Trading Consequences

Duration

January 2012 – December 2013

Web

Trading Consequences Blog

Trading Consequences on Twitter

Summary

Trading Consequences will examine the following question: What were the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century?

The project will have a global scope while using Canadian natural resource flows as a way of testing the reliability and efficacy of the data produced. The sources for our study will be large corpora of digitised documents from the period in question, and we will use text mining - more specifically, information extraction - to transform unstructured text into structured data.

This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses, both through structured query and through a variety of visualisation tools.

Project Deliverables

• text mining tools
• a commodities database and query interfaces
• visualisation and exploratory client interfaces

EDINA Contacts

James Reid

Partnerships

• Language Technology group, University of Edinburgh
• Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University, Ontario
• School Of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

The project also benefits from the support and expertise of 

• Canadiana.org
• Nipissing University
• Open University
• ProQuest
• University of British Columbia
• University of Guelph

Funders

• AHRC - the Arts & Humanities Research Council
• ESRC - the Economic & Social Research Council
• IMLS - the Institute of Museum and Library Services
• JISC
• NEH - the National Endowment for the Humanities
• NSF - the National Science Foundation
• NWO - Der Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
• SSHRC - the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council