Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.
Through a combination of web crawling and the application of Natural Language Processing methodology the project will create a non-intrusive, distanced tagging of the data within those distributed sources to facilitate more sophisticated and structured searching.
Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between resources.