Text Mining Oral Histories in Historical Archaeology

Abstract

Advances in text mining and natural language processing methodologies have the potential to productively inform historical archaeology and oral history research. However, text mining methods are largely developed in the context of contemporary big data and publicly available texts, limiting the applicability of these tools in the context of historical and archaeological interpretation. Given the ability of text analysis to efficiently process and analyze large volumes of data, the potential for such tools to meaningfully inform historical archaeological research is significant, particularly for working with digitized data repositories or lengthy texts. Using oral histories recorded about a half-century ago from the anthracite coal mining region of Pennsylvania, USA, we discuss recent methodological developments in text analysis methodologies. We suggest future pathways to bridge the gap between generalized text mining methods and the particular needs of working with historical and place-based texts.