[open-humanities] Content Mine launches

Thu Apr 23 13:19:58 UTC 2015

hi all, on both the open humanities and open economics lists

The Content Mine has launched:
contentmine.org
@TheContentMine
For a good intro to it:
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2015/04/16/thecontentmine-is-ready-for-business-and-will-make-scientific-and-medical-facts-available-to-everyone-on-a-massive-scale/
As stated in title of that post, the aim is to make "scientific and 
medical facts available to everyone on a massive scale." This will be 
done through automated text mining of scientific literature for facts, 
and then connecting and organizing these facts.

The obvious question is: what of application to other disciplines, such 
as economics, history, etc.
My immediate thought is simply that the scraping aspect can be used to 
mine publications for data, especially numeric. There's many a table in 
economic and economic history journals; fewer, but still some, in other 
historical journals.

(I spoke briefly with Peter Murray-Rust about this; it appears that the 
publications to be mined need to be fairly recent, ie last 50 years or 
so. Mining historical material, in the Internet Archive for example, 
would therefore be problematic.)

Any other ideas?

John

-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis