until a more universal system of organization is developed. Do you intend to eventually incorporate all the primary sources of value that you can possible acquire?
A task that daunting would potentially require a lot of assistance.
Is there any way for amateur historians to help?
Perhaps you would be interested in sources of British history from the United States?
I suppose you have plenty of colleagues at Harvard U. or in the Boston Public Library that would jump at the opportunity.
If not, and the idea is still attractive, I would love to become involved.
We may well be interested in British history sources from collections in the US in future phases of the project. They would probably need to contain very substantial relevant material, however. (We’re not quite thinking that far ahead at the moment!)
Have you thought about defining a standard ontology (OWL) for historical data?
Seems to be one lacking for historical data/research, I know you’re trying to be non-intrusive, but if I can insert historical semantic tags (additional meta-data) into my historical content, it is going to make indexing, creating relationships and association’s a lot easier from a search perspective.
It will basically give non-structured historical data context at the source.
Interesting project – look forward to seeing the output …