Finding Names in Trove: Named Entity Recognition for Australian Historical Newspapers

Historical newspapers are an important resource in humanities research, provid-ing the source materials about people and places in historical context. The Trove col-lection in the National Library of Australia holds a large collection of digitised news-papers dating back to 1803. This paper re-ports on some work to apply named-entity recognition (NER) to data from Trove with the aim of supplying useful data to Hu-manities researchers using the HuNI Vir-tual Laboratory. We present an evalua-tion of the Stanford NER system on this data and discuss the issues raised when ap-plying NER to the 155 million articles in the Trove archive. We then present some analysis of the results including a version published as Linked Data and an explo-ration of clustering the mentions of certain names in the archive to try to identify in-dividuals. 1