Discovering accounts of Native American burning within digitized historical documents using information retrieval methods

Abstract

Historical accounts (ca 17th–19th centuries ce) are valuable for understanding how and where past Native American cultures used fire as a land management tool. Previous research has compiled and interpreted accounts, but methods of compiling them remains less systematic, leaving open the possibility that undiscovered accounts exist. This study uses information retrieval methods to locate accounts of Native American burning within digitized historical documents. Utilizing known accounts from digitized documents, this research develops a model to rank text portions within unread documents based on their predicted relevance. The model used frequencies of key terms and related textual features as predictors, and the presence and absence of accounts within text portions as the dependent variable. Within 121 documents related to western New York State (NYS), USA, this study discovered 40 accounts including 28 in western NYS. Of accounts in western NYS, 12 accounts (describing 21 locations) made explicit connections to Native American burning, were resolvable to town-level or finer resolution, and were not derivative of other texts. To locate all known accounts, the model aided in reducing the amount of text to read to only 0.61% of total. Locations of burning were 0.0 to 16.2 km (median = 5.6 km) from the nearest Native American village area, and 0.1 to 12.5 km (median = 1.5 km) from the nearest trail. This study demonstrates how information retrieval can discover accounts of Native American burning, and suggests that undiscovered historical accounts exist that may advance historical, cultural, and ecological understandings of burning practices.