June 2010 Archives

The Muninn Project
Tracking, Transcribing, and Tagging Government: Building Digital Records for Computational Social Science
Tuesday June 22, 2010, 14:15-15:15
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Abstract:

The Muninn Project is a multidisciplinary, 
multinational, academic research project investigating millions of records pertaining to 
the First World War in archives around the world.

In this talk I will review some of the methods being used in the Muninn project to 
extract information from the scanned documents of historical archives. Previous data 
extraction efforts for historical research were done through the human review of 
documents, one at a time. We employ an approach where computing power is used to collate 
similar document types to extract the information from them.



The Great War era produced a mix of hand-written and type-written documents that require 
processing using computer extraction methods assisted by the manual reviews of specific 
cases by human volunteers. I will contrast this with previous methods that have been used 
to digitize documents, such as recapchat, and close with some observations about managing 
archival data in a high-volume setting.