Digital History Workshop – Text Mining

Can computational methods explain how context shapes (or is reflected in) text? To answer this question, we will scrutinise the “London’s Pulse” corpus, a collection of Medical Officer of Health reports that provide comprehensive information about the general state of health in the boroughs of London. Using Topic Modelling (more specifically Structural Topic Models) we analyse how various themes in these reports are associated with specific external factors, such as the level of poverty in a borough or the political orientation of the local council. In short, this workshop provides researchers with computational techniques to understand the relation between a content and context.