Frequently Asked Questions

History Lab is an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to making sense of our history and politics in the age of big data. In short, we take documents, process them, and store the information as usable data, in order to understand the trends and grand narratives that drive history, while allowing users to delve into the specifics as well. See our about page to read more about our process.

We are currently working on introducing a feature allowing users to sort results by the probability that a document is historically important. This draws on research we are conducting on which State Department Cables are selected for publication in FRUS. Another ongoing project is Event Detection, which analyzes patterns in official correspondence to uncover significant moments in foreign policy. We also work on authorship identification - attempting to figure out who wrote a document simply by analyzing the body text.

The Declassification Engine is a sub-project within the larger History Lab umbrella. It is primarily concerned with developing tools to automatically identify classified information, and therefore ease the burden on government officials who have to manually perform this task. We hope to develop tools to automate the declassification process, therefore ensuring we can safely release more information to researchers while ensuring the protection of truly sensitive data.

Our archive is built to grow, and we are always intent on ingesting illuminating and important collections to our database. The President’s Daily Brief is one of the document collections we are keen to add to bolster our coverage of postwar foreign policy. One of the goals of history lab is to expand our digital archive into a global repository of documents. At this point we are working to add the Azaredo Da Silveira Papers, a Brazilian collection composed of correspondence between the Foreign Minister and the President in the 1970’s. We are also interested in absorbing selected papers from the digital records of the UK National Archives.

We welcome feedback from our users and would encourage you to get in touch about issues, concerns, or areas of interest. Click here to email us directly, and we will try to get back to you as soon as we can.

Names are spelled in a variety ways throughout our collections, so this is unfortunately commonplace. If multiple names are in the same box, then these names refer to the same person and will yield the same result. We subject the names to a process of disambiguation, so that “Henry Kissinger” and “Henry A. Kissinger”, for example, generate the same set of documents when searched (all the spellings of the name link to one master Kissinger ID). If however, the two names are in different boxes (as in the case of Madeleine Albright) then each name will produce different results. This is because we have not yet fully disambiguated the collections, so there will be incidents where the same person spelled differently generates a different list of documents - we are working to eliminate this.