Digital Methods— Peaches and lemons are foodstuffs. Trying to classify historical texts using the BBIH Thesaurus.
If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact the organizer.
The Institute of Historical Research collates and classifies a large variety of material relating to History in UK Higher Education. With the rise of open access publishing and the proliferation of web resources, keeping up has become more and more difficult. Funding from the AHRC has allowed the IHR’s digital team to explore ways of automatically classifying works based on features such as book blurbs, article abstracts, titles and metadata.

This talk will cover the challenges the AHRC-funded TOBIAS project has met in classifying this material, using the Royal Historical Society’s fine-grained vocabulary of British and Irish history. Techniques the team is trying range from “bag of words” string matching to machine learning.

Simon Baker is the editor of the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH).

Jonathan Blaney is the Project Editor for British History Online.

Marty Steer is the Website Manager at the Institute of Historical Research.

All three speakers are engaged with the TOBIAS project, funded under the AHRC’s Follow-on Funding Impact & Engagement Scheme.
Date: 6 October 2016, 13:00 (Thursday, 0th week, Michaelmas 2016)
Venue: Weston Library, Broad Street OX1 3BG
Venue Details: Centre for Digital Scholarship
Speakers: Jonathan Blaney (Institute of Historical Research, University of London), Simon Baker (Institute of Historical Research, University of London), Marty Steer (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
Organising department: Bodleian Libraries
Organiser: Pip Willcox (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Host: Pip Willcox (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whatson/whats-on/booking?eid=210916&ename=Peaches+and+lemons+are+foodstuffs&edate=6+October+2016&etime=13%3A00&evenue=Centre+for+Digital+Scholarship%2C+Weston+Library&emap
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Pip Willcox