Abstract
Diamonds in Borneo: Commodities as Concepts in Context
For comparative research on globalization, understood as the intensified circulation of people, commodities and ideas historians currently study texts ‘manually’ deriving lists of concepts, such as places, products, and labour types as well as related characteristics explaining changes in these concepts.
To do this more efficiently we want to transpose our existing lists of concepts to vocabularies and use those to derive structured information from texts like travelogues, newspapers, trade papers etc. For this particular project we want to improve our concept lists on diamonds,using existing linked data and adding data from the Geillustreerde encyclopaedie der diamantnijverheid.
Based on a selection of texts from Delpher and with help of NLP tools like Entity recognition, classification & linking and the Ontotagger we hope to detect the mining, manufacturing and trading places and people in Borneo up until now a blind spot in our knowledge about the global diamond commodity chain.
