Towards an understanding of how slavery is present in historical sources |  Ash Charlton | #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 2022-10-05

Scholarship presentation by Ash Charlton, University of Edinburgh; National Library of Scotland
Towards an understanding of how slavery is present in historical information sources: the role of Transkribus in analysing the early Encyclopaedia Britannica
How are concepts of race and slavery represented in our historical information environment, such as the early Encyclopaedia Britannica? Although digitised editions are available, a clean machine-processable source for textual analysis was not. This research uses images of the first eight EB editions (1768-1860), and a custom trained Transkribus model to create a corpus with low character error rates. This enables substantial volumes of data to be processed with data mining, to seek out and map complex concepts through editions. This research will use topic modelling to closely examine the entries relating to slavery and enslavement to offer an overview of the concepts and how they change. The identification and frequency of selected keywords across all entries in editions offers an insight into intellectual interconnectivity between Encyclopaedia Britannica entries and reveals the legacy of race and slavery in print culture.