Aurelius Noble, organiser
The seminars will cover a basic introduction to the application of data science methods to economic history. In particular, it will focus on automated data collection, transcription, and labelling. Advances in this field have made it possible for researchers to rapidly transcribe and annotate millions of documents. The seminars will provide a broad introduction to the field: web-scraping, automated transcription using machine learning, and natural language processing. The main focus will be on transcription. Namely, how to use computer vision to transcribe a variety of historical documents: from printed directories, to tables, to handwritten documents. The seminars will contain a theoretical overview of: the state of the field, central concepts, pipelines and tools. They will also incorporate a brief workshop demonstrating some basic implementations of these tools in Python.