Using Named Entity Recognition on the East Boston Community News
Digital Repository Service and Metadata Attribution As part of our initial analysis of the East Boston Community News, we decided on starting with running some form of named entity recognition on the 471 issues of the newspaper. The collection is currently digitized as part of Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections and is maintained…
Read MoreBoston Research Center Phase One Overview
In 2018, the Boston Research Center worked with seven project groups on Northeastern’s campus to identify innovative ways to support historical exploration and research. These pilots were spread across different disciplines, time periods, and neighborhoods in Boston. These initial collaborations built on the strengths of Northeastern faculty, staff, and graduate student research, and allowed us…
Read MoreBoston Research Center Receives $650,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
(Originally published on Library News, the Northeastern University Library blog.) The Library is pleased to announce that it has received a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement the next phase of the Boston Research Center (BRC). The Boston Research Center is based in the Northeastern University Library and is dedicated to the study of Boston, enabling researchers…
Read MoreIntroducing The Birth Of Boston
By: Dr. Chris Parsons, Project Lead and Faculty, Northeastern University History Department How can it be hard to find Boston’s history? Surely, when we walk the freedom trail, tour the common, or visit one of the many historic house museums in the Boston area, we are enjoying a city that celebrates its history as…
Read MoreHistorical Data in the Birth of Boston project
By: Matthew Bowser, PhD student, Birth of Boston Project When looking at archival property records, the timeless blandness of legalese can make it very easy to forget what century one is looking at. As I pored through records of landholders in 1648 Boston, copying down their names, occupations, property records, and other relevant information…
Read MoreGeoreferencing 17th Century Maps using ArcGIS
By: Molly Nebiolo, PhD student, Birth of Boston Project There are some challenges that come with trying to translate 17th century primary sources into a digital humanities project. In previous posts, Chris Parsons has discussed the pedagogical background of this project as it has come to fruition, and Matt Bowser has written about some…
Read MoreIntroducing the Boston Research Center’s Projects
The Boston Research Center is excited to announce the first set of project prototypes in development, summer 2018. These projects build on the existing expertise and strengths of Northeastern faculty, staff, and graduate student research, presenting a broad array of data types and design challenges. The BRC has been working with project groups to identify…
Read MoreNortheastern Wants to Unlock the Secrets of Boston’s Past with Big Data
Originally published at Boston Magazine on May 16, 2018 Boston has a long and complicated past, and its many archives and databases each tell little pieces of that story—a photo album here, a map there, a batch of letters and some old news articles somewhere else. But what do we do with all that stuff? What kinds of…
Read MoreNortheastern receives Mellon Foundation grant to launch center for study of Boston
Originally published on News at Northeastern on May 1, 2018 Northeastern University has received a $200,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the humanities in the United States, to launch a new center dedicated to the study of Boston, enabling researchers from around the world to shed light on the…
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