Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Historical

Friday, 25 September 2020, 14:50   (virtual room E)

(Semi-)Manual Data-Mining and -Processing

Markus-Schnabel, Karsten
Stiftung Planetarium Berlin

The amount of data, becoming available worldwide through the internet, is increasing rapidly. As this applies to historical data, too, this will -in theory- lead to the collection of new knowledge in the history of astronomy. However, many difficulties arise, as -ideally- all available data related to the researchers field of interest should lie at hand, before she or he can formulate his or her results. Of course, expecting this to happen is as unrealistic now, as it was in the times before the internet arrived. Nevertheless, a researcher tends to collect as much data as possible to be able to get to a seemingly complete conclusion. Thus, every researcher will do what the author would like to call “data-mining”, i.e. the search in the worldwide network (and elsewhere) for all kind of data, and subsequently, the processing of this data, to be able to do some sort of analysis to gain more information from this. Since the available amount of time for professionally (paid) researchers usually is very limited, as is the number of paid researchers in the field of history of astronomy in general, the activities of data-mining and -processing and even the analysis of the acquired data, are well suited activities for (groups of) amateur researchers, students and alike, who -similar to the field of obtaining and analysing vast amounts of astronomical data- can help science and scientists with their investment of time and knowledge. This kind of research very often can not be completely automatised and the already established semi-automatic processes often require regular adjustments. Therefore, this work can be quite tedious and time-consuming. In this contribution, the author briefly describes a range of current and past research-projects, to allow for interested persons to immediately begin doing research on their own, thus helping to gain knowledge and to further historical research.