Computational methods for the history of commodities as illustrated by apple pie recipes

This chapter provides an introduction to computational methods for commodities analyses focused on natural language processing and Semantic Web technologies. Natural language processing is the research field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science, aimed at investigating how computers can be used to process large amounts of texts. Semantic Web is the research field concerned with representing knowledge in a machine-readable manner, allowing for integrating information from different sources and reasoning over them. The authors illustrate the potential, as well as the challenges, for the use of computational methods for commodities analyses through a case study on apple pie recipes to explore culinary practices as independent variables in sugar consumption. The chapter concludes with an outlook and guidelines on how to include computational methods further in commodity-history research.