Connected Histories

Connected Histories (Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900) will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.

Through a combination of web crawling and the application of Natural Language Processing methodology the project 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 can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results 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 resources.

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.