University of Edinburgh
My research is examining race and slavery in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1860) using a textual data mining approach. The first eight editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica span the years of the UK’s heavy involvement in the transatlantic slave trade as well as the abolition of slavery in 1838. I will be analysing the National Library of Scotland’s digitised Encyclopaedia Britannica (around 167 million words) to explore how Atlantic slavery was represented in these texts, shed light on how legacies of slavery are embedded into our historical information sources, and how we can digitally investigate, analyse, and visualise these texts in future.
