The University of Sheffield
Humanities Research Institute

Connected Histories

Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900

University of Hertfordshire

Institute of Historical Research

Funded by the JISC

Funder: JISC

Programme: e-Content Capital Programme

Partners

Funded by the JISC's e-Content Capital Programme, this project will create a federated search facility, 'Connected Histories', which will bring together a critical mass of quality content drawn from a wide range of electronic sources on the subject of early modern and nineteenth-century British history. More than simply creating a portal for accessing these historical resources, this project will combine web crawling with Natural Language Processing techniques in order to remotely `tag´ previously unstructured texts and allow consistent, structured searching of names, places and dates. In so doing the project will add a new level of precision and intellectual rigour to the search process.

The Connected Histories search engine will be developed by the Humanities Research Institute [HRI] at the University of Sheffield. The website will be developed and hosted by the Institute of Historical Research [IHR] within the University of London, and will sit as an 'umbrella' over all the sources in the cluster. Testing will be carried out by historians at Sheffield, Hertfordshire, and the Institute of Historical Research. Evaluation will be conducted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London.

In the first instance, 'Connected Histories' will incorporate the following distributed historical sources:

In total, Connected Histories will provide access to fourteen major databases of primary source texts, containing more than 412 million words, plus 469,000 publications, 3.1 million further pages of text, 87,000 maps and images, 254,000 individuals in databases, and over 100 million name instances.