University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ryan Shaw, Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will use this Early Career Development grant to invent new tools for understanding large collections of histories through computational text processing techniques. The project will focus on a promising technique for automatically identifying within narrative texts individual events and their participants. These events will then be used as basic units for building up larger-scale models of narrative structure that can be used to link and compare related histories. The specific histories to be used for this project are 80 scholarly monographs and 350 oral histories related to the civil rights movement.