The project

Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British history. Through the combination of web crawling and the application of a Natural Language Processing methodology it 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 adapts to each resource (depending on whether and how the data is tagged, and on the text structure) to allow searching across the full range of chosen sources for names, places, and dates, as well as keywords and phrases. Background information about the search results will be delivered to the end user, 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 sources. The search facility will be expandable as new digital resources become available.

Early modern and nineteenth-century Britain is one of the times and places in history for which the largest number of digital sources is available. These have been created by universities, archives and commercial providers, and are accessed by tens of thousands of individuals each day. But many are under-exploited, and researchers are hampered in the way they use these materials by their distributed nature and the variable forms of tagging and structure present in each resource. Connected Histories provides the next stage in meeting historians’ needs by addressing the requirement to access historical resources in a single, consistent way; and in a manner that moves beyond simple keyword searching to a forensic and semantically-driven approach.

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, 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 IHR. Evaluation will be conducted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at King's College London.

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

• British History Online
• Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1913
• Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London
• 17th-19th Century Burney newspaper collection
• Origins Network
• Parliamentary Papers
• Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835
• Strype’s Survey of London
• Charles Booth Online Archive
• Collage

In total, Connected Histories will provide access to 14 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.

Partners

• Professor Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield)
• Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire)
• Dr Jane Winters (Institute of Historical Research)
• HRI Digital, Humanities Research Institute (University of Sheffield)
• Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King's College London)

The JISC e-Content programme

Connected Histories is one of 11 projects funded under JISC's e-Content programme which is running from September 2009 to February 2011. Projects are aligned under two strands, some looking at the skills and strategies required in universities to embed digitisation as a core part of its remit, whilst others are creating enhanced digital resources by bringing together disparate collection of related digitised material.

JISC inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education.