Mining Wages in Nineteenth-Century Job Advertisements. The Application of Language Resources and Language Technology to study Economic and Social Inequality

For the analysis of historical wage development, no structured data is available. Job advertisements, as found in newspapers can provide insights into what different types of jobs paid, but require language technology to structure in a format conducive to quantitative analysis. In this paper, we report on our experiments to mine wages from 19th century newspaper advertisements and detail the challenges that need to be overcome to perform a socio-economic analysis of textual data sources.

Authors: Ros, Ruben (Utrecht University), van Erp, Marieke (KNAW Humanities Cluster DHLab), Rijpma, Auke (Utrecht University & International Institute for Social History The Netherlands), Zijdeman, Richard (International Institute for Social History, The Netherlands & University of Stirling, Scotland)

Conference: LREC 2020 - Proceedings of the Workshop about Language Resources for the SSH Cloud (LR4SSHOC)

Date: May 2020

Publisher: European Language Resources Association