Linking the past: discovering historical social networks from documents and linking to a genealogical database

• Authors: Douglas J. Kennard;Andrew M. Kent;William A. Barrett
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing
• Year: 2011

Historical social networks (HSNs) can be used to inform historical research, including family history and genealogy. In some cases, clues about the structure of an HSN can be found in artifacts of family history such as personal diaries or autobiographical sketches. However, manual inference of such networks can require significant time and effort, including pooling and cross-referencing many different data sources. We present our current research into facilitating that process by automatically finding names in document transcriptions, relating those names to the names found on a roster/list of people who may be talked about in the documents, and automatically generating a social network graph from the result. We link individuals in the social network to a global genealogical database so that people researching their own family histories can easily find their ancestors within the HSNs created in this manner. We also provide examples of how the linked HSNs may be used to inform research about people and situations even when direct information is scarce.