What is it about?

This article show researchers how they can identify set of Irish people in sets of historical documents by using names. This is useful when you want to know how the Irish were different (or the same) as other groups. For example, are they being arrested more than the English? Are they appearing more frequently in the newspaper than the non-Irish? The technique works best for records from before 1850 because of intermarriage and mass migration from the mid-nineteenth century.

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Why is it important?

The work feeds into the era of big data analysis. An approach that uses names to identify relevant sets of documents is well-suited to a macroscopic view of the group in the past. In an archive of hundreds of millions of words and tens of thousands of names, the ability to quickly identify a subset of Irish individuals allows researchers to generate hypotheses worth a closer look. Without this approach it is much more difficult to focus one's effort on the important questions and researchers spend all their time looking for relevant documents rather than analysing them.

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This page is a summary of: Irish London. Middle-class Migration in the Global Eighteenth Century, Social History, April 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/03071022.2014.896519.
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