Stephen Hart's Blog - Posts Tagged "primary-sources"
Making Historical Sources Accessible: Part I
When you are researching matters historical, you often come across fascinating primary or early secondary sources. You extract the snippets that you need and move on. You probably make a note somewhere about the type of material it contains in case you need to go back to it. You might mention it to like-minded friends and colleagues but it then disappears under the ever-accumulating pile of data.
Now that we are living in the century of the fruitbat, it seems we should do better and, indeed, it is happening. It is something of special interest of mine, combining interests in history and computing.
One of the prime examples of this is the Old Bailey Online project - oldbaileyonline.org - containing the Proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913, including 197,745 criminal trials. It is fully searchable, you can cross-reference the crimes to maps of London, read secondary accounts and anything else that might be around. It is an absolutely awesome resource.
Of course, it is supported by several Universities, has dedicated technical and project staff and, no doubt, hordes of students all keen to do their bit. Most of us do not have these resources but there is still a lot we can do. And it can be fun.
In this post, I would like to touch on how we can use the power of Google - the largest database search tool on the planet. (There are other search engines and they do a similar job. What works for Google works for them all). I am going to use my own website - pascalbonenfant.com - as an example, partly because I am familiar with it and partly because I want you all to know about it.
The site is dedicated to the 18th century and the Georgian period in general. I have done various things with databases, which I propose to discuss in a subsequent post, but even without databases you can do a lot.
In 1866, a man called John Timbs published a two-volume work entitled Club Life of London containing numerous anecdotes about London clubs and pubs during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the anecdotes are, frankly, tedious but others contain many gems of historical information. The text is available from Project Gutenberg so all you have to do is download it and read it through.
No, I didn't think so. Neither would I.
So, what I have done on my website is simply to divide the book into separate webpages, one for each location. For each webpage, you give it a title and description relating to the
tavern name. (Click here if you want to have a look at it.) Now when Google searches it gives each page a reasonably high rating because it knows the information is specific to the topic.
Let us suppose you are researching Charles Lamb and want to know a bit more about the Salutation and Cat where he would hang out with Coleridge. Enter "Salutation and Cat" into Google and there is our page, third from the top.
Google has undoubtedly indexed Timbs' book but it contains so much information about so many different topics that the search engine has no way of knowing that the information needs to be high on the list for that particular topic. Because it is in our title and description, it does.
Thus, we have rescued a small snippet of information from obscurity. Not only the Salutation and Cat but also the Turk's Head Coffee House, the Tzar of Muscovy's Head, the Essex Head Club and sundry Whitebait taverns and many others.
Whether Timbs' anecdotes deserved to be rescued is another question but it serves as an excellent illustration of what we can do. Because the wonderful people at Project Gutenberg have already provided the text for us it has not been too big a job. In a minor way, we have made things much easier and more interesting for our fellow travellers in History.
In my next post, I will be discussing the power of a "good bits" version of a text. Watch this space.
Now that we are living in the century of the fruitbat, it seems we should do better and, indeed, it is happening. It is something of special interest of mine, combining interests in history and computing.
One of the prime examples of this is the Old Bailey Online project - oldbaileyonline.org - containing the Proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913, including 197,745 criminal trials. It is fully searchable, you can cross-reference the crimes to maps of London, read secondary accounts and anything else that might be around. It is an absolutely awesome resource.
Of course, it is supported by several Universities, has dedicated technical and project staff and, no doubt, hordes of students all keen to do their bit. Most of us do not have these resources but there is still a lot we can do. And it can be fun.
In this post, I would like to touch on how we can use the power of Google - the largest database search tool on the planet. (There are other search engines and they do a similar job. What works for Google works for them all). I am going to use my own website - pascalbonenfant.com - as an example, partly because I am familiar with it and partly because I want you all to know about it.
The site is dedicated to the 18th century and the Georgian period in general. I have done various things with databases, which I propose to discuss in a subsequent post, but even without databases you can do a lot.
In 1866, a man called John Timbs published a two-volume work entitled Club Life of London containing numerous anecdotes about London clubs and pubs during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the anecdotes are, frankly, tedious but others contain many gems of historical information. The text is available from Project Gutenberg so all you have to do is download it and read it through.
No, I didn't think so. Neither would I.
So, what I have done on my website is simply to divide the book into separate webpages, one for each location. For each webpage, you give it a title and description relating to the
tavern name. (Click here if you want to have a look at it.) Now when Google searches it gives each page a reasonably high rating because it knows the information is specific to the topic.
Let us suppose you are researching Charles Lamb and want to know a bit more about the Salutation and Cat where he would hang out with Coleridge. Enter "Salutation and Cat" into Google and there is our page, third from the top.
Google has undoubtedly indexed Timbs' book but it contains so much information about so many different topics that the search engine has no way of knowing that the information needs to be high on the list for that particular topic. Because it is in our title and description, it does.
Thus, we have rescued a small snippet of information from obscurity. Not only the Salutation and Cat but also the Turk's Head Coffee House, the Tzar of Muscovy's Head, the Essex Head Club and sundry Whitebait taverns and many others.
Whether Timbs' anecdotes deserved to be rescued is another question but it serves as an excellent illustration of what we can do. Because the wonderful people at Project Gutenberg have already provided the text for us it has not been too big a job. In a minor way, we have made things much easier and more interesting for our fellow travellers in History.
In my next post, I will be discussing the power of a "good bits" version of a text. Watch this space.
