Digital Humanities Initiative Talk Series

Date: 4 November 2024 (Monday)
Time: 5:00 pm (HKT)
Via Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Luke Blaxill

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About the talk

This talk addresses the challenges and opportunities afforded by the computational analysis of unreadably large textual datasets. Dr. Blaxill argues that historians have failed to grasp these profound opportunities. Despite the abundance of machine-readable data liberated by digitisation, there has been no widespread embrace of text mining, cliometrics, or a broad philosophical debate on the role of computing in history. This ambivalence has arisen mainly from apathy, sidelining computational analysis into a specialist methodological niche. This damages the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to engage with the dawning age of data science and associated developments in artificial intelligence.

This talk will showcase examples of text mining in action in modern British political history. Case studies will include election speeches from 1880-1910, the contributions of women in Parliament since 1945, and nineteenth-century election violence. Dr. Blaxill argues for a reopening of the wider methodological debate about historians and computers. This requires informed skeptics to come forward to engage with advocates to discuss how we face the future.

About the speaker

Luke Blaxill is college lecturer in Modern British History at Hertford College University of Oxford. He has published widely on text mining in History, especially British politics, including in Past & Present in 2024. His first book, The War of Words- the language of British Elections 1880-1914 was published in 2020 with the Royal Historical Society.