Where soldiers' journals and longer accounts bring the conflict to light in a very personal way, the digitization of millions of forms and official documents concerning the "war to end all wars" allows for the detection of global patterns of migration, communication, and disease previously impossible to find using manual research methods. Mining Great War data might be feared to rob the war of its power to illuminate the costs of modern conflict, a power that has historically lain in the personal tragedies and triumphs identified with it and the revelations they offer about human suffering and human potential, not the more anonymous and repetitive information on official forms. In a discussion of the patterns and trends detectable by analyzing millions of data mine-able Red Cross files, however, we will suggest that data mining both significantly alters our understanding of the war and yet continues to move us in surprising ways.

 

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.