The use of machine learning to garner insights about the future is one of the benefits of the technology most oft cited by enterprise. For historians, however, its true potential lies in its ability to reveal new things the past - potential that is now being realized on a massive scale.
There have been a number of projects conducted by historians in recent years that have leveraged data analytics. Real Clear Politics, for example, applied text mining tools to 34 years of state of the union addresses, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1981, to analyze their political tone. They looked at the language used to chart each speech ideologically (on a left-right political scale) based on its content. Their analysis revealed a number of insights. For example, President Clinton’s speeches shifted significantly to the right during his second term, while President Obama’s speeches became more liberal. Another project saw two PhD students at the Stanford Literary Lab feed 2,958 19th century novels into a series of Big Data analytics tools, leveraging insights about what the semantics meant about the wider society in which they were used. Among their discoveries, they found that words describing action and body parts became more prevalent as the century went on, and concluded that increasing urbanization during the 19th century brought people closer together physically, which made people’s bodies and actions harder to ignore.
While these have produced some fascinating discoveries about past societies, by far the most significant project in terms of scale is currently being carried out by digital humanities researcher director of the digital humanities Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Frederic Kaplan. The project, which he calls the Venice Time Machine, will use state-of-the-art scanners and adaptable machine learning algorithms to convert 1,000 years of maps, monographs, financial records, manuscripts, and sheet music held in Venice’s state archives into digital form, from which historians will be able to reveal in minute detail the lives of ordinary people throughout the period and the development of the city over the millenia.
Venice is, in many ways, the perfect test case for this kind of project.
