Data digging in the Greer Archive

Theatre 2 (Room B120)
207 Bouverie Street

  • For all graduate researchers

The Print Journalism series in the Greer Archive comprises 1270 files from 1959-2010. The finding aid, for the 24 boxes of clippings, typescripts and print outs, is 186 pages long. This talk uses the Print series as a case study to consider how and why metadata is made and what it can be used for. Dr Rachel Buchanan, curator of the Greer Archive, will discuss the ethical, practical and personal factors that have shaped the metadata she created as she catalogued the series, while literary scholar Dr Millie Weber will demonstrate what happens when new tools, such as the sentiment analysis software SentiStrength, are applied to this metadata. When a human coder meets a machine reader, what new knowledge is possible?