What did Big Data find when it analysed 150 years of British history?

What could be learnt about the world if you could read the news from over 100 local newspapers for a period of 150 years' This is what a team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers from the University of Bristol have done, together with a social scientist and a historian, who had access to 150 years of British regional newspapers. The patterns that emerged from the automated analysis of 35 million articles ranged from the detection of major events, to the subtle variations in gender bias across the decades. The study has investigated transitions such as the uptake of new technologies and even new political ideas, in a new way that is more like genomic studies than traditional historical investigation. The team of academics, led by Professor Nello Cristianini, collaborated closely with the company findmypast , who is digitising historical newspapers from the British Library as part of their British Newspaper Archive project. The main focus of the study was to establish if major historical and cultural changes could be detected from the subtle statistical footprints left in the collective content of local newspapers. How many women were mentioned? In which year did electricity start being mentioned more than steam? Crucially, this work goes well beyond counting words, and deploys AI methods to identify people and their gender, or locations and their position on the map. The landmark study, part of the University of Bristol's ThinkBIG project , collected a huge amount of regional newspapers from the UK, including geographical and time-based information that is not available in other textual data such as books.