This project uses a set of online resources in eighteenth-century British social history to evaluate the potential benefits of Semantic Web technology for Arts and Humanities researchers.
Online materials of the greatest potential value to scholars, such as library archives and digitised collections, face growing problems of redundancy and irrelevance. Traditional searching methods, such as keyword searching, produce multiple versions of the same information or information whose context, when investigated manually, makes it irrelevant to the research question being pursued.
At the University Of Sheffield, the Natural Language Processing Group has been at the forefront of technologies to cope with the huge challenges of modern knowledge management. The relevant output from this work is the development of Armadillo, a tool designed to provide machine readable content for the Semantic Web. For the last two years, we have been evaluating in what ways the technology which comprises Armadillo might benefit the Humanities Computing field.