Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Teaching geography with literary mapping: A didactic experiment

The relationship between maps and literature has long been debated from both narrative and geographical perspectives. At the core of this contribution are so-called reader generated mappings, mapping practices performed after the reading of a literary text. The aim of this article is to suggest possible didactic directions for teaching geography through geo-visualisations based on the reading of literary texts. In particular, this research draws from the results of a literary mapping workshop attended by students during an introductory human geography course at the University of Padua (Italy). Focusing on one of the literary mappings performed by the students, namely the mapping of a short story written by the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a deductive process is used to understand the possible future potentialities of literary mapping in didactics. Analysing the students\u2019 literary maps, this article aims to direct attention to literary mapping practices as constellations of learning moments to exploit. The reading of the text, the envisioning and creation of the map are here explored as the steps of a complex practice capable of visually developing geographical knowledge

Personal life event detection from social media

Creating video clips out of personal content from social media is on the rise. MuseumOfMe, Facebook Lookback, and Google Awesome are some popular examples. One core challenge to the creation of such life summaries is the identification of personal events, and their time frame. Such videos can greatly benefit from automatically distinguishing between social media content that is about someone's own wedding from that week, to an old wedding, or to that of a friend. In this paper, we describe our approach for identifying a number of common personal life events from social media content (in this paper we have used Twitter for our test), using multiple feature-based classifiers. Results show that combination of linguistic and social interaction features increases overall classification accuracy of most of the events while some events are relatively more difficult than others (e.g. new born with mean precision of .6 from all three models)