A Text Analytic Approach to Rural and Urban Legal Histories
From the post:
Aberdeen has the earliest and most complete body of surviving records of any Scottish town, running in near-unbroken sequence from 1398 to the present day. Our central focus is on the ‘provincial town’, especially its articulations and interactions with surrounding rural communities, infrastructure and natural resources. In this multi-disciplinary project, we apply text analytical tools to digitised Aberdeen Burgh Records, which are a UNESCO listed cultural artifact. The meaningful content of the Records is linguistically obscured, so must be interpreted. Moreover, to extract and reuse the content with Semantic Web and linked data technologies, it must be machine readable and richly annotated. To accomplish this, we develop a text analytic tool that specifically relates to the language, content, and structure of the Records. The result is an accessible, flexible, and essential precursor to the development of Semantic Web and linked data applications related to the Records. The applications will exploit the artifact to promote Aberdeen Burgh and Shire cultural tourism, curriculum development, and scholarship.
The scholarly objective of this project is to develop the analytic framework, methods, and resource materials to apply a text analytic tool to annotate and access the content of the Burgh records. Amongst the text analytic issues to address in historical perspective are: the identification and analysis of legal entities, events, and roles; and the analysis of legal argumentation and reasoning. Amongst the legal historical issues are: the political and legal culture and authority in the Burgh and Shire, particularly pertaining to the management and use of natural resources. Having an understanding of these issues and being able to access them using Semantic Web/linked data technologies will then facilitate exploitation in applications.
This project complements a distinct, existing collaboration between the Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives (ACAA) and the University (Connecting and Projecting Aberdeen’s Burgh Records, jointly led by Andrew Mackillop and Jackson Armstrong) (the RIISS Project), which will both make a contribution to the project (see details on application form). This multi-disciplinary application seeks funding from Dot.Rural chiefly for the time of two specialist researchers: a Research Fellow to interpret the multiple languages, handwriting scripts, archaic conventions, and conceptual categories emerging from these records; and subcontracting the A-I to carry out the text analytic and linked data tasks on a given corpus of previously transcribed council records, taking the RF’s interpretation as input.
…
Now there’s a project for tracking changing semantics over the hills and valleys of time!
Will be interesting to see how they capture semantics that are alien to our own.
Or how they preserve relationships between ancient semantic concepts.