15-20 Minute Paper
Timothy Bristow and Jim Clifford
York
University
Biographies
Timothy
Bristow
was
appointed
Digital
Humanities
Librarian
at
York
University’s
Scott
Library
in
2011.
As
his
title
suggests,
Timothy
is
principally
concerned
with
the
development
of
library
systems
and
practices
to
facilitate
new
modes
of
digital
scholarship.
Timothy
also
serves
as
the
Chair
of
York
University
Libraries’
Scholarly
Communication
Group.
Jim Clifford is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Colin Coates, on a collaborative research project, Trading Consequences, which has funding from a Digging into Data grant. Early in 2011, Jim completed his PhD in the History Department at York University in Toronto.
Abstract
Text
mining
offers the
promise
of a macroscopic
approach
to
historical
inquiry.
With
the
support
of
the
Digging
Into
Data
Challenge
and
other
programs,
a
growing
number
of
historians
are
assembling
and
mining
large
textual
corpora
in
an
effort
to
identify
novel
patterns
and
explore
new
hypotheses.
Our
project,
entitled
Trading
Consequences
(http://tradingconsequences.blogs.edina.ac.uk/),
uses
text
mining
to
investigate
the
environmental
and
economic
impact
of
global
commodity
trading
in
the
British
world
of
the
nineteenth
century.
However,
in
attempting
to
apply
digital
methods
to
explore
imperial
commodity
circulation,
the
Trading
Consequences
team
found
our
efforts
restricted
by
the
terms
of
the
academic
publishing
industry
and
its
control
over
the
circulation
of
textual
data.
Vendors and their proprietary systems present both explicit legal barriers and implicit technological barriers to the effective use of the underlying data for the purposes of text mining and other emerging modes of digital inquiry. If libraries wish to support work in the digital humanities and better articulate their role within the field, these barriers must be removed. After negotiating the widespread shift to digital resources over the past twenty years, librarians must now help to negotiate their effective use for digital scholarship.