Working with Archival Texts as Data – Using Natural Language Processing to Support the Description of Digital Archives

Description: Born-digital and digitized textual archives open up the possibility for computational approaches to archival description. In this workshop, we will use two natural language processing (NLP) techniques – named entity recognition (NER) and topic modelling – to locate potential access points and assist with archival description.

Working with Archival Texts as Data – Post-OCR Error Correction with OpenRefine is a strongly recommended prerequisite for the workshop.

Time: 4:00 pm ET/ 1:00 PT (2 hours)

Date: May 18, 2021

Cost: Members $ 50.00, Non-Members: $ 75.00, Student Members / Precariously employed members: $ 25.00

Learning Outcomes: By the end of the workshop, you will be able to 1) identify names, locations and organizations within digital texts using NER tools and 2) discern subjects within a digital text collection through topic modelling tools.

Instructor Bio: Devon Mordell is an educational developer at McMaster University, living and working on the traditional territories shared between the Haudenosaunee confederacy and the Anishinaabe nations. She has a Master of Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia and worked as a digital archivist at the University of Windsor before returning to online learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. She teaches workshops on digital scholarship topics such as online exhibit creation and writes about issues that can be broadly characterized in the vein of archival futurism.