Early Modern Notes

The next edition of Carnivalesque for everything ancient and medieval will be at Zenobia: Empress of the East on 19 December. Nominations: email – judith[AT]judithweingarten.com; or the nomination form; or tweet @zenobia1 (use the tag #carnivalesque).

The Digging into Data challenge is an international grant competition (UK, US, Canada), which announced its first eight winners yesterday.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

The most exciting bit for historians of crime and fans of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and of Zotero and TAPoR, is that the Old Bailey Online is one of the eight:

Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Awardees: Dan Cohen, George Mason University, NEH; Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire, JISC; Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, SSHRC.

Additional Key Participants: The National Archives (United Kingdom), McMaster University, the Open University, Amherst College, University of Sheffield, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario.

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.