JISC (the Joint Information Services Committee) fund a number of digitisation projects with content that spans nearly five centuries of British history. Some notable examples include British Newspapers 1620-1900 and the 19th Century Pamphlets Online. The manifold importance of digitisation is that the records are made easily accessible to scholars and the general public, and two once the records are ‘data’ they can be used in new ways to gain fresh insights from the data (especially in a large-scale quantitative sense such as parsing 2 centuries of Legal or Parliamentary records). The UK is fortunate in that it has invested so heavily in digitising some of its immense human history so that now this ‘data’ can be imaginatively used in new ways. As new computational tools and methods are developed, more usages of this data will be found (as long as the data is structured and preserved in a useful way).
(this is just a crappy JPEG I have used as an example. Not the real deal).
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