Ash Charlton
Ash is based in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology.
Ash’s research is focused on using text mining to identify legacies of race and slavery in the early Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1860). Her project uses keyword frequency counts and distributions across eight editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to explore how race and slavery were portrayed in the publication, and how this changed over time as anti-slavery sentiment increased in Great Britain. She is also using network analysis to map the explicit and implicit references to slavery across articles, and to identify where there are silences on the topic. She is working in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, and their digitised Encyclopaedia Britannica dataset from their Data Foundry forms the basis of her research.