Mapping the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s through Text Mining and Social Network Analysis

In 1980s, the widespread failure of savings and loans institutions created a financial and political crisis in the United States. This paper seeks to understand the role of social networks in the world of financial actors and institutions during the crisis. It uses the S&L crisis as a case study to demonstrate how challenges for collecting contemporary historical data can be addressed through the use of text and network analysis and computer mining. Created in collaboration with the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, the paper will demonstrate how network data of financial actors can be constructed from “structured and unstructured natural language text data, a process also known as relation extraction” through a program developed by the University of Illinois called ConText. Engaging with the field of computer mining, the paper also addresses the ways in which these methods will affect the future of historical research by anticipating the challenges that the historical profession will face over time as our data sources will be largely in digital form.