Historians should not rely upon Excel for temporal data. In the first place, its assumptions are not always entirely logical; type in 04-05-30 and it will assume you mean 1930, whereas entering 04-05-25 will signal 2025—and this will likely change in the next iteration of the programme, as we creep ever closer towards mid-century, leaving […]

After nearly a year of cleaning, processing, refining, reprocessing and analysing data, I felt cautiously optimistic about my results. Derived from the British Library 19th Century Newspapers collection, I had compiled a list of reprinting—perhaps better characterised as duplication—between 1800 and 1865. After initial filtering, I was the happy owner of 780 individual monthly manifests […]

In 2014, I began to convert my newspapers transcriptions–stored haphazardly in a variety of plain text and Word documents, as well as Access, OneNote and Evernote databases–into XML. The value of structured data was immediately apparent, but the means for structuring it were not. My first attempts were as haphazard as my previous storage solutions. […]