Full-Text Databases and Historical Research: Cautionary Results from a Ten-Year Study

Full-text electronic searching of books, periodicals, and government documents is providing historians with the ability to survey unprecedented amounts of historical material for references traditionally not associated with those sources. Yet because the research conducted with these new tools is of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of social history 2012-10, Vol.46 (1), p.89-105
Main Author: Upchurch, Charles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Archives & records
Assault
Full text searching
Gays & lesbians
Gypsies
Historians
Historical text analysis
Indecent assault
Indexes
Libraries
London, England
Males
Men
Nineteenth Century
Optical storage
Periodicals
Police
Search terms
Sexuality
Sexuality, Emotion, and Gender
Social history
Subject terms
United Kingdom
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Summary:Full-text electronic searching of books, periodicals, and government documents is providing historians with the ability to survey unprecedented amounts of historical material for references traditionally not associated with those sources. Yet because the research conducted with these new tools is often not possible or practical using other methods, the shortcomings of the results are not always evident. This article highlights some of those shortcomings through a detailed discussion of a ten-year study that spanned the development of some of the main databases now used in nineteenth-century British history. The study was designed to uncover the number of newspaper reports discussing sex between men in three major London newspapers between 1820 and 1870, ultimately detecting over one thousand such reports. The study was designed in 1999 using the Palmer's Index to the Times on CD ROM in conjunction with archival sources, and those results were contrasted in later years to the results from the Times Digital Archive, the Palmer's Index to the Times within C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, and the British Library Newspapers 1800-1900 databases. The inability of newer tools to detect large amounts known material sparked a systematic crosschecking of the results of these databases to map the extent of the discrepancies. The article discusses some major shortcomings of these new tools, demonstrates methodologies for working around the limitations, and highlights some of the new findings related to the public discussion of sex between men obtained through this study.
ISSN:0022-4529
1527-1897
DOI:10.1093/jsh/shs035