Historians should learn text processing techniques?
Renaissance Book Wheel (Wikipedia)
By Jonathan Baney
Historians have always dealt with a large amount of text and have to develop ways to deal with its volume as an index card or Renaissance.
Now so much text information comes in electronic form, the data is now easier to access and analyze. However, some historians have to understand that the text processing techniques are difficult to learn.
Many text can be downloaded in digital form. This is an excellent opportunity, but also a problem for traditional humanities. Those who want to know what they can do with text collections may not be sure of where the data will be obtained and online courses are written for a computer scientist than historian.
IHR historians wrote two free courses for the basics and data preparation of semantic data. There are many historical examples to describe in advance knowledge and describe the material.
Semantic data means encoding texts according to their features. The beauty of this is that the researcher is the history of which Paselom is noted, and the language is used in the letter of excise duties or diplomats in port records. It is a lot of work to coding texts, it can allow you to allow you to help you not only help you to help you work more than other digital collections. Many of the texts are available and free to download and can provide all kinds of valuable information with a little practice.
The text cultural, on the contrary, does not think the text is recorded. It uses programming to interrogate large collections of texts to find syntactic and semantic patterns related to items about items about texts. Fortunately, programming was mainly made for us: In this course, Python uses the natural language in the natural language, which is best for Python. The text cultural is a major topic and just scratched the surface of our course, but we hope that some of our readers will continue to connect this very strong tool.
In addition we have included a Audit of tools Along with the course. Historians do not know which tools are available and this is a jargon free entry in a variety of and useful number. Finally we provided some Case research to show what can be done with digital techniques and historical information.
Nothing in the methods of accessing texts does not rule out old methods. When printing did not change the manuscript or writing a number of digital text print tastes. Even a book wheel is still used in historical research.
