What did Big Data find when it analyzed 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.