Freeing up digital content with text mining: New research means new licences

Abstract

The method by which users have traditionally exploited digital resources such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) has been via keyword search. However, researchers are increasingly finding new ways to exploit entire corpora of digitized resources, treating the resource as a single entity to be analysed, rather than searching or sifting through the resource for individual parts.This article looks at the work of one research team at the University of Lancaster, exploring how they are using a corpus of seventeenth-century newsbooks to leverage open new areas of research. Using tools borrowed from linguistics and geography, the researchers can analyse the place names mentioned in the newsbooks and see which linguistic concepts (e.g. war, money) were associated with which geographical areas.Such work has implications not only for future research but also for the resource managers to negotiate and manage the licences related to such resources.