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Anthracite Oral Histories and Text Mining

21 October 2024, 1:25 pm–2:45 pm

Voices Unbound

We are pleased to welcome Dr Paul Shackel and Dr Madeline Brown (University of Maryland) for this 'Voices Unbound?' seminar.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Marco Humbel, UCLDH Associate Director (ECR)

This research covers novel approaches to analyzing existing public oral history collections in the context of the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. The oral history collections from this region include memories of coal miners and their families related to coal mining, immigration, and livelihoods that remain important for understanding local history and identity. Here, we re-examine oral history transcripts using text mining approaches with R. We consider the methodological challenges and advantages of applying techniques such as sentiment tagging and domain-specific lexicons to historic texts.

All welcome to join this online seminar. Please register to receive the joining details: https://voices-unbound.eventbrite.co.uk


Voices unbound? Exploring new and/or possible directions in digital and experimental oral history

A lecture series co-organised by TU Darmstadt, University College London, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. The series is convened by Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt), Andrew Flinn, Andreas Vlachidis, and Marco Humbel (UCL), Shih-Pei Chen (Max Planck Institute), and Gerben Zaagsma (C²DH), offering an important way of keeping up to date with the methodological and theoretical state of the art in digital oral history. We invited speakers to present work on recent technological developments that may hold promise for digital oral history. In this way, the seminar series appeals to (digital) oral historians, digital humanists and scholars of the history of information, memory and knowledge systems.

 

About the Speakers

Dr Paul Shackel

Professor of Anthropology at University of Maryland

He has worked in the anthracite coal mining region for 15 years and focuses on issues related to race, labor, and immigration.

Dr Madeline Brown

Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Maryland

Her work applies mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to tackle questions about contemporary and past human-environment interactions.