Participants

Investigators

Dan Cohen (George Mason University, USA) is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Since 2001 he has worked extensively on the creation of digital tools and methods for historians and other humanists, including founding the Zotero project, which has produced one of the world’s most popular and flexible applications for organizing and analyzing digital documents. He is a co-PI with Sean Takats on an NEH grant to explore the use of text mining in history.

Tim Hitchock (University of Hertfordshire, UK) is Professor of Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Hertfordshire, and has written or edited a dozen books on the histories of poverty, gender, sexuality and masculinity. He is co-director of the Old Bailey Online, and Plebeian Lives projects; and was also a co-director with Mark Greengrass of the AHRC funded programme, https://omsk.abari.ru/tag/113/: Information Mining in Distributive Research Datasets in the Arts and Humanities’. Over the last two decades he has worked to place the experiences and agency of non-elite people at the centre of our understanding of eighteenth-century society, using both emergent technology and a distinctive approach to historical writing, to help create a ‘new history from below’.

Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta, Canada) is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. He has worked on text analysis extensively developing the TAPoRware tools which are example web service tools. He is also the project leader of the TAPoR project which brings together 13 universities and 150 researchers in its second iteration. Rockwell has through TAPoR access to programming support and servers.

Jörg Sander (Univeristy of Alberta, Canada) has an MA in Logic and Philosophy of Science, and a PhD in Computer Science. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and has research experience in data mining and similarity search in databases. Sander brings expertise in different techniques for unsupervised data mining such as clustering, and association rule mining, as well as index structures for similarity search in high dimensional data sets.

Robert Shoemaker (Univeristy of Sheffield, UK) is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on the history of crime and criminal justice, and is currently researching textual representations of criminality. With Tim Hitchcock, and Clive Emsley, he is co-director of the Old Bailey Online, and with Hitchcock he is co-director of the Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London project, a digitisation and record-linkage project which will provide an integrated searchable database of some 100 million words of mostly manuscript text from a dozen archives, allowing the lives of plebeian Londoners to be traced across a wide range of interactions with the institutions of local government.

Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University, Canada) is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University. Sinclair has experience developing text analysis tools for the web including HyperPo and the current development of the Voyeur tools that are designed to be called on remote data through an API and will be used in this project. Dr. Sinclair has also been awarded funding for a Postdoctoral Fellowship at SHARCNET which will provide needed supervision for running large-scale processes on available HPC systems.

Sean Takats (George Mason University, USA) is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media. He developed and mined a corpus of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for his dissertation research, which focused on the professionalization of cooking among domestic servants in eighteenth-century France. Along with Dan Cohen, Takats co-directs the Zotero project.

William Turkel (University of Western Ontario, Canada) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario. He is a historian of science, technology and environment, with a background in programming and linguistics. Turkel has received SSHRC funding for a workshop on APIs of the sort that this project will test, and is also the director of Digital Infrastructure for the SSHRC-funded strategic knowledge cluster NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment.