scholarly journals What is National Biography For? Dictionaries and Digital History

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Philip Carter
Keyword(s):  
Digital History ◽  
National Biography

Seizure of the English College, Douai, and Imprisonment at Doullens, 1793–4. A Contemporary Narrative

1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-157
Author(s):  
H. Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Twin Brother ◽  
School Year ◽  
National Biography ◽  
At Home

The original of this narrative, kindly lent me by Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, to whom I make full and grateful acknowledgement, is a manuscript booklet of 41 pages, about 9 in. by 5 ½ in. The author, it seems clear. was Lewis Clifford, who with his twin brother Arthur was in the school year 1792/3 in the class of Poetry. These two boys were grandsons of the 3rd Baron: their father. the Hon. Thomas Clifford, of Tixall, Staffordshire, the youngest son, was married to Barbara. a daughter and co-heiress of the 5th and last Lord Aston of Forfar. She it was who inherited Tixall and at her marriage brought that estate into the Clifford family. The twins, aged 17 “le cinq du mois ventose de l’an troisieme” (23 February, 1795), after their release from Doullens reached London on the following March 3rd. and after a month or so at home spent the summer term—April to August—at Stonyhurst. Arthur then rejoined some of his former fellow prisoners at St. Edmund’s, Old Hall. Of Lewis one knows only that he died unmarried in 1806. For Arthur’s subsequent literary work. see the Dictionary of National Biography.

A Finding Aid for The Equity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Blackadar
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Digital History ◽  
R Language ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
Optical Character ◽  
Text Searching ◽  
Person Location

Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec digitally scanned and converted to text a large collection of newspapers to create a resource of tremendous potential value to historians. Unfortunately, the text files are difficult to search reliably due to many errors caused by the optical character recognition (OCR) text conversion process. This digital history project applied natural language processing in an R language computer program to create a new and useful index of this corpus of digitized content despite OCR related errors. The project used editions of The Equity, published in Shawville, Quebec since 1883. The program extracted the names of all the person, location and organization entities that appeared in each edition. Each of the entities was cataloged in a database and related to the edition of the newspaper it appeared in. The database was published to a public website to allow other researchers to use it. The resulting index or finding aid allows researchers to access The Equity in a different way than just full text searching. People, locations and organizations appearing in the Equity are listed on the website and each entity links to a page that lists all of the issues that entity appeared in as well as the other entities that may be related to it. Rendering the text files of each scanned newspaper into entities and indexing them in a database allows the content of the newspaper to be interacted with by entity name and type rather than just a set of large text files. Website: http://www.jeffblackadar.ca/graham_fellowship/corpus_entities_equity/

An Essay in Critical Biography—Charles Churchill

PMLA ◽  
1920 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Beatty
Keyword(s):  
Personal Information ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Original Material ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
New Material ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
The University ◽  
National Biography

A writer in The Annual Register, soon after the death of Charles Churchill, gave to the world the first account of his life; this was followed by The Genuine Memoirs of Mr. Charles Churchill. To Bell's edition of the poet's works is prefixed a life of the author by Doctor Johnson; this does not add anything new. Kippis, in his Biographia Britannica, followed most of the inaccuracies of the first biographer, but added some new material from his personal information. Anderson used these sources in the British Poets (1795). Robert Southey in his Life of Cowper, and William Tooke in an edition of Churchill's Works (1804) made more elaborate studies of the poet's life, but, unfortunately, were satisfied with earlier biographies or neglected to give careful references to original material. John Forster, in The Edinburgh Review (1845) pointed out many of Tooke's inaccuracies. Every biographer of Churchill from Chalmers in his English Poets to Leslie Stephen in The Dictionary of National Biography, followed Tooke, or Tooke modified by Forster. In 1903, R. F. Scott in his Admissions to the College of St. John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, made several valuable contributions to our knowledge about the early career of the satirist. Ferdinand Putschi, in Charles Churchill, sein Leben und seine Werke (1909), had not seen Mr. Scott's book, and followed the earlier biographers.

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